Polaroid Android

India Ink on White Cardboard

Potable Pachyderm

Recent watercolor sketch.

No Holds Bard

Poster design for my girlfriend’s production of The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr Abridged.  Had a lot of fun drawing it, and it was a helluva good show too.

Lycanthropic Lycopene

Because who doesn’t love stop-motion animated, anthropomorphic tomatoes?  Evidently, the Heinz corporation…

I threw this together in a couple of days for a contest sometime in 2007. Sort of my chauvinist answer to the California Raisins.  Needless to say, I didn’t win.  Still, had fun making it.

This Cartoon Has No Punchline Pt.2

Make up your own, collect them all!

This Cartoon Has No Punchline…

I’d like to do a whole series of cartoons with no punchlines.  This is the first.

Stick ‘Em Up…

New Painting– “The Heist”

Phil & Larry – Origin of the Species

Truth be told, I am a frustrated comic artist.  While, like many, I have a massive queue of abandoned projects ranging in shape, size, type, and medium, the vast majority are unfinished comics.  They vary in stages of development, from seeds of ideas and outlines to character designs and half-drawn issues.

I have never successfully completed one.  I love the medium, but maybe I lack the required patience to draw for regular and extended periods of time.  Maybe it’s my total lack of intuitive layout skills.  Who knows?

Recently, though, I’ve been reflecting on a dusty duo of mine, two characters whom few have heard of, yet I’ve been steadily doodling for some ungodly reason since at least 1996.  I am speaking of “Phil & Larry”

Phil and Larry, cerca 1996.

First drawn over a decade ago, Phil and Larry began as my own adolescent Ren and Stimpy knockoff (not to imply that the real McCoy was any less adolescent).  A rabbit and a bear, respectively, Phil and Larry followed the hackneyed comedic trope of an unlikely duo, an odd couple.  Phil was a deadpan cynic and Larry was a complete moron prone to wild flights of fancy.  Their species were completely incidental and totally unexplored– anthropomorphic animals were a given in the genre and seemingly required little more explication.  Bunny and Bear.  Smart and Stupid.  Big and Small.  They simply were.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, I revamped the characters in an attempt to both give them more depth and generate better story fodder.  Their stereotypes were limited and their identities incidental.  Moreover, they took way too long to draw.

In an effort to make things more manageable, I streamlined their designs, making them at once cruder and more graphic, with a splash of vintage Bosco-esque stylization. I also decided to limit their world to single-panel gags.  They essentially became de-contextualized mouthpieces, an Abbot and Costello-like duo that told bad jokes in front of a red curtain.  This was fine by me.

In 2005, after I dropped out of UCLA, Phil and Larry transformed once again.  I was a confused kid floating somewhere between high school and college with no assured plan. Perhaps as a response reflecting my own lack of sure footing, Phil and Larry were suddenly endowed with grounded back-stories and codified philosophies.  Phil, though still cynical, was given specificity as a jaded hedonist.  The hot pursuit of his singular obsession with pleasure pushed him towards increasingly violent and often disturbing extremes.  Larry, conversely, was transformed from an idiotic bear into an amnesiac Yeti, the last of his kind with no sense of identity.

No longer “smart” and “stupid”, the two became better defined as polarized foils- an obsessive madman with a clear goal inexorably paired with a lost wanderer trying to find his place in the world.  As a final act of self-indulgence, I wrote myself into the story as well, playing the part of the comic creator, occupying a confused mental space somewhere between the two characters.  I had a clear goal and no clue how to get there.  They team up and kill me on page 3.

As my CalArts graduation approaches, another transition looms ever closer.  I can’t help but wonder how Phil and Larry will transform next…

How To Make A Monster

As I’m wrapping up principal photography on my new stop motion short, “Bygone Behemoth,” I thought it might be interesting to show the process by which the main character was designed and constructed.

“Bygone Behemoth” tells the story of a washed-up B-movie monster called Al, a relic of the past akin to the fantastic creatures brought to life by special effects artists like Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien.  As such, I decided to create Al using the old-fashioned latex/foam build-up method pioneered by Marcel Delgado.

It all began with the sketch– a rough blueprint of how I envisioned the final puppet, both frontal and profile.

More after the jump…

Stuck in the Cretaceous– Back in April…

Kittens in Carbonite will return full-force in April.  In the meantime, I’m locked in the studio with a dinosaur.