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Showing posts from 2012

ELEGANT COMICS FROM A BYGONE ERA

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Fifty years ago, some comic strips presumed readers had a level of literacy, as well as a patience for drawings, that today's readers lack. You won't find anything on today's comic pages today to resemble this Sunday strip by the great Leonard Starr.  Here, a journalist is smuggling a Chinese defector out through the jungles of Vietnam.  The two have begun to get on each other's nerves.  Starr's smart dialogue combines politics, human nature and humor.   Note Starr's cinematography,  his facial expressions, his understanding of anatomy and design.  Readers today don't linger over the comic page long enough to appreciate such characteristics.   I love the elegance of Starr's lines, both written and drawn. Around the same time, MAD Magazine was producing satires that assumed even children knew the words and music to Gilbert & Sullivan songs.  MAD writers and artists even thought their young subscribers would get jokes about rivalry between Nelson Rocke

Merry Christmas!

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This is a painting I did for the DreamWorks Christmas Special Shrek the Halls , it's meant to set up the look of the lighting and color for the moment when Shrek tells the Night Before Christmas story.

LEE CONREY (1883-1976)

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 Few people today remember  Lee Conrey, but he drew thousands of lurid illustrations for  The American Weekly in the 1920s and 1930s.   The American Weekly was a cheesy supplement for Sunday newspapers, printed by William Randolph Hearst on pulp paper. Week after week, Conrey drew ambitious, complex drawings with a lot of heart.       Most copies of The American Weekly have crumbled with age, but it would be a shame if Conrey's illustrations crumbled with them.  You can tell that after thousands of drawings, Conrey still got the same child like pleasure from creating these overdone, dramatic pictures.  A fortunate artist indeed!

Online Portrait Drawing Course!

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Study portrait drawing with me from anywhere in the world! My new online class is Drawing the Portrait in Charcoal. It begins January 21, enrollment is limited, sign up today! Hosted by the great people at LAAFA! I've done my best to make this class the strongest such class on the market, it includes nine fully illustrated,  jam packed audio/video lectures, twelve video drawing demonstrations showing a wide variety of subjects, techniques and materials, and weekly homework assignments that will build on themselves to teach you a clearer, better way to work from life. I'll work with you personally each week, you'll get a full audio/video critique of your work where I'll talk through with you what's working in your drawing and what can be improved and I'll draw over your image to give you a personalized demonstration for every assignment you turn in. And there's a built in grace period at the end for you to wrap up any incomplete assignments and still get ful

AGAINST SCHOLARSHIP IN THE ARTS

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"The shudder of awe," wrote Goethe, "is humanity's highest faculty."  This helps explain why some people are attracted to the arts.  But other people who aren't as comfortable with shuddering have found more orderly ways to relate to art. For example, art historians try to understand art by researching the lives of artists.  (The new biography of Saul Steinberg , a splendid piece of scholarship, devotes 732 pages to how Steinberg's childhood, his sex life, and his paternal grandfather shaped the pictures we enjoy today.)  Chemists analyze the composition of pigments for whatever insights chemistry can contribute.  Radiologists x-ray paintings, searching for earlier, discarded drafts.  Psychologists rummage through an artist's underwear drawer for psychological explanations for creative decisions. But that's not the worst of it.  Prominent economist David Galenson explains that with the benefit of new "quantitative methods," we can

Coming Soon: Online Portrait Drawing Class!

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Next week we'll officially announce my upcoming online, 9 week portrait drawing class which will begin in late January. Keep an eye out, we'll start taking enrollments at the time of the announcement and I'd be thrilled to have you join in. So if you'd like to see and hear everything I know about portrait drawing including a live recorded demo of this drawing and numerous others, check back here or at the LAAFA website for more info. (you'll also see that I have a 2 1/2 hr charcoal portrait demonstration currently available through LAAFA).

El Dorado

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This is a painting for The Road to El Dorado done in acrylics on Crescent #100 illustration board. Below is my initial sketch, as you can see I got overly excited about the contrasts and needed to back off in the final to make it a proper character moment. The last image is the final frame as it appears in the movie.

NEW BOOK ABOUT ALBERT DORNE

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Just in time for the holidays,  Auad Publishing (which brought you last year's Robert Fawcett monograph ) has released the first monograph dedicated to master illustrator Albert Dorne, the most successful commercial artist of his day. The book is hard cover, 9x12" with a dust jacket and 160 deluxe pages. Like the Fawcett book, it was edited by the talented Manuel Auad, who was kind enough to let me write the text again. Many thanks to Walt Reed, Howard Munce and Leonard Starr who generously provided me with their memories of Dorne.  Here is my favorite anecdote, from Starr: The artist Andy Warhol explained to Albert Dorne, "Art must transcend mere drawing."   "Pardon me, Andy," Dorne interrupted, "but there's nothing all that fucking mere about drawing." Dorne was one tough bird, and as you can tell, completely unapologetic for the "commercial" nature of his work. Thanks also to Magdalen and Robert Livesey for generously sharing th

Happy Thanksgiving!

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This is a table setting I put together for one of the Shrek projects.

HERCULES TRIUMPHS OVER THE DUMPSTER

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Some archaeologists believe that the oldest existing illustr a tion of a fictional work on paper is this drawing of Hercules fighting a lion:   Known as the Heracles Papyrus, it was discovered under the desert sands outside the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus (named for a fish which, according to legend, ate the penis of the god Osiris). The city was once the bustling regional capital of the 19th Upper Egyptian Nome.  For a thousand years, residents dumped their garbage-- including this noble little illustration of Hercules-- in the sands outside the city.  With the fall of the Egyptian empire, the city was conquered by successive foreign invaders (from Alexander the Great in 332 BCE to the Arabs in 641).  Reduced to ruins, Oxyrhyncus was abandoned and gradually reclaimed by the desert. But it turns out that the climate was perfectly suited for preserving the scraps of paper in the rubbish heaps outside Oxyrhyncus.  The site had virtually no rain, a low water table, and

A little help from the blogosphere please...

Hi all, I'm getting ready to record demonstrations for a portrait drawing online class I'll be putting out early next year. Any suggestions on what kind of personal video camera will give me nice, clean recordings? I hear that a simple HD flip can do a good job under good lighting conditions and that's an affordable option but I'm very open to suggestions Thanks!

PIB Comp

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This is a comp for the grand finale shot of the Puss in Boots Short "Puss in Boots and the Three Diablos".

Online Class 2nd Term

The second term of my online class has just opened beginning April 15! We have a limited number of spots, first come first served, sign up today! Full again, I do appreciate your interest in this class. We may be able to take on more students for the April class at a later date so do go to the link and get on the waiting list if you're interested. We'll also run the class again for you in July and October.

My New Online Class!

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Study Concept Art with me from anywhere in the world! My new online class is Concept Art for Entertainment: Designing with Color And Light . Begins January 10, enrollment is limited, sign up today! Hosted by the great people over at Schoolism! Thanks for the overwhelming response everyone, the class sold out in the first day! I welcome you to sign up for the following term, go ahead and click the link, there's a window to leave your email address to be notified.
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Townscape painting for The Legend of Puss in Boots . We spent a lot of time on a lot of different versions trying to find the right look for Puss in Boot's hometown. This one gets close but there were more tweaks as the show went through final production.

Happy Halloween!

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This is a color and lighting painting for a DreamWorks Halloween short called "The Pig Who Cried Werewolf".

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 42

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The remarkable Harry Beckhoff drew this tiny picture of a man scared by a black cat in 1913. What a marvelous design. Many artists would feel constrained by the actual size or shape of a cat.  Or they might struggle over the fact that a cat walks on the ground around our ankles, so you are obligated to draw the entire body if you want to show the face. But Beckhoff understood that the design comes first.  Everything else flows from that.

Shark Tale Color Roughs

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BELIEVING IN A RED PIXEL

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The computer gaming industry was launched using just a few primitive elements. Two or three colored pixels were all that was necessary to construct a story in the minds of viewers: a red pixel might represent a missile trying to knock out that green pixel before it hits blue pixel earth. Later would come photo-realistic graphics, complex story lines and motion sensitive technology.  But the most important step-- turning viewers into believers-- was achieved with just a few basic visual symbols.  Our imaginations did the rest.   It's amazing how a visual image--even a single red pixel--  gives our minds a starting place for belief in scenarios where mere words might fail to persuade.   Even the most far fetched ideas become more plausible once we can visualize them. The newly released movie Argo tells the true story of the rescue of American diplomats hiding in the Canadian embassy in 1979 after  a mob of Islamic militants took over the US embassy.  To smuggle the diplomats out of