eeny-meeny-miney...

moe.

small painting

Worked without relying on line so much last night. Concentrating on shapes and watercolor.

P.S., Inc. Moving Day-- time lapsed!

I don't think that we really got a ton done. But. Oh well.
Enjoy.

Illustration Friday: "Missing"

"Dead Eye" yeah, that's what they called him. In his day.

new post?

Haven't been able to post anything in a while. That's obvious, you may say. Well, yes. It is obvious. But judge my unfortunate inactions kindly, as I have reasons.

One big reason being that Portland Studios have recently upgraded office space. You may imagine that I have acquired certain amounts of junk from the previous space. This is very true. And it has taken time to move.

However, the new space is even more luxurious.

The new view from my computer.

The new work on the new desk has also been, unfortunately, un-postable at this point. Lots of client work, as well as internal P.S., Inc. projects that have yet to be revealed.

Illustration Friday: "Poem"

"Sing! O muse, the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Zeus fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another."

The Iliad
Homer, 800 B.C.

old!

Behold! Uncovered in a recent dive: Old drawings and paintings dredged from the fiesty bowels of the Portland Studios Network.

All of these were completed approx. 3 - 5 years ago I think. During college years, at least.

Who is Adolphus M. Grimble?

Good question! Is Adolphus M. Grimble the next greatest literary character to appear in print? Will he go down in our collective memory as the oscillatingly sympathetic and delightfully hateable Proprietor of the Manufactory?

I don't know for sure but I am prepared to wait and find out.

He is, in fact, a person and character of my own creation. A strange mix of emotions, desires, and personal catastrophes. He is melancholic and explosive. He loves filth and pink muffins.

He has attained a position of importance in The Brothers Grimble: Jack & Inar, a story of my own writing and illustrating, set for print publication in the fall of 2007.

Adolphus has created a Facebook account and has set to demoralise those around him with insensitive personal remarks, unsolicited advice, and his overall ostentatious personality.

Request Adolphus M. Grimble to be your friend on Facebook and join the verbal abuse!

Below are some samples of his personality, congealed in actual comment form in response to writings on his Facebook wall.

Illustration Friday: "Discovery"

digital friend alliance

Look who has in fact joined the digital friend alliance, it's Adolphus M. Grimble, proprietor of the Manufactory, from the forthcoming Portland Studios book, written and illustrated by me, Jack & Inar.

You may click above to try and be friends with him on Facebook.

Tally-ho!

Onward and forward! Progress!
Abandon hopelessly narcissistic, Napoleonicly complex impluses!

Aspire to greatness! Seek the highest common denominator! Behold!

Illustration Friday: "Geeky"

Geeky? An overweight man dressed in flowing ribbons carrying a platter of fruit? Is that geeky? I don't really know.

But I do know that this picture of me from a year or so ago thinking I'm Harry Potter is geeky. I can admit that. And I'm ok with that.

The Tapestry

The Tapestry, book one: The Hound of Rowan

Here's the cover of a book coming in September from Random House. I had the privledge of designing and creating the cover. Their designer created and placed the text.

Basically they asked for something that felt like a "tapestry" and I took imagery from the interior illustrations (the author illustrated the book) and created the cover.

I hear tell that this title was the hot item at this year's BookExpo in Washington, D.C. Something about trilogies being dead and this collection reviving them. Something like that.

Maybe they just liked the picture.

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.