Going to Mold...that does not sound as cool as it should

First off, click on this picture to see the Captain Capitalism sculpt right before it went to mold making this weekend.
I cannot wait to see these guys in person. Still trying to figure out how to make them into banks, paint them, and figure out how much to charge for them. Much thanks to Mike Petryszak for helping bring this childhood dream to life.

Been making headway on the next cartoon, "Culture Clubbing."

Until it is ready here are a few teaser images, first some Mary Blair inspired representatives of various cultural stereotypes:

I re-did the two kids that Captain Capitalism talks to in the cartoon the past few weeks. Now they are roughly based on two brother who work at Powerhouse Animation: Sam and Adam Deats. Sam and Adam are two very talented guys who also happen to love anime, almost as much as the kids in the cartoon...

I'm with the help

Mandy and I went to the Richard Garriot estate for William Shakespeare's birthday last Thursday. Austin Shakespeare was having a "gala" for the occasion and showing a sneak peak of Romeo and Juliet.

According to the internet, which should never be trusted, galas tend to be black tie occasions:

But this is Austin, TX. We should have known better. We did. We talked about it on the way there.

When we arrived, I was asked if I was there to help serve. Ah, gotta love Austin. I'm in a tux; guy in the car next to me, wearing shorts and t-shirt. I felt a little out of place.

Mr. Garriot's place includes a nice little Elizabethan style theater. The play was fantastic, and I highly recommend checking it out in its full glory, May 7-June 7.

Friday night, I saw Mr. Garriot again, at a Fundraiser for Brewster McKracken.

Then on Saturday night, one of our coaches from CTC defended his title at a local show. Kamal (the fella in the middle) is a former olympic wrestler and did well in a really tough fight.

Things have been so incredibly busy, doing all these extra-curricular activities has not gotten cartoons done.

Cool Naked Lunches

Last Friday, Mandy and I went to the Birth of Cool exhibit at the Blanton Museum. If you live in Central Texas, or the exhibit tour comes to your town, I highly recommend it. But that may just be because, as my wife said "It's like an everything Brad loves exhibit." There was no fighting sports, praying mantids or Hamlet performances, but it was close...

The exhibit focuses on the retro-modern movement, especially as it relates to the west coast. The exhibit features furniture protoypes from Eames, Miller and more

It also had lots of great images from West Coast Jazz, and stations to listen to pivotal works. When we went, (it was an event for museum members) they had a combo playing Dave Brubeck. I love Brubeck, especially Time Out. I have a record player at the office and have worn down that album, probably much to the chagrin of my office neighbor, Frank.

The greatest part of the exhibit though was a wall where 3 TVs played 3 cartoons; "Beep Beep", by Chuck Jones, "Gerald McBoing Boing", and "Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom" directed by Ward Kimball. It was so great to be in a museum, watching people watch these cartoons, especially seeing folks laugh out loud still to the Chuck Jones cartoon.

When I was at the museum shop I came across a postcard of William Burroughs, which was kind of synchronicity. Not because I am big Burroughs fan, (though I have a great recording of him reading that is pretty fun), but as I started to say in my last post, I have been working on trying to start a figure drawing class for animators in Austin.

I used to love figure drawing, and have not gotten enough of it in the past 8 years.

So I have been trying to find a place to hold classes for the past 4 months. It has been surprisingly hard. I followed many dead ends, and had some very bizarre encounters. I wont name names, but there was someone who wanted to charge each student $50 per student, per class...just to hold the class in their space.

Details will follow soon, but we have a date. I am very excited.

The first class will be May 30th. I wanted to have the class around lunch time on Saturdays. So I thought we would call it "Naked Lunch." Thus the Burroughs reference. Ironically the models will not be fully "undraped," as Prof. Schiffhauer would say, because folks will be able to get drinks (coffee and beer) from the coffeehouse next door and there are apparently laws about nudity and liquor proximity, even if it is for the purpose of learning how to draw.

On another topic, I recently customized my laptop. I bought a Toshiba Satellite R-15. It is a tablet PC, (you can draw directly on the screen) and has a larger monitor than most tablets (14"). Rich Simms at Powerhouse, let me try one out, and I was tired of being chained to my Cintiq at night. Unfortunately, they dont make them anymore, so I had to get one used and take it to a shop to fix up, but the outside was still very scratched up. I asked the gentleman at the repair shop how I could paint the laptop. He told me I was crazy. So I decided I definately had to paint it. Here is how it looked:

Here is what it looks like now:

And it runs like a champ. Hehe. I know, I could have been working on cartoons. Speaking of which, this week is pretty crazy...hope to share more soon.

Easter Bunny brings Captain Capitalism sculpt

We went to La Grange for an Easter celebration on Saturday. A cousin of mine has some land out there. It was nice to get away from work for a couple days. The trip reminded me a lot of the days my 12 cousins and I spent on our grandfather's farm when we were growing up.

No Easter celebration is complete without a calf-scramble, right? Right?!? Anyone?

And as promised, here are some photos from the most recent sculpt of the Captain Capitalism resin bank. It is still rough, but I am very please with the product. Mike Petryszak and I met ay Toy Joy here in Austin. I thought that would be appropriate. It was great to meet Mike in person, see the latest piece, and talk things through. We drew a little bit of a crowd, and it seemed like people were impressed with the sculpt. I know I was. Maybe I can talk them into putting a few of them into the shop...

Hope Mike does not mind me putting the photo up. It was great to finally meet him in person and his lovely wife also. Thanks Mike!

Good Friday

Good Friday...

I have not posted in a while. It has been an hectic month. I had oral surgery to remove some heavily impacted wisdom teeth that put me out of "evening work" condition for a couple weeks. Also, Powerhouse is working on a very large project with some tight deadlines that has required a lot of overtime. When I have time outside of work I usually hit the gym or a Jiu-Jitsu, Kickboxing, Boxing or other class to release some steam. Since this blog is mainly about projects that I work on outside of the day job, and there has not been a lot of "outside of the day job"...there has not been a lot to say.

It looks like things are winding down though, and there are some exciting things in the works for Captain Capitalism and other projects too...

- Naked Lunch
One of my resolutions this year was to try to start a figure drawing class just for animators, here in Austin. I have been talking with the folks at Artseen Alliance, next to Spider House Coffee and trying to work it all out, and I think it is about to become a reality. Figure drawing in Austin has been difficult to come by. There are a lot of artists so classes fill up fast, and then concentrate on long-poses for rendered drawing and paintings. Animators need gestures and short poses. It looks like the class will start up at the end of May. If you are in the Austin area and interested in animation, coffe, and drawing the human form... shoot me an e-mail. To give credit, I learned about the venue at the last Dr. Sketchy...which if you like figure drawing you should definately check out. I had a lot of fun, but was suprised how incredibly rusty I have become. You can never get enough figure drawing.

-Captain Capitalism sculptures
Tomorrow night I am meeting with Mike Petryszak, live and in person. Mike is the artist currently working on my Captain Capitalism bank/resin/vinyl figurine that I hope to sell through an ad on the end of the next cartoon. He is supposed to bring the lastest sculpt. I will post some pictures.

-Culture Clubbing
I need to bite the bullet and get back to work on this short. I write things that are too long. Maybe it is the unrequited undergraduate English major in me, or that I want to make 7 minute shorts like my heroes. I would like to release this one by the end of May. There has not been a lot of movement on this, this month, so I have a lot of work to do. I need to start writing 1-2 minute pieces.

-Political Cartoonists, (who do also do animation), Super Friends
I have been talking to another animator who does editorial cartoon type animation, and great work. We are discussing finding a few other animators who do politically based work and starting a youtube channel through a larger distributor. I think this would be a blast, and we started talking as a recommendation from all around mensch, Aaron Simpson, guru of Cold-Hard Flash.

-G.O.D. and Hamlet
I continue to dabble with a 7-minute version of Hamlet short and a short that is VERY loosely based on Bruce Lee's Game of Death. These projects let me be a little more arty. Like a stinkin hippie. I will post some developmental work from them some day soon.

Hope everyone has a good Easter.

Go see Coraline

Ok, first things first. If you have not seen Coraline in 3d. Please shut your computer down and go see this film. It is very inspirational, and much better than anything you will glean from this blog.

Ok, are you back? Pretty wicked, huh? I know.

Here are some links to good blogs from the fine folks who designed that film:
http://shannontindle.blogspot.com/
http://shaneprigmore.blogspot.com/
http://dankrall.blogspot.com/

I have kind of been spinning my wheels with the cartoon lately. I don't know why. I have been looking at time spent on the cartoon, and I probably get about an hour and a half of work into it...about 5 days per week, inbetween everything else. That does not sound like a lot, but I am not as far as I thought I would be by now.

Another strange Graeber story: The wife and I went to Bess for Valentine's day. We waited to make reservations, so we could only get a 10:00. We got there early, and they seated us early. While looking at the menus, I heard a laugh I knew I had heard before somewhere. A snorty kind of laugh. I looked over and in the booth next to us was Sandra Bullock, Jesse James, Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson. Ms. Bullock owns the place, so I guess it is not that strange.

Thats about all I have folks. Sad. Maybe I'll post some pics from the cartoon soon.

New York 2009: Final Weekend

On Friday I went to Boston for some meetings. It was a pretty long trip, but succesful. I didn't get back to New York until about 11pm.

The next morning, I got up and went straight to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to meet up with fellow former Vizlab colleague, and current Blue Sky employee, Scotty Sharp. There was a great drawing exhibit with lots of figure drawings and sketches for paintings from the 1400s-1800s that was really interesting. Scotty and I waxed nostaligic about figure drawing and college. I have not seen Scotty in a while, and it was good to see him again.

It was a good day for art on Saturday, and quite humbling. For dinner that night we went to Cafe des Artistes. Mandy had made the reservations, and I was not aware that this was the restaurant that featured several murals by Howard Chandler Christy. I have always wanted to see these paintings, ever since my father brought me an illustration book when I was a teenager that had several of these paintings in it. They are amazing. The food was pretty good too.

This is Mandy, her uncle Glenn, her aunt Nancy and myself tucked away in a corner that had a portait of Christy done by James Montgomery Flagg.

Sunday morning, we drove around the city for and unknowingly bumped straight into the lunar New Year celebrations in Chinatown. There were several lion dance processions going into the various shops.

It seemed like many of the lion dance groups were from praying mantis based kung-fu schools similar to the school that I went to.

There was also a giant dragon, that probably had 50 people underneath it that came through the parade.

We wandered around Chinatown the rest of the day. We had a contest to see who could find the best deal in the markets. I also stumbled across a woman digging through a tub of frogs. She was being very particular, and I think I angered her a little taking this picture.

We had a really good trip. New York feels like the center of the universe and always recharges my batteries and gets me excited for work and projects...that being said, it definately feels good to get back home to Austin. You could almost feel things slow down as the plane landed on the runway in Texas.

Nikita seemed happy that we are home, too...