Narcissism

Do artists really have to draw self portraits?  I've drawn a lot of these over the years, usually at gut check times and apparently often with a furrowed brow.  My apologies!  I think what's most amazing is how few of these actually resemble me.

Woman and Dog

These are a few character sketches from another short film I am currently boarding and hoping to put into production later this year.  It would be another animated documentary, this time from an interview with a woman running a very small, unsuccessful museum in rural Texas.  The woman was getting older and a bit worn down from a difficult life and I wanted to put that into the anatomy of herself and the dog.  Hopefully I can share more as things go along.

Swimming Lessons!

Teaching swimming lessons: that's how I'm payin' the bills folks!  It is, ofcourse, everyone's dream job.  Here are a few drawings from the water park I used to work at in Michigan. When I was doing these, I was making a giant, crappy painting.  These made me realize I needed to get back to animating.  I love the feeling of human weight sitting on my page.  I think the effect of doing these came through for me most when I was working on the oversized father in The Parkbench: he had the same kind of shape as some of those water park moms.  I've posted that model sheet as well as a pencil test of the Father and Son's Grand Entrance into the park.

The Father's Model Sheet

Father and Son Enter the Park

AirPortraits by Adam Smith

I've always enjoyed the photos of my good friend and roommate, Adam Smith.  You can click here to see a PDF of a book he put together collecting his "AirPortraits" series, a project shot in airports all over the country.  I've also posted a few shots he took while working as the sound technician for a traveling dance talent competition.  He's shot some good ones for sure.

The Birds

Perhaps the most popular characters from The Parkbench are the birds.  These birds have their origin in a comic book I wrote a few years back called "The Story of Three Brothers Who Lose Their Mother at an Early Age and Subsequently Have Difficulties Dealing With Life".  That's pretty much the plot. Here you can see the death of the first brother from the chapter "The First Brother : Whose Traumatic Memories Make Him Victim To a Most Tragic End".

He flies through a clothing line, ends up with a dress over his face, and smacks into a landing jet plane.  Seems like a Stephen Neary film to me. I think I was reading too much Dostoyevsky at the time. These birds appeared again in a little film called "The Rocket".  Here are two of them falling in love from a "Rocket" pencil test.

At this point, the birds were very warm, sympathetic characters.  When they first appeared in The Parkbench, that was still the case... but they were BORING!  I realized they had to be a little less sympathetic, a little less intelligent, because one of them was going to die and it had to be funny.  Well, it turns out the easiest way to make a bird look dumber is to move his eyeballs out to the side (less human, more birdlike).  Oh, and add a big flat head shaped like a hockey puck.

Here is a pencil test of one of these birds standing up after his crash landing.  This was one of the first things I animated after redesigning the film and it really helped set the tone for the whole project.

Emotions

Besides The Parkbench, I am also working on an animated documentary of one man's experience at The Battle of the Bulge.  I would like to share some of the drawings I did for the last scene, in which the American GI recounts being haunted by the face of a child he killed in combat.  The soldier is in his tent, waking up at night with this painful memory.  Here is the pencil test.

In doing this, I was really influenced by two artists: Auguste Rodin and Kathe Kollwitz.  Rodin is, ofcourse, the famous French sculptor.  I've always been in awe of the extreme emotion he has locked up in the faces and bodies of his work.

Auguste Rodin, details from "The Burghers of Calais"

As for Kollwitz, outside of Goya's "Disasters of War", I don't know of an artist who has captured more powerfully the raw human desperation that comes from war.

"Death Siezes a Woman" & "Woman with Dead Child" by Kathe Kollwitz

I've also posted an image from Charles Umlauf. when I first saw his sculptures, I thought I was looking at more Kollwitz.  There is a fantastic sculpture garden and museum for Umlauf in Austin, TX.

"War Mother" 1939 by Charles Umlauf

The following images are all drawings created for this sequence.

The Parkbench and Owen Jones

Hello everyone!  Thanks for checking out my freshly minted blog.  I want to use this first post to explain a little bit about the design of my animated short  The Parkbench.  Much of the design of the film comes from studying Owen Jones' "The Grammar of Ornament", (Dover) a book which was originally published in 1856 with the intent of reducing the clutter in Victorian design.  Jones makes a strong case for  simple, carefully structured designs in which no mark could be removed without fundamentally changing the effect.  Toward the back of the book, Jones demonstrates the existence of these kinds of absolute patterns in nature, which reminded me of Ellsworth Kelly's plant drawings.

Owen Jones : "The Grammar of Ornament" (Dover)

Lily, 1961 by Ellsworth Kelly

I always admired the way these things held the page so solidly, as if everything was in perfect balance and I wondered if I could get that into my animation.  The Jones book got me thinking more about creating characters which would be instantaneously distinguishable from one another in any shot from any angle.

a study from Jones and the final Father character design

Stuart Davis was another big influence on the film; I wanted to match the appeal of his shapes in whatever I did with the characters.

Colonial Cubism, 1954 by Stuart Davis 

The following images are all sketches created for the design of the father and son characters in the film.