No Evil part 2

This is a big one. It took so long to get this next post that I decided to post all the designs from the League of Evil spots. Below, Klekthos, who was pretty much figured out during the pitch phase. The ad agency came to us with rough sketches, and Klekthos was one of the few that was close to being designs from the start.
Same with this character below, Midnight Queen. Just a few design samples to get her finalized.


The henchman I pretty much tried to make them look like Moltar, but the agency was too worried about infringing on the Toth designs, so it got changed slightly.



Magmor had a few rounds but the biggest trouble was locking down the color and the cracks in the skin. He's supposed to look hotter on the inside.




Below, the Roach, another character that was pretty much designed by the agency with their rough sketches. I just tied it down and put it in the correct proportions.

Now, Neurosis to quite a few rounds of designs to get correct. My favorite is design C on page 3. Nice clean lines. Definitely closer to the original Toth inspiration, but the last few characters really deviated from the Toth/Superfriends world, IMO.









Sharak was a cool character. Again, my favorite design was from the pitch. I didn't think it needed to get any more complicated than that. But the writers really had something in mind so we eventually moved away from these vertical shark designs towards a horizontal shark.











Next, David 4000. It changed quite a bit.





And finally, Zzzat. It went from very stylized electricity to something more simple, which I was happy with since it's closer to what they would've done on Superfriends.





OK. That's all for now. Next post will be all the designs created for the one Scooby-Doo parody.

No Evil - Dr. Triclops

Continuing my walk through of the design process as Art Director for Net10's "No Evil" ad campaign, here we have Dr. Triclops, despot of the League of Evil.
Dr. T's design was mostly figured out during the pitch phase of the project (see last post). I was mainly inspired, of course, by the original Lex Luthor design from the beloved Superfriends. Years ago, my animator friends and I always hated this model sheet because if you take a moment to look at it, Lex looks like a different guy from pose to pose. However, when I look at it now I see the sort of ham-fisted drawing style that I know and love and see it for what it is: representational art. When you're a kid, there's no mistaking it for Lex, even if on the left he looks like Daddy Warbucks and on the right he looks more like Maggott from the Dirty Dozen.


So the crew at Droga wanted to make sure that we didn't go too close to any of the established designs. Even though I'm pretty sure you can't copyright bald-muscular-white-guy, they insisted on exploring various facial details.
Of course, I generally try to amuse myself during the process and push it as far as I can, while also knowing that they probably won't go for the more extreme ones. This also helps lead them back to a simpler design that sometimes a client won't want to choose right away because it's the first thing you did.
They were pretty much digging A from above right away and next they were wondering if the third eye needed an eyebrow:
Below is pretty much the final result. The client wanted to make sure the animators knew that the third eye was a functional eye, so I jotted a few notes. And this is about as far as I got with any well drawn model sheets. This was a part time position, and it was on top of VB designin' full time, but the real reason is due to the pace of the schedule. Although we wondered at the end if it would've paid off to concentrate on perfect model sheets and therefore cut down money spent on key-drawing revisions. It just didn't seem prudent to make model sheets for all the characters since this wasn't a real show.

I knew Lex would have a range of emotion, jotted down these roughs that never made it to inks where I would have fixed things I didn't like, and do the flip test, etc. Even though they are finished in ink, I still think of them as roughs because they don't have those extra steps, and it shows. It's fun to "tie down" with ink, though, and a good practice to get into.Same thing with the hands. I knew it would come up often with the human characters, and these are pretty much the kind of human cartoon hands I've been drawing for ten years, no doubt based on having animated Toth-style HB characters even back then.

No Evil

I was Art Director for a campaign of commercials for Net10, its ad agency Droga5, and their production company World Leaders Entertainment. These commercials have aired all over as well as the internet, and I'm pleased with the way they turned out. It was a dream come true, being asked to head up the art styling for this project since the primary inspiration for the commercials just happened to be two of my favorite childhood cartoons, The Superfriends and Scooby-Doo.

Frame showing Dr. Triclops and his death ray, from the spot titled, "Agent".

Before a project like this begins, the production company (WLE) has to win the job, often having to create sample art on spec to win the job. WLE hired me to work up a shot with the influence stated above plus a big dose of Alex Toth. I love the panel I came up with first:


Everyone liked it too, but as usual I took the client too literally, and they wanted to turn down the Toth knob and "crappy" it up a bit to go back in the Superfriends direction, along with a few changes. The revised panel looked like this:



There were a few houses competing for this account, but by this stage it was narrowed down to 2, World Leaders and J. J. Sedelmaier. In order to "break the tie" they asked for another round and wanted to see three more characters, so I came up with this:


This is still my favorite Sharak design, which in the end, changed quite drastically. The background here, and for all the spots, was painted by a very talented artist named Reggie Butler. So these two panels won the job and since I crafted the characters they asked me to be the Art Director. Now this was entirely on top of a full time job as designer on the Venture Brothers season 3. Needless to say, I was very busy last fall. The campaign was eight, one minute commercials and had over a dozen original characters, for which I probably drew several designs each. I have a ton of cool designs that never made the cut that I will show here and over the next few posts. You can check out the 45 second versions of the spots at the official No Evil Site.

Last Year's DC Work...

...turned out to be a mere four pages. It's probably the least active in comics I've been since getting into the biz in 1998. And what's worse, it's dated January '08, so I fear that I didn't even see print in comics last year! (I'll have to see how early it hit the shops.) Well, I'm already fixing this problem. I'll be taking on some more Dexter's Lab pages, and I've been waiting to show you the four I drew last year. This is the first time I had the chance to draw and ink my pages! I'm happy with the way it turned out, and my editor is too, so I'll be doing more inking this year. I borrowed heavily from my influences of the past few years, and am looking forward to trying out more things as I get comfortable inking my own work. From DC's Cartoon Network Block Party #39:






I inked on Cintiq which is quite different than reality. It has it's own set of rules, and I liken it a lot more to airbrushing than brush inking. At first I found it too tedious but after two pages learned some tricks that made the work go much faster and therefore more fun.

When drawing comics, my favorite are the thumbnails. Generally, most of my creative input happens at this stage. These are the thumb's for the above:

Shave Everywhere Dot Com

I designed and animated the brochure animations for the recently re-launched website, Shave Everywhere. Please check it out. I had a lot of fun working on this project. There are several reasons why it was a pleasure but the most important one is that all of my clients were talented and encouraging. They really wanted to hear all of my creative input and in most cases were happy to keep them in the scripts. The second cool thing about this project is once I had impressed them with my designs, I had free reign on designing the rest of the project, from storyboards to characters and props. So, basically I had the privilege of drawing and animating in my own style. I drew two designs of which they picked the second. The rest was deciding on a painted style for the backgrounds. I was really hoping they'd go for the more colorful ones, but in the end (and thankfully, cuz it would've been harder for me otherwise), they chose simple flat color backgrounds with colored outlines.

2:30am UFO Dreams

Damsels in Distress 03

Had some free time tonight, so I thought I'd work on another Damsel in Distress study.

Damsels in Distress 02 Sketch

Just got finished messing around with this; a larger sketch based on one of the doodles from the previous post. Not a bad start, but I'd like to push it farther. I may re-work this to make a better composition, or move along to a new pose...

Last Night's Doodles

I've been posting a lot of my comics work lately, but I'd rather be posting art that is not "work for hire", such as this page of doodles I mashed out last night. Most of my non-work-for-hire art that I've been making lately, that would be shown here, is instead featured on the Summer Camp of Death! Blog, as well as the SCOD site. There's some fun, cartoony stuff over there. Check 'm out if you have time. The above doodles are some preparatory exploration for a project that will be related in theme but will be featured here. More on that coming soon.

Cover Calamity Part Doo

OK, so enough with the griping already. Well, maybe just a little more before I put this subject to rest (see the original post, Cover Calamity). I got this in the mail the other day and thought I'd post it, since I really think it turned out quite nicely. I'm happy to show the world this inked version (inked by the amazing Mike DeCarlo) for the FIRST TIME EVER! (that I know of...) Uh, who's that character runnin' at us...?

Cartoon Network Action Pack #10

This cover turned out pretty good. This one was a LOT of fun.

Cover Calamity

I drew several covers for DC's Cartoon Network Action Pack last year. Some better than others. It quickly became obvious that whenever Ben 10 was featured on the cover, there were problems. I found out much later that the marketing department at CN mandated that only model pack poses of Ben 10 could be used. I worked super hard on the pencel below:



And then I got it back looking like this:

Check out the differences. DC was forced to rearrange everything. Of course I'm more fond of the pencil, but the real issue is of course, non-artists (who are the ones in charge and directing the art, go figure..) and their interpretations of what it means to be "on model". I've run into this hornet's nest many times in my career. The clip art may be a more definitive drawing, but it's the same one you see over and over. And, if you watch the show, Ben 10 doesn't look anything like the model pack art that's used above.

But what gets me the most is that they don't give kids the credit to be able to know it's the right character. After it's painted the green, brown, white and black, what kid wouldn't know it's Ben 10? Give me a break!

Eventually I found myself more of a graphic designer than a cover artist, slipping in the right JPEG and getting to draw the two inset panels. So, I bowed out of doing them. But I miss it. The covers where this didn't happen were a LOT of fun.

Has anyone else run into this situation?

Hot Stuff

Marker, color pencil, and white-out on printed copy paper, c. 2006.



The original black and white drawing - pencil and ink on copy paper.

Erin Sleeping

A sketch and a quick marker finish of my darling wife done sometime in the fall of 2006.

Thing from '89

Check out this Thing I drew over seventeen years ago. I was in 10th grade.

Chookies - Coming Through!

This is one of the first productions I ever worked on (c. 1996) in the animation industry - a commercial for a new Brach's candy called Chookies. I was an "inker" then (in quotes because it was actually pencil finishes) and it also features some of my first effects animation - a chocolate waterfall. So much of my reel from those early days has been lost forever (my old cat peed on a lot of the VHS's) but I found this one the other day and decided to preserve it forever.

Christmas Gifts - 2006

Around Thanksgiving weekend last year, I was so broke, I realized I wouldn't be able to buy gifts for the Holidays. Luckily, I'm an artist. So I spent about four weekends making these gifts. It turned out to be more fun, cheaper for me (still had to come up with $ for supplies), and much, much more greatly appreciated by all the receivers than the usual trinkets. I've been meaning to do this every year, but this was the first time I completed the task in time, mainly do to the fact that I was motivated by poverty. I now plan to do this every year!

The Adventures of Fist and C-B.O.N.E.

"Let the Call of Duty Leave a Message, part 1" - First published in issue #2 of Cartoon Mafia Comics' Tour Zine.








"Let the Call of Duty Leave a Message, part 2" - First published in issue #3 of Cartoon Mafia Comics' Tour Zine.







I couldn't find any of my original scans of these pages, so what you see here are scans of work prints or actual Tour Zine issues, so the quality could be better. Tour Zine was a little fan 'zine that a friend published (and I helped finance, as well as contributed other illustrations and articles) sometime between the years of 2003 and 2004. It was a pretty cool 'zine about "lot culture", - what fans do before and after a concert they attend. I was asked to contribute art and invited to tell a FIST story of five pages or so, whatever I wanted. So I adapted a story to fit the theme of the 'zine.

Now that a few years have passed and I look at the art and read the story, I have mixed feelings about it. Mostly, I'm happy with it, simply because it got made. I'm not so happy with some of the art that was very rushed and sometimes drawn straight with a marker. Knowing the audience, as well as the size of the 'zine (copy paper folded in half), I didn't put too much time into some of the panels. And, the story I came up with, trying to adapt the FIST universe into the theme of the 'zine, is not my favorite. However, it's the most completed story with these characters to date, and there are some things I love about it, so I want to finish it. We'll see.

One note about the previous post: The art you see there was published in Tour Zine #1 as an advertisement for the FIST story to be featured in issue #2. However, that page and its story have nothing to do with the story in the pages above. This is because it was created years earlier as an ad, or cover, for a completely different story. I have several finished and inked pages from that series that I may feature later. As I mentioned before, since college I've started several FIST projects that were all abandoned. That's why TZ was so successful (for 2 issues) because they were only five pages at a time with about three to six months in between. There were four issues of TZ in all (with a fifth that never got printed), but I cut out after issue three due to several unhappy complications associated with the work environment. Oh well. I look forward to hearing any comments you might have about FIST or his robot friend C-B.O.N.E.

The Adventures of Fist and C-B.O.N.E.

The story centers around Fist and his best friend C-B.O.N.E. who are getting close to graduating from college. The image above hints at, pretty well, what the story is about. I've always wanted to do a comic book that looks like a super-hero book but reads like an indie book. I'm sure there are some out there now that are doing this, but I have yet to see one with the sensibilities that I'm looking for, which is kind of like taking the day to day problems that Spiderman always deals with in his book, but pushing it farther and having more complex dynamics between the characters as they deal with the day to day BS, like what you do when you're so drunk you forget you have a girlfriend. Heh heh. Has that happened to anyone else during those fast-paced college days? Whoops!

Like a lot of artists in the animation industry, I love comic books and all the art associated with the medium, and have always dreamed of drawing my own book someday. Over the years I've created a universe that falls under the current title of The Adventures of Fist and C-B.O.N.E. I've sat down various times over the years to begin some new story, each time getting farther and farther towards completion, but have yet to finish one of them. As many of you artists out there have found out, as I have, it's quite difficult to see a long-range project through to the end with no budget and doing it all in your spare time. Anyway, the last series of pages I worked on came the closest to completion, and I've decided to post them here, with the idea that I would finally finish at least one story, even if I only get one page done a month. I've been thinking about it ever since I bought my Cintiq, how quickly I could draw, ink, and letter them now. Here is an advertisement, a sort of a would-be cover, of a story I was working on a few years ago. Not sure if this actually was from the most recent or not. I'll find out for sure, and then I'll post the latest story!

Celebrity Sketches 03

This is Andy Samberg, and when I saw him on a commercial tonight I immediately paused it and grabbed my sketchbook. Not only is this guy hilarious on SNL, but he's hilarious looking! I encourage any artist out there to do a charicature of this guy.

DC Comics CNAP Cover 01

My first comics cover ever! This is the cover for DC Comics' new kids anthology called Cartoon Network Action Pack!



I included a copy of my pencils as they were when I delivered the job.

Celebrity Sketches 02

I tried pushing these a little farther than last night. I think I made some progress but will continue tweaking. Couldn't quite lock down Brad, but fun to draw anyway...

Celebrity Sketches 01

I've been wanting to do some of these since seeing John K.'s hilarious Brad and Angelina caricatures. Now I've finally started! I'd like to push these farther and use fewer lines, but for this first sketch, this is the style that was most natural.

Naked Girl Sketch

Here's a quick sketch (done in Photoshop on a Cintiq). And, speaking of naked girl sketches, I just bought a whole book of them, some very inspiring stuff. It's Shane Glines' new book titled, S Curves. A little steep in price, but well worth it! Check it out if you've got a spare hunjy to spend.

Summer Camp of Death!

"Wet Dreams"
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As some of you already know, I've been ivolved with a little project called Summer Camp of Death! Check out this YouTube friendly version, or go to the site to see the original. I look forward to your comments. Think you could sit through 15 minute episodes of this?

She's Randy Character Design

Here are some of the designs for She's Randy, "Quest for the Fairy Prince". For more on this, see the previous post.

She's Randy

Being an animator and owning an animation studio in 2001, I found that it was my daily activity to come up with a few cartoon concepts to pitch to different networks in the hopes of getting some animation work, but also for networking, and in general for practice. She's Randy is one of those concepts. As circumstances permitted, I embarked on a journey down the road of animation production of the self-financed variety, which basically means "done for nothing". I was pretty good at accomplishing this and managed to drag quite a few talented artists as well as friends of the non-artist type into my schemes, haphazardly cobbling together a team of sorts for accomplishing the task. The only unfortunate snag was the same as many young animation enthusiasts, which happens to be the fact that any good idea in animation tends to multiply and the multiplications when calculated tend to multiply yet another time until those calculations decide to stop lest they continue in the same tradition. So, this good idea of mine turned into what amounted to be no shorter than a five minute cartoon. Needless to say, the whole thing was never completed and barely made it two fifths of the way. However, even such a miserable attempt is not without some notable accomplishments and having the fortune of being able to look upon that time from a vantage of several years past, I can take pride in certain aspects of the production. Having said all this, I'm happy to show you this uncompleted, amatuerish work, from some half-forgotten, homemade studio.
Secondly, it is also my good fortune to finally be able to thank all those people who were involved, who put in time on the project for no other reason than being good friends of mine and altogether nice people. Thank you. I hope that you and also many others, can enjoy this little animated short film from the days of my early career.

Doodles, 2

Some doodles from the past week or so. Many thanks to everyone out there for posting their doodles. They do inspire me to jot down some of mine once in a while.

Sketching on Cintiq

A quick sketch c. Feb '06. I think this is the first sketch after I hooked up the Cintiq to my mac. What was life like before the Cintiq? What's this "pay-per" you keep talking about?

VEGETA!

Sometime around 2001, I really got hooked on Dragonball Z. It took me a while to "get-it" (basically you have to watch a few episodes in a row) but after that I was very impressed. One of my favorite characters was Vegeta. What a jerk! Anyway, here's a drawing of Vegeta I did sometime around December of 2005.