By: John,
on 2/2/2013
Lovely colors and great character design by Stevie Lewis, visual development artist at Dreamworks. Nice work for sale in her Etsy shop, too.
(via Stevie Ray)
HEY! modern art & pop culture PART II
Au musée de la HALLE SAINT PIERRE
2, rue Ronsard (Paris)
du 25 janvier au 23 août 2013
/
HEY! modern art and pop culture PART II
At the HALLE SAINT PIERRE museum
2, rue Ronsard (Paris)
from January 25 to August 23, 2013
Paperman - Full Animated Short Film (by disneyanimation)
One of my favorite films of 2012. So happy to see Walt Disney Animation Studios put this out there on YouTube for everyone to see.
By: John,
on 1/30/2013
SUPER series 2 is available until 11:59 PM PST tonight, then they are gone for good.
If you buy two, I will throw in a SUPER Krang for free. My personal fave.
I love Mike Mitchell SO MUCH; discovering his work has been a joy, but not nearly as nice as discovering him as a human being. He’s made me reconsider how popular culture can inform art and image-making in a way that transcends ideas of fanart or appropriation. ANYway he has a new series of prints out. More info here.
By: John,
on 1/26/2013
Watching Lewis Trondheim erase masking fluid is more captivating than you’d imagine.
La magie du drawing gum. (pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas, c’est un liquide épais qu’on étale où on le souhaite, puis qui sèche, ensuite on peut le recouvrir d’encre, gommer l’ensemble et récupérer ainsi le blanc du papier)
By: John,
on 1/25/2013
Are you kidding me?!?!
By: John,
on 1/23/2013
Chris Sanders (Co-Director of Lilo & Stitch, How To Train Your Dragon, The Croods) shares some unused storyboards from his latest film The Croods.
I think I’d rather just watch 90 mins of Sanders drawing storyboards than watch the finished movie; these are beautiful!
By: John,
on 1/23/2013
This looks so great! An animated-short anthology with films by Charles Huettner, Dave Prosser, Sean Buckelew, Louise Bagnall, Jake Armstrong & Erin Kilkenny, Eamonn O’Neil, Daniella Orsini & Joe Orton, Scott Benson, Alex Grigg, Conor Finnegan, Christen Bach, and more. These folks are doing it up right, too - when they get it all assembled this spring, you’ll be able to get a great-sounds pile of goodies along with the films, and you can follow the project on twitter and tumblr too.
NOTE: The trailer is ever-so-slightly NSFW, if your work gets upset about split-second flashes of animated non-aroused male nudity.
By the way, here’s some advice from anecdotal evidence and personal experience: make stuff you want to make - personal projects give you room to explore, and they lead to more interesting client work. Well done, Late Night Work Club animators!
Hey everyone, the trailer for our independent animation anthology ‘Late Night Work Club project #1’ just hit the internet! Take a look and spread it around. Check out the website for more info.
Scott Benson has done a great job organizing it all and I couldn’t be more pleased to be included with so many great animators.
Speaking of vector program alternatives, I was also told about iDraw by illustrator George Coghill (he’s been using it for a while now). iDraw seems quite feature-rich and offers both a desktop version ($25) and an iPad app ($9). Yes, $25 for a desktop vector program. Are you listening Adobe??
That’s what illustrator Ricardo Gimenes promises with his new project, Vectorlooza (nice job on the clever video too!).
We don’t link to crowdfunding projects very often, but this one has certainly piqued my interest. Ricardo claims Vectorlooza will outperform all other such drawing apps currently out there. What do you think? Do you use any vector apps on your iPad?
Thanks to Jesse R. Ewring for the tip!
There’s a lovely interview with Bob Staake over on Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. I always love seeing process evidence, and Bob has posted a lot of it over the years. One shocker from the post is that while he planned to take 43 days to complete his 2012 follow up to 2011’s Look! A Book! (not surprisingly called Look! Another Book!), it actually took him 48 days. If you have seen either of these books, you’ll be scooping your jaw off the floor along with me - that’s an incredible amount of drawing in a very short amount of time. Now I see why he is so prolific!
But the thing I’m most excited for is Staake’s new book, Bluebird, coming in April. It looks gorgeous, and the buzz makes it sound as if the story, told wordlessly, is touching and powerful as well.
And I’m sure we won’t need to wait very long for the next thing he is working on - keep up the amazing work, Bob!
I missed this when it was posted last summer, but I’m glad I found it now. Dave Cooper’s drawings, Johnny Ryan’s writing, and Nick Cross’s animation? Slam dunk! Why aren’t there more of these?
PigGoatBananaMantis! (by Nick Cross)
At school we are all busy putting together our portfolios to apply for co op placements this summer and one of my teachers keeps talking about ‘making art you want to get hired to do’. Well I would love to be hired to illustrate a kids book one day and man would I ever love to work on a Tolkien adaptation!
Who knows if that will ever happen! So I decided to attempt it on my own and plan out a fake ‘golden book style’ Hobbit, inspired by the Unexpected Journey movie. These were all painted with acryla gouache on watercolour paper and the book cover was edited with some photoshop.
I have a few more illustrations for this ‘Little Tokien book’ project on the go but homework is piling up so it might be a few weeks before I can dedicate some time to get the rest done. I’m not really sure if this is anything I can use in my looming portfolio but it was so much fun to do! There is really something nice about taking a little break now and again to rejuvenate your creativity with a personal project!
Something to learn here, kids - create work that you’d WANT to get hired to do. This is smart thinking. And hopefully, this’ll get Rosemary Travale hired by Little Golden Books to illustrate one of their books. I’d certainly buy one.
Barrel of Monkeys is the first book from new publisher Rebus Books, and as far as I know the first wide English publication of work by the team of Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot.
What to say about this book? I did not expect to like it nearly as much as I did. It seemed esoteric and vaguely arch when I first flipped through it, although maybe—as an uneducated person—that’s just me being mistrustful of anything/everything that seems smarter than I am. And the book was esoteric, and more than vaguely arch. It was weird and strange and profane and gross and occasionally shocking and definitely one of the best comics I’ve read in the last year. It’s a human book; it’s a book about human beings and how stupid and crude and terrible we are, and it’s hilarious.
Barrel of Monkeys is drawn by both Ruppert and Mulot together in, according to the back cover, “a shared visual style.” It’s a little bit like a gestural, scratchy version of a clear-line style: there’s just enough information there for your mind to latch onto and follow, but little enough that you are forced to continually work to apprehend what’s happening. In order to read the pages, you have to fully engage with them, and the book depends on this leaned-forward attention of the reader to deliver it’s short, quick, crystalline jabs in each story.
The effect is amplified and redoubled by the formal tricks Ruppert and Mulot use: from piling speech balloons all over a page so you can’t tell who’s speaking (or when) and so have to ferret it out for yourself, to more involved tricks. For instance the phenakistoscopes—complex circular images designed to rotate around a central axis in order to produce an animated effect. There are numerous phenakistoscopes throughout the book, each punctuating something happening within a story. When I came across them in reading the book, they seemed a little overwrought, more or less destroying the flow of the reading; which is not unusual for overtly formalist tools in comics. But following the suggestion of the book, you can see them animated here, and wow. Even days after reading the book, seeing the animations now (because I didn’t stop reading in order to watch animations on my phone (for once)), each of them really does add something, each one is a perfect beautiful little weird gem.
But why do it like that? Seeing a single flat drawing meant to be animated, in the context of a multi-page comics story, creates a weird, dissonant parallax. “What is this? Where does this go in the story, in the sequence, or in my brain?” There’s a lot of that in Barrel of Monkeys, and I’d be surprised if it weren’t fully intended. The drawings are beautiful and light and airy, but there’s only enough information, especially in the faces, for you to tell characters apart. Who they are is less important than what they’re doing, saying or thinking. They often seem like not much more than ciphers, banal in the extreme, acting out a series of clumsy rudenesses. The strange, often terrible actions of the people in these stories stands in stark contrast with their blurry forms and smeared personalities. Though it’s a black and white book, there’s very little actual black, in terms of a compositional tool that moves the eye around a page purposefully. Florent and Mulot seem determined to let you founder until they feel it’s time to drag you up.
I spent most of my time reading Barrel of Monkeys squinting, both figuratively and sometimes literally, to discern what was actually happening, and so was unprepared over and over again for how everything was wrapped up into a perfectly precise knot by the end. The story of the duel that happens to take place at an international meeting of sword swallowers by itself is worth the price of the entire book. I didn’t read the back until I was done, and Dash Shaw’s blurb says it perfectly:
“When I’d get Ruppert and Mulot’s books in French, I was perplexed by comics that seemed largely informed by theatre, Eadweard Muybridge and proto-animation. Now that I can read it, I’m delighted by how evil and mean-spirited the work is.”
I loved this book. And it’s a really great launch for Rebus Books, run by writer and critic Bill Kartalopoulos. Now the only problem is waiting for more Ruppert and Mulot in English.
112 pages
6.5 x 9.5” bw softcover
ISBN 978-0-615-62235-4
$19.95 | buy from publisher | buy via Amazon
Oliver Jeffers, butcher, baker, picture book maker.
Happy new year everybody! I hope you all had wonderful holidays!
Here is the second card for Rotopolpress. It’s not really snowing here anymore (it’s actually quite warm) but I drew this in December when there was snow everywhere.
I love Maike Plenzke’s work. Beautiful. More here and here.
My promo postcard for 2013. Yay!
You may have already seen this because it’s awesome and a lot of people are talking about it, but I’m going to post it anyway because it includes three of my favorite things: Invisible Creature, Lego, and my friend Dave Taylor, whose name is on one of the boxes in the video here, and whose house I’m going to break into so I can steal his copy of the Eye Creature set.
Eye Creature (by Invisible Creature)
Paul E. Stinson created this image in maybe 1978, when the book cover it was for came out (Pillars of Salt, by Barbara Paul). Paul: your website and LinkedIn give a dead email for you…. Laine Nooney would like to talk to you about your videogame art in the early 80s. And hey! Can you do some more of these trippy scifi things?
I love these zodiac symbols by Cinders McLeod, found over at her Tumblr, My Life as a Sketchbook, where she has been sharing pages from years of diaries and sketchbooks. Click through to see the rest.
New Chris Ware cover for The New Yorker, with commentary by Chris
I recently went through the mammoth slithering piles of comics and books and minis I got and/or was given this year, and culled out the ones I didn’t have room for, organized the rest, and was left with a great big reading pile to start the new year. This one, Top 5 Boardroom Techniques by Chris Kuzma, was one of my favorite “gets” from CAKE, and cracked me up just as much flipping through it again. Some of my favorite minis are in this mode, a quickly delivered idea that grows larger somehow outside the context of a larger collection or smushed in with a bunch of other work in an anthology.
This is not only a hilarious (and short) (but cheap) little mini, it’s a great introduction to Chris’s work—he’s also a member of Wowee Zonk with Ginette Lapalme and Patrick Kyle, and—conflict-of-interest alert—published by my own publisher, Koyama Press. You should just consider that extra endorsement though, and go ahead and buy the $1 mini.
I always like to watch people draw, but this is one better - the voice-over (read by Wil Wheaton, no less) is text from Warren Ellis’s new novel, Gun Machine, which looks and sounds pretty good. The drawings are made by southpaw, Ben Templesmith, and the video is directed by Jim Batt. Kudos to the entire team.
Book trailer 1 for GUN MACHINE.
This is sad and beautiful and about singing fish, but it’s opera, not country music.
Una Furtiva Lagrima (by Carlo Vogele)
80. January Again Already
I’m still working on this one, those last two panels are a little dark.
David King www.reliablecomics.com
An early look at the next Reliable Comic. David King is one of my favorite cartoonists on the planet, and takes my breath away over and over and over again. More at his site, plus his hilariously cynical Crime World strip at the excellent Study Group site. And if you’ve never read his Lemon Styles comic, it’s one of my favorite comics ever. Ever! Gush gush gush!!
