“If evil be said of thee, and if it be true, correct thyself; if it be a lie, laugh at it.”
– Epictetus (55 – 135)
It really is an interrogation – not some twisted version of “pull my finger.”
It is hard to believe, but the last Drawn & Quoted column was posted way back in June of 2010! It is high time to resurrect these combinations of quotes by famous people with drawings that relate to their words of wisdom in some way. I say “some way” because some drawings have been straight forward while others have travelled the path of the sick and twisted. If you would like to see any of the previous Drawn & Quoted columns, just CLICK HERE!
Yeah, yeah, it’s Wednesday. Consider this a bonus issue of Tuesdays with TIM! The Tuesday thing still applies because the video I’m about to show you was filmed yesterday which was (drumroll please)….TUESDAY!
Well, since Brian and I are in our final week of fundraising on Kickstarter, we wanted to make you an offer that is harder to refuse! We really need your financial support to help us make this film. If we don’t reach our total goal, all the money pledged thus far will revert to its respective donors. So, between now and the end of our pledge drive next Tuesday, March 29, if you pledge $500 or more to us, I pledge to do an ORIGINAL drawing of our lead character TIM! The only catch is that we have to make our full Kickstarter goal before I start wielding my pencil for you!
The type of drawing you can expect will be like this one…
You can get a similar original drawing such as this one if you take advantage of our new offer! Click on the image to go to our website!
Each drawing will be unique because each drawing will be drawn by hand – my hand! In addition, with your pledge you will be entitled to any other rewards we are offering on Kickstarter for the level at which you pledge! Does this sweeten the pot for you? If you need further convincing, check out the video below that we just put together for your amusement:
First, let me extend a hearty THANK YOU to those of you who may have given TIM a financial pledge in the past few days on Kickstarter! Over the weekend, we jumped up over $5000 in pledges!
Today I wanted to share some thoughts with you about the art that has been the face of my film from the beginning. Appropriately, it was also the first painting I did in the development of TIM. My producing partner Brian Joseph Ochab and I needed something that could very quickly say what our project was all about while invoking the spirit of the animated projects of Tim Burton.
Chad Frye at his drafting desk working on an original watercolor painting for “TIM”.
Anyone familiar with those Burton produced films can easily see in this piece the influence primarily from The Nightmare Before Christmas. While it may feel as though it is directly out of that movie, I was careful to put my own hand in it. Brian and I did sit and watch Nightmare together, and while sitting there in front of the television with a sketchbook in my lap, the following extremely rough drawing spilled forth:
1. The first rough sketch. Notice the double moons? I was undecided on how large it should be and where it should go.
Drawings such as the one above are quick brain blorts of mine. It was probably whipped out in about a minute or two just to quickly get a visual idea on paper. That image mulled in my head for a few days to the point where it felt like there might be an idea there needing to be developed further. So, I grabbed my sketchbook again and did the following drawing:
2. The second pass at this idea, still just a sketchbook drawing.
It still wasn’t quite right, but that was it! Later I sat down at my drafting table and worked on a large tight pencil drawing on tracing paper choosing a low vantage point looking up at the cemetery gate and moon, add in a couple of jack-o-lanterns, and finesse the whole scene. You can see that originally I intended to include even more jack-o-lanterns than what appeared in the final, but later while working on the painting, they just felt excessive.
3. The final actual size pencil drawing with all the details worked out.
From that final pencil drawing, I created the watercolor painting with a limited creepy color palette. That low vantage point was intentionally designed so that your eye is guided right up there to the title of the film, but also the use and placement of color and lighting was to achieve that same end result. Colored pencils were used to further tie things up and accent other details.
4. The final watercolored painting along with the tagline direct from our script.
When I go to a museum to look at paintings, I love getting my nose up as close as I can without setting off alarms so that I can really see the details of what the artist had done. With that idea in mind, here are a few close-ups of the final painting. Enjoy!
The angel statue is a direct homage to the angel that “catches” Jack Skellington in Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas.”You can really see how the colored pencil was utilized in the piece from this close-up.And a close-up view of a jack-o-lantern showing every gritty paint and pencil stroke.
TIM is still very much in need of every pledge small and large if we are to reach our goal by March 29. If we don’t reach that goal, then all those fine and generous pledges will not be able to be fulfilled. The fate of our film is in YOUR hands! Click on any of the images above to come support TIM!
I know, I know – today is Thursday. It’s not actually Tuesday, the day on which I isolate my comments about my short film TIM here on the blog. There was just too much to share on one day this week, so I thought I’d spread it out onto Thursday as well.
We only have 18 days left in our fundraising efforts over on Kickstarter.com, so we can use all the help we can get to spread the word about the cinematic joy my producing partner Brian Joseph Ochab and I are trying to achieve! In my post on Tuesday, I alluded to an ad that we created for Stop Motion Magazine‘s website. I wanted to post that same ad here and encourage you to download it and share it on any website, Facebook page, MySpace, and wherever else you can on the web to help us spread the word!
Click on the image to get a slightly higher resolution version of the ad.
In addition, Brian and I spent some time last week recording a special video update that was also briefly mentioned on Tuesday. So, it is posted here today for your enjoyment! I know it’s hard to believe, but we are completely untrained actors. Colin Firth better watch his back…
It’s Tuesday, so that must mean it’s time to share some more behind-the-scenes tidbits with you about my short animated film TIM. My producing partner, Brian Joseph Ochab, and I were recently discussing the need to have a logo that would appropriately communicate the vibe we are trying to elicit with TIM. It needs to be fun, whimsical, and maintain a creepy Burtonesque vibe that the film itself will have. In essence, something that can be the public face of our project. So, I broke out my sketchbook and started conceptualizing!
When I begin the visual thought process, often a flurry of very loose doodles tumble out of my pencil. My hand just whirls around the paper blorping out whatever it wants in the search for the right idea. You’ve heard of someone’s hand having a mind of its own? Believe me, sometimes it’s a challenge to get my actual mind to coordinate with the hand. My hand can go off on its own like a teenager who is handed the keys to the car for the first time. In this case, the hand was exploring lots of things that just weren’t working. It spent several hours involved in this pursuit until one sketch fell onto the page that caused my actual mind to say “THAT’S IT!”
This is the rough blue sketch of TIM that became an “eureka” moment.
After working out a more detailed pencil drawing, the next step was to create a nicely inked drawing. I do like inking by hand with brush on paper. I bought a really terrific brush pen a year or so ago and use it almost exclusively over my traditional paint brush/bottle of ink. It’s a Japanese brush pen sold by Pentel here in the States, and the ink in the cartridges is a nice solid and permanent black ink. That sucker really holds a point, too. Anyway, enough about my love for my brush pen. I also use permanent black ink pens like Microns or Prismacolor to supplement what the brush pen can’t do.
The fully rendered Timothy Todd as he appears on our “TIM – The Movie” Facebook page.
So, Tim was hand-inked, then scanned into Photoshop for some coloring. In this case, I did a kind of digital airbrushing to bring little Timothy Todd to life. The final art has all kinds of potential applications. We already made it the face of our “TIM – the movie” Facebook page (come join us by clicking here!), he makes an appearance on a coffee mug in a video update we posted on our Kickstarter page, he’s in an ad on Stop Motion Magazine’s website, and he’ll pop up in other places as well. In fact, we believe that a version of this drawing will even be the special limited edition collector’s pin that we are offering as a reward on Kickstarter!
This image may also become a T-shirt down the line. Well, it IS a T-shirt now, but only a one-of-a-kind at the moment. Just this past Saturday, Plaxico the dog featured TIM on his website. (If you’d like to take a look, CLICK HERE!) We’d like to eventually make shirts down the road, but for now am concentrating on trying to actually get the film made! But, if we do make it a shirt, it would likely look something like this…
The “TIM” logo reworked to be a cool white on black graphic!
So there you have it – the anatomy of logo creation. Come back again this THURSDAY where I’ll have a BONUS “Tuesdays with TIM” post for you. There was just too much to cram into one day!
And if you’d like to be a part of our film, come visit us at TIMtheMovie.com for more information!
Well, today over on the TIM the Movie Facebook page, we have just unveiled a contest to win the original art seen here! This drawing was inspired by something in our script that I was working on this past week with my pal and Director Brian Joseph Ochab. I created the 8.5×11″ drawing over the weekend with black and purple Prismacolor pencils on some nice textured paper, and both Brian and I signed it for whichever one of you may possibly win it!
Below the art are all the rules about how you can win this art! Enjoy!
Nothing excites a young goth lad like a shrunken zombie head I always say.
Welcome to the first ever TIM the Movie spectacular contest!!
The prize? We’ve gone all out to create a very special one-of-a-kind original pencil drawing by TIM’s co-Producer/Art Director Chad Frye signed by both Chad AND Writer/Director Brian Joseph Ochab worth $350!* It’s a drawing of our lead character Timothy Todd dressed as his hero while gleefully holding a shrunken zombie head.
To be entered into a drawing to win the, ahem, drawing, all you need to do is to make a monetary pledge of $10 or more to our film through Kickstarter between now and Thursday night, 11:59pm Pacific time on February 24th! The contest is open to ANYONE who makes a NEW pledge during the contest period, so the odds of winning the drawing are up to how many of you participate!!
And the best part of it is the drawing will be sent to the lucky winner NEXT WEEK – you won’t have to wait until our fund drive is over on March 29th like you do for the other Kickstarter rewards.
Here are the only two things you need to do to enter the contest:
1. Go to http://www.TIMtheMovie.com and make a monetary pledge to our film there on Kickstarter for $10 or more. You will be eligible for whatever rewards package you choose from the list, plus be entered in this special contest.
2. After making your pledge, you must send an e-mail with “TIM CONTEST” in the subject line to: WonderMotionStudios@gmail.com and tell us:
• your name
• your Kickstarter screen name
• and an e-mail address where we can notify you if you are the winner.
Keep in mind that these are just pledges. You are not charged any money right away. When you make a pledge on Kickstarter, you are only charged at the end of the pledge drive IF we have raised our total amount by that time.
The contest ends promptly at 11:59pm Pacific time Thursday evening, February 24th after which time one winner will be randomly chosen from among all the new pledges. The winner will be contacted to see where we need to send the original art!
On February 6, 1911, the 40th President of the United States was born. After a career in Hollywood and another in California politics, Ronald Reagan was waxing poetic as he took the highest office in the land in 1981. I was busy learning my multiplication tables and the musical stylings of the flutophone while in the third grade.
Ronald Reagan was the President during much of my childhood. I looked at the office with awe and wonder, and to even a child, this particular President seemed special. Perhaps it was his warm look, and grandfatherly voice that caught my attention, but he also seemed to capture the attention of the grown-ups. When the President was giving a televised speech, we would stop what we were doing and see what he had to tell us. And what he had to tell us was always spoken with such elegance, even if I didn’t understand everything he was talking about.
Some things I understood right away. I remember him talking about Star Wars and thinking that I liked that movie, too. As I grew older and understood more, I remember his speech asking Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. I was in high school when the space shuttle evaporated before our eyes, and I’ll never forget his touching words that seemed to usher the fallen astronauts to their eternity.
Happy 100th Birthday, President Reagan.
One year my parents let me skip school for the day to see President Reagan give a speech down the street from my father’s office in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He was to speak on the steps of city hall before two giant brass doors that the city had polished up to a shine. Even though I was just a kid, Dad let me go down into the crowd on my own. I scurried through the legs of the adults standing there and found my spot right down front where I took some pictures on my little camera. To this day, that is the only time I have seen a standing President in person, and what an amazing experience for a wide-eyed kid from Jersey.
Years later, when I moved to California, my parents, my sister and I were able to meet President Reagan. At that point it had been made public that he was suffering from the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease, but I saw a news report that said he was still going to his office in Los Angeles every day where he would meet with people. My sister was about to turn 16 having been born the year he first took office. After some correspondence with his staff in which her birthday was mentioned, we were able to visit him in his office in early 1998. The ravages of his infliction were evident that day, but it is a day I will forever hold dear. It was the day I was able to thank him.
I don’t particularly enjoy engaging in political debate. You have your beliefs, I have mine and we deal with them at the polls. Today debate rages amongst the politically minded about his contributions to our country, and yet whenever there is an election, it seems as though candidates from all sides wish to have the association of Ronald Reagan placed upon them. That in and of itself speaks volumes of his legacy, a legacy that began 100 years ago today.
