Just a link over to this recent mini interview with Bill Plympton and David B. Levy, authors of the Plympton book that I collaborated on them with!
And oh wait, here is another good interview with Bill, over here!
Today on Cartoon Brew Amid surprised me by writing up the first outside news on Sasquatch’s Big Hairy Drawing Book and caught my promo site and its linked Flickr stream with their pants down, so-to-speak. Now I know what I’ll be doing this morning: fixing them up in a hurry! Thanks for the mention Amid!
Sasquatch’s Big Hairy Drawing Book: whyissasquatchcrying.com will be the place for the drawing book’s promotional website, I’ll be certain to remind you to go there again soon when it has more neat stuff to look at.
Above are two recent books that I designed, Independently Animated: Bill Plympton and Constructing Green Lantern From Page to Screen, both published by Universe. The Plympton book is just recently out, and available now, whereas the Green Lantern book is coming out a few weeks prior to the movie, so its interiors remain confidential for now.
I’ll find time eventually to update the McD Workshop portfolio with all the latest projects, including the Portlandia animation that recently aired (embedded above) and hopefully a new TV project that I’m contributing animation to that could develop into a series, we’ll see. Also on the slate of upcoming projects is the promotion for and release of my Sasquatch’s Big Hairy Drawing Book, stay tuned for that and get your doodling pencils ready.
YEssS! Along with editor Jason Sacher, art director Michael Morris and the remote conference room full of important people who look at covers at Chronicle Books, I produced a cover for the upcoming Sasquatch’s Big Hairy Drawing Book that everyone can say “OK, sure, why not” about. Above is a snap of the proofs which look A-OK.
I love looking at process posts on artist and designer blogs. Sometime in the last year or two a post on the Chronicle Books blog caught my attention. It was a post about the cover design process for an art book all about movie posters. The amount of covers that were produced for this title floored me. I liked so many of them. Even as a book designer myself (I’ve designed five complete art books amongst other small press projects), I’ve never approached the 28 or more cover designs that are on that post. Usually five to ten designs of varying uniqueness end up being produced as we hone in on the most successful cover.
Now I that I am being published by Chronicle Books and we are still working on the cover for my debut drawing book, Sasquatch’s Big Hairy Drawing Book, I am enjoying the process with the knowledge that their catalog of books always looks so great—and does so for a reason: the intense cover design wringer that their titles go through before being transmitted to print. Check out a bunch of rough sketched designs for my book above. Note that some are variations of each other and towards the bottom the book gets a new title! By the time this book lands on store shelves in fall 2011 I expect that I’ll have a few more designs to share.
Above you see a cropped bit of one of the many dog drawings from Bill Plympton‘s new art book coming out in 2011 from Universe which I art directed and designed. This bad johnson has finally been put to bed and the next I hear about it should be when I get a short stack of designer copies delivered to my front door.
In other news the Green Lantern book design is coming along, but I can’t show you anything. Also I’m doing a fun project for the new IFC show Portlandia, but I can’t show you anything. Dang. Well I do have some new personal drawings and stuff in the works. Stick around here and the Meathaus flickr account and I’ll keep throwing stuff up occasionally while I sort out these other neat but secretive projects.
Doodled up this rough dance party in Flash to show my class some rotoscope ideas. Here’s a preview, class! If this isn’t showing up in your browser, apologies. Flash used to be so great to use on websites, now it is a struggle just to get it to show up. I copied code directly off of Adobe’s own knowledge base article, and while it worked in Safari, it didn’t work in Firefox. When Adobe can’t even embed it’s own product properly, you know there is trouble. I used a suggestion in the comments of the article and changed the “href” to “src” and then it showed in Safari and Firefox. It’s probably just a blank white box in Explorer.
Anyway, Flash still is a usable animation tool in a production pipeline, as long as you export out of it early on enough.
Experimenting with possible inside cover art for my book Why Is Sasquatch Crying? coming out next year from Chronicle Books. These are heads and little character bits from the book. Incidentally there are not a lot of complete character drawings, or at least characters with complete heads, because you are supposed to draw them, not me.
Here’s a sketchbook drawing I doodled up with the last bits of ink in a brush pen, a nib pen, sumi ink and some drug-store-bought Crayola watercolors. I posted it on meathaus.com too as part of the new daily drawing feature I’m including on the site where Meathaus associates send me drawings and I post one per day as a neat additional thing to see on every visit to the site.
In McD Workshop news, I got my designer’s copy of the the TUNES book and took a bunch of shots of the lettering I did for a portfolio post which I will do soon. I’m also in the final stages of designing both the Bill Plympton art book, called Independently Animated: Bill Plympton, and my own Why Is Sasquatch Crying? book which is exciting. It is just in time as well since the fall semester has begun and I’m teaching a class again at UArts here in Philly, this time in the animation department. That’s one day of the week. A new book project is starting up simultaneously, an art book about the concept/production art from the new Green Lantern movie coming out next year. The only thing I can say about some of the cool art I’ve seen so far is that some of it reminded me of the art of Zdzisław Beksiński, which is wild stuff.