Existential Crisis

That moment when you realize….

 

Ew.

 

Ink, gouache, and watercolor in a toned tan sketchbook.

Gesundheit

A dragon with a cold is never going to be a very effective snowman builder. Gesundheit.

 

Fire and Ice

 

This was my first sketch of 2021. It’s literally ink on a page of my sketchbook, with some color blandishments perpetrated in Photoshop. Here’s hoping 2021 gets more positive than this.

Farm Friends

Since there’s nothing else all that important happening today, how about a sketch of two unlikely friends?

Their friendship is very mooving.

Pooh Parade

Okay, we are now into our second full week of 2021. Are you marching forward into the year with confidence, ready to take on the challenges that lie ahead? If so, be prepared to battle heffalumps and woozles!

 

Maskless and free in the Hundred Acre Woods.

 

By the way, I created this piece for a friend who recently gave birth to her first child. Nothing says “welcome to the world” like Pooh. Take that however you’d like.

Magic In the Air

Yes, there’s magic in the air. Literally with this drawing. Mickey, as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, just seems to be wasting magic in the air. Sheesh. You’d think he’d at least make a broom come to life or something!

Here’s hoping the magic translates into 2021. The world needs it badly!

 

Blue sparkles from fingertips? He’d better have a doctor look at that.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year’s?

2020 is finally over. It has been the big, drooling dog that nobody wants around. Here’s hoping we can dry off in 2021.

 

Hope 2021 is the big fluffy towel we really need at this time.

Merry Christmas 2020

Wishing you and yours a very merry Christmas in what has been, to say the least, a very strange year.

My Christmas card this year takes on the coronavirus issue of today, but applied to that first Christmas long ago. The art was inspired by medieval tapestries in case you were wondering.

 

Click on image to enlarge.

 

I’ve been making my own Christmas cards for over 25 years now, but for the first time ever, the art is completely digital this year. While I love having a physical painting when it’s all done, it just seemed for the time I had to work on this, and for wanting to paint without outlines, Photoshop was the way to go. Here’s a close-up of the wise guys…

 

Click on image to enlarge.

 

Merry Christmas to one and all. Hopefully we’ll all breathe more easily in the new year.

White Christmas

Back in June I had another one of those out-of-the-blue, who-would-have-thought, stranger-than-fiction work opportunities come up.

I had already storyboarded a Frank Sinatra music video earlier in the year for the Fantoons studio. They liked what I drew for them, so when they were given the opportunity to animate a music video set to a recording of Irving Berlin’s song White Christmas as sung by the incomparable Bing Crosby, they called on me once again to board for them.

 

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-Bing!

 

David Calcano wrote a script that set the song around the military at the time of the holidays that had some real storytelling in it. It begins in the late ’60s with the Vietnam War, and later comes to our modern era. It had nostalgia, love of family, tragedy, and full circle resolution – a whole lot of the human experience packed into three minutes.

 

Dad playing with his daughter in the late ’60s.
Dad now in the Army with a military haircut writing home as Bing sings through the radio.
Bing shows up as a mailman.

 

I love doing caricatures, but just like in the Sinatra video, I was asked to NOT caricature Bing in my boards. The studio was coming up with their design for Bing, which was going through approvals with whomever had to approve. If I drew him my own way, that could have complicated things. So, a generic character in a hat is what I drew (though I did get away with half-lidded eyes and big ears).

 

Here’s the comes the mail magically flying to the little girl and her mother.
When you see the finished video, you’ll see that an older mother doesn’t appear in it as I had imagined. With a young portrait of mom on the wall in the video, I think time ultimately wasn’t kind to her.

 

So, I had a very busy week boarding the piece. 217 panels later, it was finished and sent off. The drawings above are just a few individual panels of those efforts that the team at Fantoons used as a blueprint for their music video.

And here’s the finished product! Merry Christmas everyone. Hope you get to enjoy a white one!