House Pet

Post Post Neo Con

Oliver helping dad put the Kings Of The Road panel together for the Baby Tattoo Lounge-

Boxes-

Post Neo Con

A few photos from the long forgotten Comic Con-
The Little Cartoons booth.-

Me and Rian "Device" Hughes

A big Qee

Dart, Langridge and Biskup art.

Letos.-

Headshots

A few studies I've done for the sequel to Kings Of The Road-

"The south has always been dirty,

now it's about to get ugly."
Yes, I just quoted Bubba Sparxx.
I'm off to Dragon Con in Atlanta. I'll be there all four days including a presentation on Saturday at 10:00 am. I'm not exactly sure what I'll talk about. I suppose I'll let the audience direct the discussion to some degree. Ive been to Atlanta for a convention in the past and I must say that it was a great experience. The city, food and people are all great. Since I was remiss on my Comic Con coverage I'll try to do a wrap up when I return.

Roland is God.

Garrett Chow gave me the heads up on this one. God, I wish I had filmed some of our classes with him. To this day I've not seen so many adults gutted, crushed and brought to tears as in his classroom. He seems to have mellowed considerably with age. Good lookin' out G.

If It Aint Paint...

This piece will be in one of the group shows at Copro Nason in July. It's one of only two pieces from Kings Of The Road that isn't in the Spring 2007 show at Van Eaton Galleries. Of course if it doesn't sell it will be in the Spring show anyhow.

Also

I forgot to mention that these prototypes may be on the show floor in San Diego. Maybe at Electric Tiki maybe at Sideshow?

Getting The Goods

I've received a bunch of emails asking where to buy books. You can buy any of the current books where ever you buy books- your comic store (via Diamond Previews), Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, Bud Plant, eBay etc. If your book store doesn't have it in stock they can order it. We no longer sell directly. Kings Of The Road begins shipping in the next few weeks and Vernaculis will probably ship around the end of August.

Here are the ISBNs-

Chromaphile- 0-9729388-9-3
Izzy's Very Important Job- 0-9729388-2-6
King's Of The Road- 0-9778949-1-6
Got Your Nose- 0-9729388-1-8
Vernaculis- 0-9778949-9-1

The Countdown...

With just a few short days until the bedlam begins I thought I'd nail down some info.

Kings Of The Road is here. I'll say it again- I'm really happy with this book. People seem to have no qualms about telling me how mush they dislike it. I have no problem with that and for those that are waiting for Vernaculis the news continues to be good. We should have a number of advance copies available. The proofs have looked great, but I've yet to see the actual final book.

The Little Cartoons booth is #722. I think this is exactly the same space as last year and very near where we've been for the last several years. Unfortunately my schedule this year is unrelenting so I've had schedule times for signings. I'm sure that I'll be around more frequently, but there will be guarantedd times that you can catch me at the booth. When I have the final schedule I'll post it and of course the times will pe posted at the booth. I'll also be signing at the Van Eaton booth(s) on Friday and Sturday from 4-5. If you're looking for prints that's the place to go as we won't have any for sale at our booth this year. They're located just around the corner from us. If you're coming in form out of town and have my number just give me a call to track me down. I'll probably be buying comics, art or gorging on ice cream at the Baby Tattoo Lounge across the street.

En Francais

An interview in french. I think.

Me and Mo

I hope to be doing a lot more of this very soon.

A Slow Boat From China

Long live the king. I've received the first copies of Kings Of The Road from the printers in China. The printers always send a few copies of the final book before they pack the cases onto the container and they begin the 3 week journey to LA/Long Beach harbor.
I'm very happy with this book. There were some minor color problems with the cover, but that's about it. The size, the weight and the paper stock are all exactly as I'd wanted. They should be here soon, so look for them in San Diego next month.

End Of The Line

Sorry for the long delay in posting. I've had a pretty demanding month. I've finished up Vernaculis and got it off to the printer and have approved the color proofs, so it looks like there's a good chance that we'll have copies at Comic Con next month. It won't actually be available for sale from the usual sources until the end of August. I think it's pretty good for a sequel. However, I think I've exhausted the material and can't really imagine revisiting the genres, so don't expect another follow up. There is quite a bit of material that didn't make the cut, a few montsers, the unfinished chimp calendar and a variety of other pieces that didn't seem to fit. I'm sure those pieces will see print at some point, but probably not in the same format as Chromaphile and Vernaculis. These are few pieces that did make it in.

Corn Dogs and Roller Skates

A piece from the now finished Old Maid card set. The background is something I threw on at the end. The actual cards all have the same cream color field behind them.

The Gourmand

One more piece from KOTR.

Interview

There's an interview up at the Character Design blog. I can't bring myself to read it.
I hate reading my own interviews. I always cringe at what I've said or didn't say. Feel free to cringe right along with me.

Character Design Interview

Poster Class

I'm teaching a one day -3 hours- class on poster design at EAA this Sunday May 7th.
You can read a description of the class by following the link on the right.
This is the one and only time I'm going to do this. I may still teach classes at the studios on
occasion but this is the only one that'll be open to the public.

Just Like The Old Days

Since having children I've made every effort to keep a somewhat normal work schedule. For the most part I work from about 7:30 to about 6:30 Monday- Friday and take weekends off. However, there are of course times when that's not going to cut it. For instance, when you have a book due, or more accurately past due. That's been the last couple of weeks. So it's been 14-16 hour days and working weekends including Easter and finishing up with an eighteen hour day on Monday. But it's done now and I'm mostly happy with the result. The cover changed quite a bit from the one I posted earlier. After the book was complete I decided that the cover really didn't suit the interior, so back to the begining. I'll post the final next week as well as some photos I took of the process of laying out the book. Here are some of the pages from Kings Of The Road-

Hugo

A head study of Hugo from Kings oF The Road. Not a particularly good one, but one that looks closest to the actual drawing. Though, I think I discovered something today in my scanning software that's going to help preserve more nuances in the originals. So look for some more analog work soon.

Coverage

Here are some roughs I was working on for the cover. I'll frequently work like this. Moving things around, tweaking type and colors until something stands out from the rest. If something isn't working it's pretty evident and I move on, hence the unfinished, clumsy looking state of these.



Here I'm getting into the ballpark.




This is where it ended up.

Kinks Of The Road

Some roughs that are going into Kings. Big City is now pushed back until early 07 and this book is taking its slot. Big City needs a little more time in the oven.

Closing The Loop

The highlight of the entire Got Your Nose animated short process came last week. The preliminary "sketches" of the music score had exceeded my expectations of having such a great composer on board. But, now I'm completely blown away. Sitting in the mixing booth at Capitol Records as the musicians tuned up and familiarized themselves with the material would have really been enough for me. I could have left after that. But, to watch and hear them bring the piece to life in the next few hours was truly remarkable. It's a fantastic piece of music and they far surpassed what this little project probably deserved. I hope that this in some small, or not so small, way is an impetus for other animated shorts and even series to return this approach of arranging music. The difference it makes is huge.

Thanks to Michael Giacchino and Chad Seiter for composing such a masterful and appropriate score. And funny too.

At the end of the session we took a trip up to the top of the building. It was a gorgeous post-rain LA evening. Apparently they used to have parties up on the roof fairly regularly. Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, The Beatles, The Beastie Boys had all hung out up here. The mind reels thinking about the shenanigans gotten up to.



Could the day get any better? Yes. Yes, it could.

When my best friend moved out from Sweden to attend Guitar Center we decided to share an apartment nearby. That aparment right over there.




The Capitol Records building filled the window of our lobby. It was also the first apartment Jill and I shared and where I lived when we started dating. The one room apartment that would regularly be home to 4-6 people. And many, many more on weekends. The apartment that housed the elevator in which Jill found a very large and very bisected snake. The apartment that employed a security guard that wore a bullettproof vest, and needed it. The apartment form which I watched the DEA raid the place next door. There's more, but you get the point. I'm standing on the top of Cap Records 2 blocks from where it all started. Who'd have guessed that I'd be driving up from OC for the pleasure.
Jill and I eventually moved down the street a couple of blocks, just down from the police station also known as "The Wilcox Hotel" made famous by Lee Ving in Fear's "I Don't Care Bout You". Was that really 17 years ago? Damn! I just figured we moved another 9 times since then. And we bought our house 8 years go.

Loop closed? Close enough.

New York

Well I'm not going to be there as I'm tied up with deadlines here, but my new art reps will be at Art Expo New York with my first new prints of the year. Van Eaton Galleries, who are probably pretty familiar to the animation fans out there, are in New York this week debuting these new pieces. They're great people and I couldn't be happier to working with them. A lot of people have been emailing over the past few months inquiring about prints. They're the people to cantact now. We won't be selling prints at all through the website or at conventions. We will still be selling books and other mechandise.

Panty Thief Paul

Have you ever seen the guys caught on video dashing to the clothes line and franticly yanking off underwear and scurrying away. Those guys kill me. Unfortunately they look like your average backwoods louts. I'd much prefer the traditional bandit mask-striped shirt-dollar sign bag get up.

Gettin' around

Some vehicle, prop character designs from Big City. The next batch of Big City stuff I post will be sketches and thumbnail stuff.

Cigarette Girl

A cigarette girl with some BOOM in the front and a little POW in the back.

Under The Wire

A couple of pieces that made the cut for Vernaculis.

Vernaculis

The cover for Vernaculis (Chromaphile 2) will look something like this-

Do You Have Any 8's?

An almost final design for the card game deluxe box set. This was the first straight package design I've done in years. As of now it's 4 interior boxes, 4 exterior boxes, one insert, 1 large interior box, 1 large exterior box, 60+ card designs and 4 card back designs.

Crawling back.

It looks like the worst is over for a little while. It's been a rough couple of months and it's nice to have some room to breath. Just in time for spring fishing too. Awesome! Anyway- here are a couple of last minute pieces from Got Your Nose. These will be the last until after it airs, or doesn't as the case may be. I'm considering a follow up book, which surprises even me. It won't be until after I finish up a few other books, but I've got some ideas for Horace and Boris.