Weekend.

Seems like everything came down on me this week---
Chris Ware's in town this weekend, and Canzine's on Sunday; good relatives in town and looking for a new apartment; assembling big portfolios and many little books. Here's to a calmer weekend, and a continuation of my portfolio posts.

some of this drawing thanks to Victor Bergen-Henegouwen and Steve Liss.

04-05

Looks like until I can figure out Blogger-browser issues, who knows who'll be able to see what. Anyway, I've continued to work on my little suburb story, developing it in all sorts of fun directions, but over the last year I've started a number of other projects as well, working them to greater or lesser degrees. The kick that I get out of this stuff is all the pre-production business--coming up with ideas, concepts, characters, and stories.

What I'm after this time is something more fun and upbeat than the last submission. After a couple months of chefs, diners, spies, little girls, robots, scientists, and elderly men buying goldfish, I found something to go ahead with that seemed to thoroughly satisfy my fun quota...

A pastiche.
For J.

2003 again.

For everyone who couldn't see what I'd posted previously:
a repost--plus and minus some.

Let's see if it'll work.

2003

A couple years ago I started on a project based on my experience of the suburbs--a little pleasant, a little melancholy. I really think that the real world can be beautiful and compelling, and I wanted to make something that was. I'm a big fan of animation being animation, but I think that there's a place in animation for something more subtle and sincere; a good story is a good story, isn't it? Make it entertaining, make it challenging, make it funny, make it heartwarming, make it poignant; we owe it to people to do good stuff.

Needless to say, it's two years later. From this portfolio I've had some good responses; I've flown around a bit, drawn some storyboards, production designed, animated; I'm still working through this fella, but have since moved on to a number of other projects in its wake. But anyway, that's where I was going, so this is where we'll start.

An excerpt:

Preservation Hall

Before showing new work, I thought it'd be good to dip into the archives.

First, the announcement of some posts on my until now defunct Preservation Hall Blog. I started it right when Hurricane Katrina hit, and it felt wrong for me to start writing about New Orleans and art and beauty... Bad stuff going on out there, as we all know; hopefully everything turns out alright. Anyway, it was meant to be a forum about influences and aesthetics--a place to talk about the bigger world of art stuffs and processes. Check it out here.

On a related note, due to request, the artists from my grid of fellas:

Mary Blair, Joaquin Sorolla, Al Hirschfeld, Charles Dana Gibson, Quentin Blake
Tony Fucile, Milt Kahl, John Singer Sargent, Tom Oreb, Glen Keane
Alex Toth, Anders Zorn, Hayao Miyazaki, Harald Siepermann, Alice and Martin Provensen
James Baxter, Sergio Pablos, JC Leyendecker, Lisbeth Zwerger, JP Miller
Bill Peet, Miraslov Sasek, Marc Davis, Tadahiro Uesugi and Sunny B. Cook