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!
A couple of weeks ago I was in some slow traffic on my way to work, when I was startled to see one of my creations giving me the thumbs up on the side of a mini-van that came up alongside of me. It was as if he was saying, “Good job on your driving, Citizen!” I had heard of the Captain Traffic van before, and yet had never seen it for myself. There he was promoting safe driving on a van that was passing me on the right.
Captain Traffic giving his thumbs up approval of my driving while on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles.
Back in 2001, I was working at Walt Disney Feature Animation. One of my friends there, Brett Drogmund, was leaving to form his own company that included a fully legal online traffic school here in California. He and his business partner wanted to have a character that would be the ambassador for the business. Together we created Captain Traffic, and not long afterwards, ComedyTrafficSchool.com was born.
I was fairly new to using Photoshop as an art tool at that time. The Captain was inked by hand, and colored in Photoshop. I was beginning to teach Photoshop to the other artists at Disney by day, and by night I was working on lots of Captain Traffic drawings and other cartoons that you can see on their website only if you are a bad driver and have paid for the course (which is only $13.95 these days!).
Here’s the full drawing of what appears on the side of the ComedyTrafficSchool.com mini van.
If you’d like to see another piece starring Captain Traffic, there’s one on my website that was conceived to be like a comic book cover for Brett’s other website, TrafficSchoolUSA.com where the good Capt. also appears. You can see it by CLICKING HERE!
And if you are on Facebook, Captain Traffic now has his very own fan page which you can see by CLICKING HERE!
So, if you happen to be driving down a freeway in Southern California and you come across Captain Traffic, don’t be startled and swerve into your fellow commuters. But if you do, quickly jot down the phone number from the side of that van. You’re going to need it.
I mentioned yesterday that the upcoming Disney release of Gnomeo & Juliet was ultimately created up in Canada and was NOT the product of Disney Feature Animation down here in Burbank, CA. I was never privy to the big business branches of the studio, nor was I really all that interested in those decisions. I was just the little guy trying to scratch my name in the tree trunk.
I would imagine that part of the reason Gnomeo moved out of house was due in part to the fact that it was being developed right at the time that the studio was laying off half of its workers that was documented so well in the film Dream On Silly Dreamer. That’s about the time I was laid off, too. Not long after, Disney’s corporate management was having its own disagreements with Pixar, and had started to develop a version of Toy Story 3 apart from Pixar in the building where they had been developing Gnomeo. Those were dark days indeed.
In honor of those dark days, here’s a bleak piece I submitted back then. Somehow the thought that the deep feelings a ceramic gnome would have in losing a dear friend (that just so happened to be a ceramic lawn deer) made me laugh. Twisted? Perhaps.
Whether you are on the side of the Montagues or Capulets, you can’t help but shed a tear at the agony of this scene.
Come back again tomorrow to see TWO more Gnomeo inspired gag drawings from my archives!
This past summer I was contacted by Daniel Stelzer, Art Director for Answers Magazine, to possibly work on an illustration assignment for them. I had not seen Answers Magazine before, and learned that it is a magazine that deals with scientific issues and other worldview topics all from a biblical perspective. It is the periodical produced by the Answers in Genesis organization, the folks that are behind the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.
Dan had sought me out having seen some of my previous work created for a series of Bible lessons for kids. He said he wanted me to create five pages of graphic novel-style illustrations all about the details of how a white blood cell works. The graphic novel thing I understood because I’m a cartoonist, but also because I’m a cartoonist, I couldn’t figure out why he wanted me to do serious science art. After a pause on my part, I said,
“You’ve seen the work on my website, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t want me to put funny faces on the cells?”
“No.”
“It’s just straight up micro-biology illustrations?”
“Yes.”
So, the challenge presented in this assignment was intriguing. The white blood cell process had to be turned into a panel-by-panel “story” so that it would be more readily understood by the layman picking up this magazine. I decided to accept this mission, knowing full well that the magazine might disavow any knowledge of me should I screw it up.
They provided rough thumbnail concept sketches of what they wanted, and since I don’t happen to have a microscope of my own, they also sent some great reference material to help me along. We were dealing with real science and nothing of fantasy, so it had to be right. This meant we had MANY discussions back and forth discussing each step in my creative process which included rough drawings, tight pencil drawings, a rough color pass, and then final color. Changes were made along the way to make sure some things were more accurate while others were more understandable.
Stylistically, the Art Director liked my previous work with watercolor, but also liked the sophisticated computer coloring found in many graphic novels today. So, I had to come up with a hybrid of methods to pull off a look that was both slick and organic. The art ended up having an inked line as you would see in comic books, with a coloring job that combined traditional watercolor paint and additional Photoshop work. I thought the combination of methods turned out pretty good….
The splash page of my five-pages of illustrations detailing how white blood cells work. “Answers Magazine” laid it out with the type. (CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE A LARGER VIEW.)
If you’d like to see a little more of my work on this project, including some preliminary stages of the art, you should check out Answers Magazine on Facebook where they posted some extra steps in the process of this article.
Or, if you’d like to order your own copy of the magazine with all five pages of the published art in it, it is available now in the Oct-Dec 2010 issue. Just go to Answers Magazine‘s website and contact them about ordering this special issue!
We all have them in our lives – a person who is there just to suck every last bit of childlike wonder we have inside. They say things like “You wouldn’t eat THAT would you?” just as you are about to take a bite. “Those haven’t been in style since MC Hammer!” as you are walking around in your favorite pants. Or “You can’t drive BACKWARDS on the freeway!” when you clearly are navigating your vehicle quite well on your own.
All I have to say is, don’t let them bring you down!
There’s always a killjoy in every sewer, isn’t there? Sheesh.
This past weekend I spent several nights sleeping in a hotel in the Phoenix, AZ area. While the room appears clean when you first arrive, you always wonder what those cleaning ladies may have missed. With the current bed bug scare in the United States, you hope desperately that the preceding traveler didn’t leave behind little guests of their own that enjoy room service.
Thankfully I didn’t have bed bugs (that I know of), but it still didn’t stop me from sketching this drawing right there in my room of what could have been. Oog.
