Strange, really

Life is a little strange.

I think being in the right place at the right time means you get some surreal experiences.

Like helping the head puppet wrangler from Laika frantically assemble original puppets from Coraline to be in one of our gallery shows (as the show was happening) and getting to see these incredible works of art up close and hold them and glue their eyelids on.

The past 4 days or so have been crazy. I'm super jazzed up from the Concept Art workshop, and excited to do some new work.

AFI Film Festival

I was asked to create a lot of our promotional material for the AFI Dallas Film Festival, which starts today. Limbert Fabian art directed, and simply asked me to make something that "makes the studio look awesome." This illustration is going in the program for the Festival to be seen by real cool people, so it made me real nervous.

I knew that my normal stuff doesn't really scream AWESOME FILM FESTIVAL, so I did a weird Shaun-Tan-esque robot with cowboy boots and cacti and it is probably a friendly robot. I figured Reel FX is a real rag tag crazy contraption. Either way, it's powered by studio love and coffee. Dustin and Yashar helped me think up doodads and gadgets to put on top.



In conjunction with the Festival, Reel FX also hosts the Tex Avery award, so I did another page for the program to advertise the event, and we decided to keep it in the same style as the robot ad.




And then, ALSO in conjunction with the festival is the Animation award, so I did the certificate that the winner will receive, along with whatever supersweet computer system.

Crazy times for me lately. Life is pretty exciting and work is satisfying. I have a lot of projects on my plate right now, and as usual the coolest stuff has to stay secret for a long time. Either way, I'm settling into life in Dallas, and looking forward to things to come. I'll be attending Concept Art's Reverie Workshop this weekend, hope to see some of you there. Take care.

real horrorshow

I was approached to do a piece for a Kubrick Anthology being put out by a European publisher, and immediately wanted to do something for A Clockwork Orange. 

Last year, I'd intended to do a book cover for Clockwork Orange as part of my thesis, but I felt like it would be almost impossible to compete with the movie. Also, I've seen some other neat book covers for Clockwork Orange, (here and here) and it was too overwhelming to try and compete with all that. The movie is so engrained in our culture that no other depiction of Alex really felt right (even though he's like 14 in the book and is played by a 28 year old actor).

When I decided to do a piece about the movie, rather than the book, I wanted to do something other than the few famous scenes everyone knows. I didn't want this thing to be a Hot Topic poster, after all. One of the funniest scenes to me is Alex picking up the two oblivious girls in the record shop, and all the ridiculous sexual imagery and sillyness that ensues. Not my usual fare, but I had fun all the same. Enjoy.