Here's a couple of recent sketches. Both are the result of "I need to draw more, fer cryin' out loud!" So, here's the start of that, and whatdayaknow, you're here to witness it.
I usually start drawing without any idea of what I'm doing, what the pose will be, anything. And these sketches are no exception. I'll be doing more thumbnails for future drawings (hopefully), but these turned out pretty O.K.
I forgot how much I hate Dragon*Con! Haha!
My buddy Adam over at GalacticHunter.com posted a photo of the Adult Swim panel in their Dragon*Con Gallery.
Saturday's Adult Swim Panel - The view from the front row.
Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick.Here we are out in Anaheim, CA visiting Disneyland! Just landed yesterday afternoon, got to the Hotel, got something to eat, hit the local Target for some necessities, and got down to the park at around 7pm to at least get some Disney fun going on our first day.
We decided to hit California Adventure since we only had about 2 hours before that park closed, and we figured that was about all we would need.
More to come later...
My lovely Wife, Liz, surprised me to no end on my recent birthday not only with a "Fudgie The Whale" Ice Cream Cake from the Carvel Ice Cream store, but with an awesome gift. A DVD of "The Best of the Uncle Floyd Show". Uncle Floyd was a big part of my teenage years in New Jersey. The show typically started out with Floyd and his puppet pal, Oogie, doing an opening monologue. Check out Oogie in action below:
Castmember Mugsy recollects: "For twenty-five years the Uncle Floyd Show has been entertaining the masses and eradicating the blues, if only for a half hour a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year. In a place in people's hearts not unlike Johnny Carson, Floyd was welcomed into millions of homes each night. Leading a weird bunch of misfits and even stranger puppet pals, the Floyd program was definitely an exception. It was a show that brought people together when everything else in the world was driving them apart. It was a show that parents could watch with children, husbands with wives. Teenagers would watch in one house and senior citizens in another. A show you might talk about the next day in school or work. Where the signs of status and success meant getting a picture on the wall or even Viewer of The Week!"
Mugsy sadly passed away after battling lung cancer in October 2005.
Floyd is a phenomenal piano player. He would play old-time Dixieland and Vaudeville favorites, songs that you typically had never heard before, but you loved all the same. In 1999, Floyd set the Guinness World Record for Continuous Piano Playing where under the watchful eyes of the Guinness judges, he played he piano for 24 hours and 15 minutes!
I might add that Hugo was a staple on the Floyd Show long before Pee-Wee Herman added "Hugo" to his act. In fact, watching Pee-Wee's original HBO special will remind you quite a bit of the Uncle Floyd Show for some strange reason.
Another of Mugsy's hilarious puppet creations is "Cuppy", a headless baby doll with a paper coffee cup for a head. Click on the clip below to see "Cuppy" in action:
Go find out for yourselves how ingenious and hilarious this local, no-budget television show was.
Thanks, Liz, for bringing Uncle Floyd back to me!
Thursday night Life Drawing typically follows the same schedule each week. 30 minutes of 1 minute poses, 30 minutes of 2 minute poses. 15 minute break. 45 minutes of 10, 15, and 20 minute poses. Here is a complete session from 10/20/2005.
For my Life Drawing posts from now on, I'm going to attempt to keep things chronological. For myself mostly. I'd like to see if I've made any progress. Har-har!
This is a great scene from the Birdman episode called "Harvey's Civvy". Harvey gets hit with a class action lawsuit from former villians that he's maimed or injured in the process of capturing them in his past life as a Superhero. A subplot involved Judge Mentok The Mindtaker, and Prosecuting Attorney, Shado The Brain Thief in a battle of mind control. Here Mentok takes control of the Bailiff, making him dance around the courtroom. The Bailiff's atomic wedgie is courtesy of Shado from the scene just prior. All this to the tune of "Dueling Banjos".
Have I mentioned that Birdman is a dream show on which to work?
This is one of my all time favorite photographs of Walt Disney. Here he is at Disneyland, surveying this amazing creation of his. Early in the morning, pavement still wet from the morning cleaning. No one around. Just the man and his ideas come to life. Awesome.
In October of 2003, my Wife and I took our first ever trip to Disneyland in Anaheim, California. It was my first ever trip to California, period. I had just started my tenure on "Birdman" five months prior and was still freelance. The Job/Money situation was still very much up in the air, so we figured "let's get while the gettin' is good, and go out to Disneyland, at least once in our lives." We went with the expectation that we would never be able to get back there ever again. This would be our one and only shot. We went for 7 days and did nothing else in Califiornia but visit Disneyland, 7 days in a row. It was PHENOMENAL! We went to the Golden Horseshoe everyday for lunch. The performers started to recognize us after a few days and would mention us here and there during their acts. We rode our favorite rides over and over. Each evening we would grab some ice cream and sit on Main Street as if we owned the joint.
So, in the tradition of Walt's photo, here I am, wearing my Cartoon Network shirt, surveying the kingdom that I, along with my Wife, owned for 7 days in the Fall of 2003.
Probably one of the best things I get to do as an Animator on a show like Birdman is take a crack at animating a classic Hanna Barbera character, in this case Riccochet Rabbit, and really pay tribute to the cartoons I grew up with and loved as a kid. We have access to all the old wonderful model sheets. We are able to study video and frame grabs of the old shows and base our animation on what the past masters did, but also add our own touches and flair to make the new animation our own. Birdman is an animator's dream job. I've been able to animate Riccochet Rabbit, Shaggy, Speed Buggy, The Galaxy Trio, Morroco Mole, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey among others!
FYI: Riccochet Rabbit appeared in the Birdman episode "X Gets The Crest" and was voiced by Mark Hamill, which added more to my fanboy lunacy since I'm also a big Star Wars fan.
This still is from a shot that I did for the Birdman episode "Evolutionary War". Harvey defends Captain Caveman's Son, Cavey, Jr. when the local schools ban books that include evolution, therefore threatening Cavey's very existence. Harvey himself wonders about his own place in the evolutionary chain since he is a man, but has wings. This scene is the signature scene of the episode which is a musical number remenicient of "Beauty and the Beast." I got to record a commentary track, along with the rest of the Production Crew for this episode on the Birdman Volume 2 DVD, due out sometime this fall.
My Wife collects rubber ducks, and for a while there, we had quite a few filling up the bathtub. She's since moved on to other collecting interests, but still has all of her duckies packed away in the basement. A few of the favorites are still lurking around the house. I still buy her new ones now and again.
I drew this duckie for her.
The Return are a FANTASTIC Beatles Tribute Band from Griffin, GA. They play the early Beatles hits, up through the1965 years, thereabouts. They have the accents, the suits, and especially the instruments. My Wife and I stumbled across them at a free concert they were giving at a local shopping mall in Georgia. We were there shopping and on our way out to the car, we heard this fabulous Beatles music drifting through the warm Summer air. Being huge Beatles Fans, we were absolutely hooked and have since gone on to see them play live about about 5 times now, with the most recent show on June 1, 2006 at Screen On The Green, where they played live before a showing of "A Hard Days Night" outdoors on the big screen.
As a dopey fan, I decided to present them with a drawing of themselves in the style of the old Beatles cartoon show from the 60's. They liked it so much, they had T-Shirts made, and are now selling them at their shows. The finished art is presented above, although they had to make a 3-color version for the final shirt. Below is my original doodle.
Check out The Return at www.thereturnonline.com
Another "Paw Island" personalized sketch. This one is of Allie the Kitten and her Teddy Mouse, Colby.
From 1999 to 2001, I worked for a start-up children's entertainment company called "Paw Island". Our main focus was on books and on our website, where we had activities, games, cartoons and music based on our core group of characters.
In 2001, we had the idea of offering personalized original sketches (by me) for a fee where I would draw a child's favorite character in either a situation of my choosing, or partaking in whatever the child's hobby or favorite past-time was.
We never got past the 12 test sketches I did, which were all personalized to folks around the old office. Anyway, here's one of those sketches, and I'll be posting the rest in the coming weeks.
As Lead Animator on Harvey Birdman, I sometimes get to choose which scenes I'd like to animate. This one looked good in the animatic, so I requested it right away... HA!
This scene is from the Birdman episode Birdgirl of Guantanamole. This episode won Best Animated TV Show for Adults at the 2005 Ottawa International Animation Festival. We are particularly proud of this honor since Adult Swim shows aren't typically recognized for their animation artistry, but for their writing. Birdman is a hilarious show... some of the best writing on Adult Swim, and I think we've proven that the animation is pretty darn good, too.
This is a fantastic idea that my Wife, Liz, came up with that we've been knocking around for a while now trying to figure out what to do with. I think it would make a fantastic Children's Book. She has come up with all these awesome designs for nightmarish carousel horses, with a poem that goes along with each one. Pictured is my rendering of one my favorite designs of hers.
This one is called "Head Hunter" and here's the poem that goes along with the image: "You might take a ride on Head Hunter instead, She's always in search of that one... perfect... head."
You can see more of Liz's work over at Puppatoons. She's awesome.
These are some 2 minute gesture drawings. I normally don't draw this small on a single page, but after looking through my sketchbooks for drawings to display here, these were some of my favorites. I'm going to have to start drawing smaller from now on.
Every Thursday night, I attend a Life Drawing class sponsored by ASIFA-Atlanta, the local chapter of the International Animation Society here in Atlanta. $5 for 2 hours is a bargain. It's the most non-work related drawing I do on a regular basis so I thought it would be a good place to start posting some of my artwork.
