Another Alligator...

I was doodling this at lunch the other day and thought I'd color and share. Enjoy.

(Just in case you were wondering about the dark colors, it is a little known fact that alligators can change the color of their skin depending on the type of water they are in. In shadows or in mucky water than can be found to be black/blackish, in lighter or sunnier colors a dark green.)

Slowly Improving My Cat Drawings...

I want to type up a good epiphany that I recently had, but right now I'm more wanting to get into posting than worrying about my bad grammar. So look forward to my adventures through demoralization and how I came through on the other side. But now Noodle doing what she and many other cats do so well--nothing.

2wiceland Commercial...

Yaaaaay!! I can show the commercial I just worked on. The director, Dave Wasson, gave me the thumbs up and also a wonderful dvd with labels and a jacket and everything--really cool and special to do. Well I finally got to go by AcmeFilmworks and grab that dvd along with the stuff I did with the over the summer--so for the next several posts I'm going to have some animation stuff to show-yippee! Anyway, this was alot of fun to work on. We did all of the animation in flash and Dave got the 3-D effects done in AfterEffects. We had two master animators, Devon Roth and Aaron Horvath, doing the bulk and then me. I did the stuff in the scenes where the woman is walking to the store, in the store, talks to the camera, and various stuff in the last shot (the birds and banner, the dude in the boat, some work with the two dudes, and the tiny little flags on the balloons). In addition to being paid I got to peruse through some of the animation files for the other shots and really learned alot. It really wasn't until the last shot that I felt back into the mentality of animating--I mean I'd been doing boards for the past 9 months. (This has taught me a valuable lesson in keeping my Illustration and Animation skills up really high--never know what is going to be thrown at you). I really think apprenticeships should return more to this field. The quality would go even more through the roof than it does at times. Anywho, enjoy!


OTHER COOL NOTES ABOUT THE COMMERCIAL: Produced by Gwynn Adik, 3-D and compositing by Nicolas Mermet, post supervision by George Khair, and the fun music by the same guy who did the stuff on Making Fiends, Ego Plum.

Addendum: Dave Wasson put a nicer copy of it on line here Also, I noticed that this link was one of the suggested videos here

Yayy, A Client's Happy...

I always love it when a client is happy with the work I've done. Between doing the commercial (which I hope to post here soon), and this project, I'm feeling very good right now--I'm a people pleaser. I was actually contacted by this person through this blog to do a logo for her catering company. Her last name is Lyon so you can see how the above came together. I don't really consider myself a logo person--especially when it comes to working with fonts--but I think that this still came out really fun. Enjoy.

A Test (Hopefully Works)...

Dont' mind this post as it is being used to create a link that I reference in the HTML. I want to modify the blog a bit and get things rolling really cool (like I wanted to do back in January), but we shall see how this goes...


Hopefully this will appear up in the address bar in about a week or so. What I did was 1)Ask the question, 'How do you change that icon up in your address bar?' 2)Went here to find out how to change your address icon. 3) Following the advice found on said page, I had the pic that I wanted converted in to a FavIcon here. Then I had the pic uploaded into their library. Now we play the wait game. Until then I can only look at this pic:

and imagine it has my url in it instead.

(Hope this helps anyone like me that wanted to know how to change such a feature.)

Earl Norem...

I'm sorry I haven't posted anything lately, I got some freelance again from Universal, then went back home to see my family in Texas (click here to see where my mom lives, and learn a little history), and then I came back to have yet another freelance opportunity on a commercial with my former director/producer on Making Fiends, Dave Wasson. I have been drawing alot (and I took alot of Photos in Texas, which I will post on my other blog sometime soon), but I'm also caught up in the NBA Playoffs right now and going nuts. The Playoffs are to a basketball fan what sugar is a to an ADD kid.

Anyway...


The real reason of this post till I get my new material together is to give awareness/promote an artist that I loved seeing the work of growing up: Earl Norem. You can find a brief wikipedia summary here. I grew up seeing his work on the covers of comics and especially He-Man stuff (and by stuff I mean practically anything with He-Man). He seemed to know how to combine real world realism with the comic world's extraordinary humanoid standards. I have examples of his work below. His unofficial page is having problems right now (and will be hopefully up again soon), but if you google him in images, you will see a plethora of work and fun. I didn't know if he had retired or what when I came across a painting he did for the newer version a He-Man a few years back. I got excited thinking he was still making work, but at the bottom of a wikipedia entry there was this quote that broke my heart:

Norem favors painting in acrylics. Suffering from arthritis, he is now retired; only painting for his own amusement and for his grandchildren. As he said in a 2005 interview, "All the contacts that I had in the commercial art field are either retired or dead, and the younger art buyers don't want anything to do with an 81-year-old artist."

So this post is my feeble attempt to not let the awesome work of one of my favorite illustrators, Earl Norem, be forgotten. Enjoy.

Just as I was about to publish this post I found someone else had done an even better tribute to Earl Norem's work (click here).

Gorilla...

I'm in Texas right now visiting me mother and family. Tonight we are watching Bednobs and Broomsticks. It alot of fun but I really wanted to draw a gorilla... so here it is.