Highlights for Kids

These are for Highlights, a children's magazine. I've done several pieces for them and have enjoyed the experience. You may imagine where the text went on both of the pieces.

Highlights, June 2007
Accompanying a poem about the zoo and its multifaceted inhabitants.

Highlights, May 2007
Accompanying a poem about birthdays and waking up on your birthday. Which was always very fun.

* * *

I'm thinking it would be alright to post these since they've already had their print run. I'm sure I'll find out if it's not.

time-lapsed

Hopefully you'll be able to see the drawing progress. Blasted YouTube watermark.

Also, I hope at some point, to have an external camera I can stick up and aim at my desk.

No more of this angling the board toward my computer non-sense.

A wall gone AWOL

We are missing a wall in our house. And we could not be more pleased.

CODY WEBSTER

Announcing a finished production I am pleased to have been involved with.

His name is Cody Webster and he is awesome.

Click below to visit the site and watch the 60 second animation of Cody Webster in action.

worthwhile.com/cody

___________________________________________

And you'll likely notice some differences when you watch the story reel:

Semi-animated, quasi-animatic-like storyboards dropped in iMovie with a few effects.
And some appropriate music, again, apologies to Michael Giachinno.

Click above to view the rough storyboard animatic.

Also, click here for a post on the Portland Studios blog with some actual frames from the short.

piano.

Illustration Friday: "Rejection"

I worked for about 5 years (from sometime in highschool, on into college) for a small publishing company doing illustrations for textbooks. Several of the pieces I did during my stint as an inexperienced in-house illustrator were rejected.

Some were rejected because they said I was making fun of X, Y, or Z. Other's because the ones requesting the illustration didn't understand what they were actually asking for, so when the idea was illustrated, they were aghast. And some were rejected because I put hair on the dog.


I remember I had to do this one over and removed the wig from the little Juliet dog. I'm can't remember what the final print version looked like.

All I remember is I liked the curls on the girl and that's the version I kept for myself.

Illustration Friday: "Suit"

An older one, done mostly all in photoshop.

Click below for the walkthrough I did of this piece on my side blog, The Photoshop Experiment:

The Factory:

Not exactly the greatest work environment but you make the best of it.

myrtle

We (Erin and I) with friends at North Myrtle beach this past weekend. Shrimp and sunburns!

North Myrtle, the day it wasn't raining.

This is a very telling photograph; Justin is as he appears-- a strange mix of Lawrence of Arabia and the T1000 from Terminator 2.

Erin is trying to climb on my back in the pool. It is not working. And it is funny.

Crafting the finest sandcastle/monster the world has known.

Behold.

We also went down to the beach some time past midnight during a storm.

Rain lashed our faces and wind whipped the ocean. There was no horizon like earlier, somehow the sky and the ocean had merged into a singluar wall. Black waves rolled in and hammered the beach.

Out of the rain and darkness a pure white volleyball came tumbling past my foot.

I brought it home.

drawings

* * *

Ha ha! Silly Fett. You have a helmet on, dummy. Of course you are going to spill.

filth means production and production means filth.

"Filthy!"

Nothing is worth doing unless it makes a mess, and nothing makes a mess like something worth doing.

Illustration Friday: "Signs"

Sign of the times? Maybe. Maybe not though.

Here is the animated music video Chris and I lovingly crafted. All in all it took around 3 months from intial concept to completion. Enjoy.

teaser

I love to draw. I love to write. In the end, what I love are stories.

I don't remember when it was exactly but at some point I came to the realization that there was the possibility to write and illustrate.

It was somewhere around the time I picked up Where the Wild Things Are and I saw the four little words, "Story and Pictures by..."

Those four little words changed the course of where I wanted go with what I was doing. They pulled me out of the semi-ambiguity of "I want to be an artist" and crystalized it: I wanted "story and pictures by..."

To make up things and draw pictures of it? I can not fathom something more fantastic.

* * *

The two most prominent stories I've talked about on this blog are The Blue Goblet and Jack & Inar.

Many times I have been asked this one particular question. I've been asked on this blog, emailed, and otherwise, "When are these books and stories going to be available?"

I will tell you, fair reader, your wait may very well be over soon.

Look in the coming months for fantastic things.

The Ruin of the Beast // MATRIX Edit

Here's the music video cut to a track from the third Matrix film. The track is called "Neodammerung" and it screams important.

baby?

Yes, we have a baby. He is new and his name is Mortgage. He is very fat and needs lots of money. He is a four-bedroom, 2 bathroom, two car garage kind of baby. There is also a treehouse.

He is nice, but he is a very fat Mortgage.

All of our evenings are wrapped up with this thing and as a result there's been little personal work on my end.

But,

here is a screen shot of a commercial I am working on here at work:

The spy Guy running, carrying the Girl.

84, 11 [update]

updated numbers for today:

---------------------

The music video has garnered a distinction-- one of the most viewed videos in a day on YouTube. 84, out of, I don't know, a lot of videos on YouTube. In "Music" at least.

And one of the "Most Linked."

I think this is a distinction.

I'm glad.

FINAL MUSIC VIDEO

Here is the fruit of many hours of labor.

A work spanning 3 weeks of animation and several more weeks of development and the making of the artwork used.

Behold, YouTube, here it is.

Click below for the full four minute, twenty-some seconds music video:

dinosaur

i used a fax machine for the first time today.

i imagine my experience of out-dated discovery could undoubtedly be likened to the elation the recipient of a telegram must have surely felt.

after the invention of the telephone.

Illustration Friday: "Fortune"

This is Ennio Montebello. He is old and though he may not look it, he is worth a fortune.

the best policy...

more music video:

I'm 98% done.
Video to be unveiled soonly.

iChat

iChat is just another instant messaging tool.

On any given day my avatar will be set as The Terminator, raccoon Mario from Mario 3, an etching of a cat, or Totoro. It just depends. Today I set it to a picture of me. For fun. See below.

note: I blurred out my less cool attempts at cool little pictures.

You can also set your iChat "status." This is just a little line underneath your name that lets everyone else know how cool you are because you are listening to --fill in the blank--

or, you can just write something.

Today mine was,


If you know this quote you get a star.

---

Below is a real, actual iChat with Brannon in three installments. He had set his avatar to an "N" today. I am still unsure of as to exactly the reason. But that is fine.

more work on the music video [edit]

update ^


Work is drawing to a close on the music video for Steven Delopoulos.
Gunning to finish the Beast this afternoon/evening.

4:10 running time; I'm at 4:03.

Previous posts:
A post with many links/ info.
And more
More music video work
Semi-animation test

flashes of brilliance

I get them sometimes. To my discredit I ignore them until it's one second to late.

Sometimes when I am doing something I think to myself, "Stop. Stop it right now or this --fill in the blank-- is going to happen."

I, most always, stop one second too late.

Two small examples:

I was cleaning the hamster cage and smaking the bottom of the glass to get all the pine chips out. I thought, nearly out loud, "I need to stop-- my hand is going to go right through this..."

One second later my hand went through the bottom of the cage, I picked the pieces of glass out of my bloody palm, and continued towards my next flash of brilliance.

I taped up what was left of the bottom of the cage, put in a plastic trash bag, and started to fill it again with fresh pine.

I filled the cage and thought to myself, "I ought to carefully set this sixteen pound bag of pine chips back down or it'll dump pine all over the hallway.

I dropped the bag

and,

One second later

I was sweeping up sixteen pounds of spilled pine chips.

---

If only I was living TWO seconds in the future.

This would make conversations difficult, I know. I imagine it'd be like playing tennis with H. G. Wells.

But I could go on TV and wow audiences with my powerful abilities, be a couple-seconds-in-the-future-psychic, or maybe best of all, my flashes of brilliance would actually help me.

Or I could just listen in the first place.

magic tricks and baby ducklings in a sparkling land of birthday parties

But I saved the birthday cake. And the ducklings are very grateful and the train swinging poachers are behind bars.

Ducklings.

Ducklings....

Or were they koala bears.

...

I have a magic trick. I can do it at parties, I can do it at weddings, I can do it anywhere.

I can even do the trick under the house in the crawl space, which is where I was this time.

My total magic trick count to date is six.

Six times I've performed this incredible trick.

Six times I've dislocated my shoulder.

Magic.