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So i have a new book coming out. It's called "Sick Simon" and its about a little kid who has a cold and inadvertently spreads it to his family... and dog… and friends... and everyone at school... and Mr. Warbles the class chinchilla...and the bus driver… and the monkeys at the zoo etc..  Some germs see what he's doing and think "hey, he's our kind of guy. We could do great things together!" and try to get Simon to team up with them in infecting the world.

Of course I wrote it after our child went to preschool and started bringing home those famous germs and we were all sick for months at a time for the majority of the year. And it's still going on, we're all sick again right now as a matter of fact. The idea was if I could make a book that could shave off even one day of sickness from what the average household of a toddler or little kid endures by teaching them about germs and how they're spread it would be a huge service to humanity. And that's what I'm all about when I'm not doing naked gnome drawings or drawing screen grabs from Sons of Anarchy.
And it totally worked, even though we're all sick again right now, it's been literally months since it last happened and I'm pretty sure it's due to this book. So there you have it, according to me this book cures the common cold.

To try to get the word out I'm having a couple of giveaways I'll be hosting on my Facebook Author's Page and my Twitter Feed. You have to go to one of those places and join or follow me to enter.

The first one has started and it's the...
Top 10 Reasons to Buy Sick Simon Giveaway!!!
Anyone who shares or retweets one of the postings will be entered to win a free copy of the book and swag (a germ prevention poster and logo tissue packet) and an ink drawing of Sick Simon infecting someone. 

So without further ado…. The Top 10 Reasons You Should Buy Sick Simon……..

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this guy... Read the rest of this post

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Aisle seat near the bathroom, pretty typical flight back from New York.

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I'm super excited about the release of Laika's BOXTROLLS and so happy it's doing so well. Here are some drawings I did for it very early on.

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I had some trouble with my webmail account and lost a recent message from someone who emailed me asking for advice on working in the animation industry. Whoever it was, I'm sorry I didn't reply, I try to always reply to people who email me to try to repay some of the help and kindness I got when I was starting out. As I get that question a lot, for that person, and anyone else who has the same question, I thought I'd type up the same answer I always give.

Advice on getting into the Animation Industry:

When I was young and starting out someone once told me, "You're not going to believe me, it sounds too easy to be true, but I swear to God this will work. Do good work and be nice to people. That's it."

I didn't believe them, I still remember the constant feeling of frustration and hopelessness as I couch surfed and worked minimum wage jobs and stayed up all night every night drawing trying to make a portfolio that would get me a job. I remember not understanding why no one would hire me and feeling like the cards were stacked against me, and that i deserved a job but for some strange inexplicable reason was not getting one. Then eventually after years of going through that cycle I finally got a job.
In hind sight 20 some odd years later I have to agree with them and have to pass on the same advice. It is that easy. Well… "easy" might not be exactly the right word, it is a little deceptive, the "do good work part" is easier said than done.

It didn't take but for a year or so of having worked for me to look back at my own work and see that it was no mystery why i did not get hired before I did. The answer was I was not doing part A of the formula which is "do good work".  I thought I was, but I wasn't. I've found that most of the time, myself included, when you're young and starting out you can't see your own work the way it is, you're too easy on yourself and you haven't started looking at your work with the critical eye that is necessary at the professional level. You've had a lifetime of being the best in your family, or the best in your class or even the best in your college, but then you get into the gigantic pool that is the whole wide world and you're now in the same labor pool as people who are famous and who you studied in college plus thousands of people you've never heard of who are better than you will ever be. It's a big world with shitloads of breathtakingly talented people in it, and they're all available for the same jobs that you'e applying for. That's how they make a living too. So the first thing you need to do is put your work next to the very best working in the industry and see how it stacks up. You don't need to be better than those people, you never will be, unless you're one of them but you would't be reading this if you were. I wasn't. If you're one of those people you're like a drawing Mozart and you figured shit out when you were a teenager and are now well beyond where I'll ever be. I'm writing this for more normal people. You just need to be in the same ball park, like there can't be any shitty hands in your drawings or weird broken construction, your drawings have to work and function and not look like student work, if you haven't achieved that level of craft you will never get hired in the animation industry, there are just too many people who have the knack for it or have put in the work required or whatever, but that is the bare minimum requirement. I've found that, again myself included, people are always looking for shortcuts to get around the bare minimum requirement. "If i had an expensive portfolio to put my drawings in" or  "a better looking business card", or "if I connect with enough people on LinkedIn" i'll get hired. Whatever it is, anything to avoid the 10,000 hours of drawing it takes to do the work required. There is no shortcut. So that's what you need to do to get hired in the animation industry, do good work.

One side note to "doing good work" is, if at all possible be unique and interesting. Even if you achieve the level of drawing you need to do the work, it can sometimes be easy to get lost in the absolute ocean of amazingly talented, devoted people who have also achieved it. In that case it can really help to be unique, I think the reason I've stayed employed all these years and keep getting hired is that I bring to project something that no one else can, my own sense of humor and my take on the world. I think sometimes the animation world can become a little self referential and incestuous, where people only draw from things that are already in the realm of animation. Old Disney movies, Anime ripoffs, etc. It pretty much always seems to me that animation projects are desperately in need of outside influences to make them interesting, so travel around, read weird books, embrace whatever strange things you find interesting and try to use them to inspire your animation work. When I started out, not knowing this probably added years on my path to doing good work. I spent a long time in the beginning drawing what i thought other people wanted to see and what i thought would get me hired, sexy girls, motorcycles, cute characters, none of which i gave a shit about but it was just stuff i had seen people draw and what i thought was expected of someone working in animation. I spent years doing this and all of it was bad, it wasn't until i started drawing things i felt passionate about (filthy gnomes, medieval beasts, funny things i saw in the world) that I started really doing what i considered to be ok work.

To stay hired you just need to be nice to people, that doesn't really require any explanation. Just treat people the way you want to be treated. The one situation I've seen nice people become un-nice is when they're in charge for the first time, they get their first show or their first movie or whatever and they think that "i've finally made it, this is my big chance" and they take everything way too seriously and start riding the people around them because they think those people are fucking up there chance. Or they're just not used to the pressure of multitasking a thousand things at once and they get flustered and take it out on the people around them. If you find yourself in that situation watch out for those pitfalls. There is no "big chance" if you're going to become rich and famous in this industry, as some people do, it will happen whether you are nice or mean, it will happen based on your ideas and your take on the world and your devotion, not on your ability to crack the whip. And it won't happen at once based on your first show or movie or whatever, it will happen slowly over the course of your career, so just settle down and be nice to people. everyone around you wants to do their work well and make their bosses happy and they're more able to do that if they're treated nicely and appreciated. I think of animation like a jazz band where you go around the circle and every gets a moment to solo. Sometimes you are the boss and it's your turn to solo, and other times it's someones else's turn and your job is to back them up.

So that's it "Do good work and be nice to people."

One more piece of advice I might add to that would be that after you're work is where it needs to be, join the community. Start a blog, or Instagram or Pinterest or whatever the kids are doing these days, put art in the group shows, go to the openings, meet people. It's a small community of people who do this and if your work is good it will be recognized and you will find yourself working faster than you can believe possible, and if you don't your work probably isn't there yet, keep at it and don't get discouraged, just try to be honest with yourself about your work and figure out why it's not there yet, what's holding you back and jump in and fix it. It's hard, hard work, but it's worth it.

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How misinformation is spread.

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Ask a stupid question... Read the rest of this post

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Took the Halloween costume out for a spin the other night.

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The perfect evening.

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One more from vacation I just got around to drawing. Now I'm out of material and ready to go on vacation again.

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I thought I'd been fired from drawing princesses for our daughter after being told I "wasn't doing them correctly". I'm happy to say I've been given another chance.

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this morning's princess drawing was heavily art directed.

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Mia asked me to draw a Disney Princess, I was happy to oblige her. I see a new project on the horizon.

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here's one I heard about at the playground yesterday, it basically illustrates the difference between boys and girls.

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more from summer vacation, this was in Washington Square Park in NYC.

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I will eventually get back to the making of the stop motion trailer, but we just got back from vacation on the East Coast and I have to get some of these off my chest.

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And in an interlude from the "Making of" posts on the stop motion trailer....
Right now I'm listening to "The Secret Garden" on Audiobook. For a Victorian girly book about frolicking in the garden amongst the roses and listening to the robins sing, it has one of the most over the top brutal and hysterical openings ever. Frances Hodgson Burnett really didn't pull any punches on the description of Mary Lennox, "the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen". In case you haven't read (or listened to it) she's so disliked by everyone around her, that she's left behind in a village in India when there's a cholera epidemic.

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and a detail of the back. This will be partially visible when on camera and will have to be removed digitally after the animation is done. He's ready to animate!

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 Making of the Stop Motion trailer installment 2:

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I'm having a new giveaway called "Who Wants to be in a Children's Book?"
Win a chance to have you or your child be painted into my next book, just join my Facebook Page to see the rules and enter.

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Here's the first part of the "making of" process, well after the initial part of asking Seamus, Mark & Chris from Screen Novelties if they would make the trailer and then getting over the shock and disbelief when they said they would. We started off with a storyboard which I drew. You can see here it's a bit longer than the trailer ended up being and this is even a much edited version from what i first had in mind.The goal was to make it 30 seconds long which came from Simon & Schuster, they (and other publishers) have indicated that 30 seconds is the ideal length for a book trailer, it's what places like Amazon and other outlets they have for it prefer. I do think in general shorter is better, but i found 30 seconds to be a bit too short, i think 40 or 45 would have been perfect. Of course that would have been significantly more work and as you'll see by the end of the "making of" it was a pretty major undertaking as it was and we barely got it done before the book came out anyway, so all's well that end's well.
A big part of the process at this stage was editing the board in Final Cut with sound to it and editing stuff out to get close to the time we wanted, also before even starting the board or conception of what the trailer might be i talked to Seamus, Mark and Chris about what would be possible in terms of the number of shots, puppets and sets they could build.

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