I should probably do a more comprehensive update soon. Busy making long-overdue updates to my websites, profiles, blogs resumes and all sort of things. I'm transitioning towards using tumblr as my main blog, but i'm still not sure how it will work out. For now i'll just be cross-posting things.
Also, for people looking through older work, I apologize for the broken links/images. I hadn't been watching my Image Shack account very closely the last year or so, and some how they lost a few images of mine in an update to a new improved interface. Sadly, this was concurrent with my main art storage hard drive and back up failing. Contacted support at Image Shack to see about restoring some of them. They were responsive and helpful, but some of the work is lost for good. On that sorry note, anyone with saved digital copies of my work should contact me ASAP.
ANYWAY. Art is more fun than depressing updates. I'm super lucky to have an awesome family who supports my creative and professional endeavors. My cousin recently commissioned this custom wedding portrait for his wife on their 2yr anniversary. Good looking couple! Lots of fun to do, especially capturing the personalities of their "children" Nera and Dingo.
I have a lot of work lately, but since I've spent so much time drawing things for other people, all i really have to post is a drawing of my cats. But it's something. After I drew this, I realized just how much I really don't have the heart to put Ms. Meeps here on a diet. So I sneak her rations of kibble before bed everynight. For art.
The more i am in the habit of meeting people outside of school, i'm gathering some awareness of how unusual my choice of field can seem to other people. Generally this fact about my self is met with interest and curiosity, and subsequently, I've gotten more and more reflective on the subject of how exactly i wound up here. I do maintain that my ability to draw is not some astonishing and mysterious god-given gift...if anything that would be my relentless drive to keep doing it, when i could be accomplishing far more useful things. Who knows if that can really even be counted as a "gift". Instead, when people get around to asking me why i would be interested in cartoons as a career, i can only think of answers which can only cast a more controversial light on my upbringing.
In general, although it's contrary to a lot of present-day parenting methods, i could not be more thankful that my parents let me watch a whole fucking lot of tv, mostly cartoons which i gravitated towards. Given how brilliant and talented and inspired I wound up as a young adult, it's clear that the whole tv/cartoons theory is a load of shit. Then again, when i was younger, we didn't have iPhones, Jersey Shore or Selena Gomez (or tweens, for that matter) (Amanda Bynes is a still by my standards an excellent role model, especially now that she's announced her retirement from entertainment). As a result, and much i the same way my baby boomer father can still remember almost every single ad jingle that aired on TV in the 60's, there are a number of animations that left a considerable impression on me, and i am plagued with remembering them in snippets long past their having fallen into obscurity. Animalympics is one, Pirates of Dark Water another...but some times i'm not lucky enough to have remembered enough details to attempt to find them again, and that is almost always enourmously frustrating.
For as long as i can remember i've had vague memories of a cartoon I once watched as a child. All i could remember were two cats, and some rail tracks, and the emotions of one of the characters. Not a whole lot to go off of, but every opportunity i get to watch an unknown animated film with cats has made me hopeful i would once day rediscover it, and be freed from the mystery of this animation which has done nothing short of haunt me.
PRAISE THE LORD IT TURNED OUT TO BE THIS GEM ALLLLL ALONG.
It actually happened yesterday when, beneath the pressure of an impending deadline, I was furiously trying to find some inspirational reference for a stylized Parisienne skyline, and my mother began calling upon her fondness for Chuck Jones and 60's animation. Few people get to know it, but my mother is another HUGE reason i got into animation. An artist herself, she has always held cartoons of her era in high esteem, and my child hood was not only tagging along on her various mural painting jobs, but also sneaking peeks into her Art of Looney Toons books, and following in her obsession with a specific Chuck Jones creation by name of Pussy foot and Marc Antony.
I was continuing to stress about my lack of inspiration for my project, i was hardly paying attention when she began to suggest i look for a movie about cats in Paris which she could barely recall and i dismissed as probably being the Aristocats or something more well-known. So while i was busy not paying her much heed, she quietly dismissed herself to her laptop upstairs to commence her own google adventure. A few minutes later, she was busy bothering me to you tube something called "gay purr-ee", the results of which are nothing less than historic in my mind.
Turns out it was the long lost kitty film of my memories, only more 60's campy, goofy and brilliantly UPA styled than I could have ever remembered. More ironic still was that it quickly became apparent that she had been referencing this film for years whenever she would doodle cartoons of our black cat Duncan, whom she likened to a burnt matchstick as a kitten, in a style that was a distinct reference to the Money Cats which appear in the film.
As if i needed any more reason to love these character designs.
Fact: I wore a really hot dress.
Fact: I called my dad at 6am to come pick me up from underneath a bridge in the industrial district
Fact: I tore up my knee when i gracefully ate shit on pavement , two inches below a scar i received by the exact same method on new years morning 2010.
Would have done this sooner, but my trial of CS5 expired about a week ago. Thanks to the magic of craigslist, however, I am back in the game with a full version of CS5 Master collection (liscensed!) for under $200.
I love Christmas shopping. Shopping in general is a major pastime of mine, and i have to say it's more fun to pick out things for other people...I just have a bad habit of forgetting that everything i've bought also has to be wrapped until it's the day before Christmas eve. I always get roped into doing wrapping for some other member of the family as well...Needless to say, i spent a good portion of today neck deep in colored paper and ribbon and tape.
I don't have any Christmas art to put up, but all the exposure to gold ribbon and the really delicious Lebanese food i ate tonight probably had something to do with this.
But hey, i'm not really trying to justify drawing a pointlessly gaudy naked woman. Nope. Not at all.
I have to admit I have been really enjoying Florence and the Machine. Lately, I've found i really enjoy singers with a unique sort of stage presence.
Wow...it's been kind of a crazy month. In case anyone was actually wondering (i doubt it) the whole 30 days/ 30 characters thing didn't really pan out. Sorry. But the good news is several other exciting things happened this month, all of which should have an actually positive influence on my productivity.
I was really fortunate to attend the 3rd annual CTN Expo in Burbank a little over a week ago. I almost couldn't handle how many awesome people i got to meet and how much talent there is in the industry right now. Tons of amazing blogs to follow make me really want to put more time and energy in to this blog. I got a lot of great advice and feedback from people who looked at my work, and got to know more about ways to stay afloat in the industry. Overall, i was really really impressed with the level of passion and drive and devotion that so many people there possessed in regards to making art. It really goes beyond telling yourself just to draw more to finding the love and the pleasure and enjoyment that makes drawing something you WANT to do more. I think the fact that I have spent most of my time as an artist in school really made it hard to cope with the first few months after graduation. My art really suffered, i had to re-evaluate my reasons for making art and figure out what to do with myself once the structure that academics imposed on my life and routine disappeared. Even more so when i finally moved back to my family's home in Portland, OR, and found myself feeling truly up-rooted from the stand point of no longer having what i could recognize as my own individual space.
The thing I've missed most about school is the ability to just go into a lab, sit down at a desk and get to work without the obstacle of a clumsy laptop on coffee table/wacom in lap arrangement in someone else's living room. Turns out, it wasn't as hard as one might think to find a perfectly good cintiq for sale cheap on Ebay, and a after a few hours on craigslist, i bought a desk too. Once i got those two pieces, it was really quite surprising how quickly i was able to throw together a reasonably function able workspace. But who really cares, i think i would have been just as happy with the cintiq on my floor. it's been set up for a whole two days now and i really couldn't be happier forsaking daytime, sleep and regular social interaction for the experience of reliving my high school experience cooped up in a basement for hours with tea and a tablet and Photoshop and thick socks. Fuck it. You do what it takes.
Having a cat helps too. I don't know why, but at least i have the comfort of another living soul willing to spend as much time underground with me. Or it's just because we keep her food and a bunch of spare bedding down here.
