Rob Liefeld Tribute
April 28th, 2010
Bloop
April 23rd, 2010
Game Over, Man.
March 11th, 2010
2 little gouache paintings for the Game Over III show at Giant Robot SF.
from ICO:
Details:
I’m liking this loose way of using pencils, inks, and gouache together – lots of happy accidents. When I look at these paintings close up, I see some “oh shit no” moments that actually turned out pretty nice-looking.
Details:
Can we talk about Grim Fandango for a second? The above painting is a mashed-perspective version of that scene where Glottis (right, big orange) is tooling around on the piano in Manny’s (left, skeleton) hotel lounge. Manny has been scouring the Land of the Dead for a woman he wronged, and he settles in this port city to wait for her. He gets a job there as a hotel janitor but is so restless that he can’t help but work his way towards owning the hotel. Here Manny takes a break from running things and hangs out with his friend Glottis, whose fingers pluck out some half-melodies from the keys. On the game’s soundtrack, Glottis’s music is looped. But by the way the scene is staged, the music feels continuous and improvised. If Manny stands idle for too long he pulls out a cigarette and just listens. You could leave the game on this scene for an indefinite time and it persists like a fishtank screensaver, except ten billion times more amazing. This game be art at its finest, maign.
The show:
O Man, Gouache Gods…
February 14th, 2010…let me finish this painting in time for the art show, pls.
Duhn Duhn DUht DUht DUh DAAA!
February 10th, 2010
What’s up, explorers. Last month, Jake Parker‘s comic book Missile Mouse: the Star Crusher came out. I helped color it, along with Jake and my roommate Jason Caffoe. Above is some fanart I did for MM in the vein of the 90′s Saturday-morning cartoons I used to watch. Does anybody remember Fantastic Max? Or what about Potsworth and Co.? My very favorite show back in the day was Tailspin. I liked the idea of those animals having adventures in their tricked-out planes while going back home to a town that felt more real than the secret bases or mansions or whatever that other cartoon heroes lived in.
ANYWAYS. Missile Mouse! Here is a trailer that Darren Rawlings put together about the book:
Pretty fun, right!? Missile Mouse is this bull-headed military agent that breaks faces across the galaxy to keep the peace.
We’re working on the sequel right now. Stay Tooned.
That Part with the Island
January 29th, 2010
*
01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08,
09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,
25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32,
33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40,
41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,
49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56.
*
Here are some storyboards I did, over the course of one day. It’s a low-key wordless scene from “Life of Pi,” which has a lot going on under its seeming uneventfulness: Pi goes through a buttload of emotions because he’s seeing land for the first time in months, and the island has a sinister quality as the reader discovers that it’s not made of your traditional rock and soil. SO I wanted to get all that stuff in there, and keep the shots interesting without being too incomprehensible.
This sequence happens pretty late in the story so I assumed that the viewer of this hypothetical movie has already spent a lot of time with this boat, and would probably want to look at it from more novel angles. I wanted to open the sequence with a shot that shows how comfortable the boy and tiger have grown since they first met. In this shot, Pi and Richard Parker are both lying down facing each other, and they almost look like they’re snuggling by the way the camera is angled. If this was an actual clip being viewed by a Life-of-Pi-newbie, the audio of the ocean lapping against the bow should be enough to cue viewers into thinking Pi and tiger are on a boat without having to begin with a wide shot.
It’s also neat to think about how effective audio cues and color pallettes are in giving the viewer information that pure composition doesn’t. This scene probably has a sort of “drumbeat” in the sound of the ocean waves (up until the boat beaches), which might influence how the shots are timed.
When you look at old photographs
January 20th, 2010
This is a bad part of the spaceship to get drunk at because the mirrored floors would really mess you up.
The Electric Ant
January 9th, 2010
Okay so a few months ago I teamed up with writer Anthony Ha to make a short comic for the Electric Ant 2 zine, edited by Ryan Sands. Anthony (Ha) gave me this wonderful script that was reminiscent of Asimov and Phillip K. Dick. He wrote about steely business dudes playing hardball over space-commodities and the ethics of their ventures, set amidst a backdrop of man’s early colonization of the solar system. Our story is called “Empire.”
It was great to to do some sci-fi work (which I love) without lasers and mecha (which I also love) – whose absence was a nice reminder that future-space can be populated by the same characters that inhabit our more subtle fictions. Um, I guess it felt good to draw a story about people trying to make money instead of lasering their enemies. In the words of Captain Hammer, “not my usual, but nice.” I want to do more stuff like this for sure.
Space surgery – uuggghh!! Happy new Decade, everybody!
“Life, uh… finds a way.”
December 2nd, 2009
Hey you guys! There is a charity movie screening-slash-art-auction going on this weekend called “Hey You Guys!” wherein a bunch of people congregate at the Rialto Theater in Pasadena, watch Ghostbusters and bid on some sick artwork. The theme of the art is “movies that inspired you.” I’ve read Jurassic Park like five times between grades 5 through 7 and the spine of my copy has more creases in it than a raisin, lodged in a pug’s forehead. The movie was basically on loop whenever I was home alone, and I learned how to draw people from the storyboards in the back of the “Making of Jurassic Park” book. So yeah, I guess Jurassic Park played a big part in my upbringing. Here is my piece for the auction!
I wish I could find a way to print it like this:
Info about the event:
Ghostbusters Screening &
Charity Art Auction
Saturday December 5th, 2009
Rialto Theater
1023 Fair Oaks Avenue · South Pasadena, CA 91030