the brigette brigade

lock, shock + barrel

2012-01-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

This is my Nightmare Before Christmas themed piece for a tribute show at Arludik Gallery month. The gallery is in Paris, France. That's right, I'm all international and stuff! (And no I'm not going...I WISH I could just jet off to Paris for a gallery opening.) Here are your favorite trick-or-treaters, Lock, Shock and Barrel, effing around in the moonlight!

When it comes to tribute shows of any kind, I like to do pieces with more peripheral characters. I have a special love for Nightmare, as I saw it when I was about eight and thought it was perhaps the BEST THING EVER. I had friends whose mother's forbade them to see it, because it was 'scary'. Whaaaat? What a bunch of weenies. This movie was also the subject of argument between me and my eight-year-old friends, since they insisted it was claymation, and when I tried to explain stop motion to them they plainly disregarded me and my amateur animation knowledge.

My other favorite movies when I was eight: The Dark Crystal, The Princess Bride, Alice in Wonderland, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. All the ones that scared the other children.

Oh yes, and one more thing: I've erased my old portfolio blog and replaced it with a new, shiny tumblr portfolio blog. To see it, you can either click the 'portfolio' button or just CLICK HERE!

And one last thing: I've started a twitter. Admittedly, I'm not a very good twitter-er. I'm kind of lame in that I don't totally 'get' twitter (if indeed there is anything to get). Maybe I will get better if you start following me. I'm gonna try harder! HERE I AM!

perfect princess day

2011-12-14T00:45:00.000-08:00

The e-book (that's electronic book) that I did for JibJab Jr. is now available! It's specifically designed for the iPad (which I guess technically makes it an ibook, too?), and like JibJab's most well known internet goodies, it has a special customization aspect to it: you can insert your little darling's FACE right into the picture!

Or your own face, I suppose.

This is really only a tiny selection of the final illustrations...there are 22 pages of girly goodness in all.

Here are a few pages from Perfect Princess Day:

This book has lots and LOTS of animation in it! All kinds of stuff moves! I didn't animate it though. Some talented cats over at JibJab did.

Because it was meant to be animated, and I knew that someone was going to rummaging through my photoshop files (which usually never ever happens in illustration), it was super important to keep all the layers organized and labeled and separated. Which was extremely time-consuming, but also absolutely necessary.

Another thing unique to this project was the whole insert-your-face-here idea. It took me a while to adjust my brain to the concept that there would be, and there was meant to be, a photographic face in the midst of my illustration. I know it doesn't seem like a big deal but I was trippin', regardless. That grey void is where your face is supposed to be.

Considering the animation aspect was a new thing, too! Although my background is in animation I honestly hadn't thought much about it in...well, a long time. Setting things up and allowing room for limbs and wings and faces to move around was a (kind of) new experience.

I had the chance to imagine my own versions of the classic princesses: Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty. That was fun! Because the photo head would inevitably be a child's, I wanted to keep the body proportions child like so it wouldn't be like, a baby head on a grown up lady's body. Ick. The rest of the princesses are ageless but very young versions of themselves as well. Also, I took every opportunity possible to make Sleeping Beauty asleep. Lazy girl.

Oh yeah, and I got to draw fairies, too!

What does it look like animated, you say? Here are some clips from JibJab Jr.'s Vimeo:

Perfect Princess Day - Page 18 from JibJab Jr. on Vimeo.

There are more clips on their channel, too!

You can get the JibJab Jr. app and this book from the iPad Book Store! Oh yeah, and you have to have an iPad to read it. (I don't have one either.)

prep and landing

2011-11-21T01:52:00.000-08:00

Well, this is a couple years late but better late than never, right? Right. It's starting to get a little Christmas-y, so this seems an appropriate time to post this schnazz!

A few years ago I was working at Disney as an intern or apprentice or disciple or fellow or whatever thing they call it now. I'm pretty sure I spent most of my time there working on Prep and Landing, and I have a big fat pile of elf drawings to back up that assumption. I dug them up, dusted them off, and here they are!

One of the first cracks I took at designing for the project was this line-up of elves. I was really shooting to be a character designer back then, and when I look at these I remember why: that s#!% is FUN!

Unfortunately for me, I only have the print outs of these guys and not the actual files. Way to not plan ahead, me. I had to scan them and past them back together in p-shop, which is why their background is all funky. Ah well.

I have it on good authority that this line up is also in THIS book. I haven't yet seen it with my own eyes!

I took a crack at designing some of the main characters too. I think these little doodles of Magee are my favorite out of all of this work. Her design in the final was pretty close to this, except less angry, and they didn't use my idea to have her coffee cup say "SHUT UP", but it still makes me laugh anyway.

Typical of me, I got tea on one of my Magees. Oerps.

When this project started the things we were looking at for inspiration were old school stop-motion Christmas specials, you know the ones, Rudolph and such! Paul Coker Jr.! Which made me really excited because I LOVE that stuff! So my ideas leaned towards simplicity and cuteness, even when the project began to sway in a direction that was, to my mind, fairly bland.

The two main dudes were going to be very different. You know: a tall goof and a short serious.

The directors liked my little brown-haired elf girl from the line-up, and they thought she might make a good secretary for Santa. So did a few drawings of her looking secretarial:

I still think she's cute.

I don't honestly completely remember what the deal was with these guys. They are supposed to be mechanics or something. Mechanic elves.

This was my friend Erik's character styling suggestion:

Which I very much appreciated.

Also, I had to draw reindeer. As someone who has attempted animal drawing and found it to be excessively dull, this was a hard thing for me to tackle.

When I found these in my drawing pile, I wasn't even sure that these drawings were MINE. I had to look for telltale clues, like sloppy use of marker as underdrawing, to prove to myself that I ever drew this. I've gone in such a different direction since then that these feel totally alien.

The antlers were kinda fun.

Reindeers are like buff cows with big horns and skinny legs. You guys, I drew so many reindeers. This is really only the tip of the reindeer iceberg. But that iceberg is kinda boring. I got tired of scanning them.

Long story short: I bailed out of Disney loooooooooong before Prep and Landing was finished (bout a year and half or so?). I watched it, and I can still kinda see some how some of my design work had an effect on the final product, but I didn't get a credit or anything for it. Near the end my heart was so totally NOT in being there that I was just happy to not ever have to draw another elf or reindeer ever again for the rest of my life. And just not to have anyone tell me what, or how to draw at all.

I managed to have some fun though.

The only thing I miss about working in a studio environment is having my buddies around me all day long. It's pretty awesome when all your friends are super talented, and they like to come into your cube and interrupt your work flow by drawing you barfing into your own purse:

(I had very short hair back in the day!)

...or you as a child sitting on a giant dog and holding an avocado. I don't get any caricature drawings anymore. That makes me kinda sad. I have a whole chunk of my life that is undocumented by other people's drawings of me! I found LOTS of weirdy-weird drawings of me in that old Disney-drawing pile. Those are probably the best things I saved.

puss in boots

2011-10-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

I remembered that the Puss in Boots book I worked on last summer is out now, so I can show you some pages!

Some projects you look back on fondly, and others not so much. This is a not-so-much for me. The deadlines were super tight and crazy, and my collaborators were, ahem, difficult. Luckily for me, the feeling of being sleepless, exhausted, and SUPER stressed is a familiar one! At CalArts I went through it once a year, getting my student films done. We call it crunch time. It's always totally worth it, but it sucks like crazy when you're in the midst of it.

All that white space is where the text is. I did have fun with the style and compositions as much as I could! Some of my favorite children's books have really excellent use of white space, so I tried it out for myself.

Oh my gosh you guys, I argued to much for the left hand side of this spread! It's not good to get super married to your ideas, but I loved how that page looked in the sketch and it's still probably my favorite of the whole book. On the right you have Humpty Dumpty having a spazz attack.

Here's a weird thing: I have no idea what happens in this movie. As a the illustrator, they don't tell you the story as it plays out in the film, you just have to glean what you can from the text and the reference images. I guess this happens, at some point, for some reason!

I also exercised the use of unnatural and eccentric color! huzzah

All in all I managed how to have fun with it, and I like how it turned out. The book is on Amazon, where you will notice that the cover is a screencap from the movie. I don't know why they do that (they did it with all the books for this film), when the insides of the book look nothing like it. What I say to that is: whateverrrrr!

Also, I found the following amusing:

I was surprised at the 'cats' part! cats? I didn't realize that was a "thing" of mine.

Don't act like you don't google yourself, too.

fairies

2011-10-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

I am technically a grown up lady but some things I loved when I was just a sprout will just never become passe or uninteresting to me. Like FAIRIES!

These designs are for a project I can't show you yet. This is part of the bummer of working all the time: I'm always making stuff, but it's always for somebody else, so I can only show it off when they say it's okay. Hm hmmn. The point is, I get to make stuff all the time, and you'll see it eventually!

I could probably just keep drawing these forever. They are marker on animation paper. Markers are fun!

Got a lot of stuff coming up around the bend, guys. BIG stuff. Book stuff. Stay tuned.

the kitty: mostly photos, a painting and some drawings

2011-09-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

Did you know I recently acquired a cute baby cat? I did. Her name is Pyewacket, but we pretty much only ever call her 'kitty'. And even then it's usually 'kitty stop that!! no biting! KITTY!'

Look at those claws! Fierce! Ferocious!

Here she is in action, trying to eat the buttons off my shirt.

Button consumption causes sleepiness.

So this weekend, when I was asked last minute to do a painting demonstration at Nucleus during the It's a Small World show opening, the little squirt became my muse. What's a painting demonstration, you ask? It's when you paint with a bunch of people watching you. It was actually pretty stressful. I was sweating like crazy, but you can't tell, thank goooooodness!

There were two other artists doing demos: to my left was Israel Sanchez, who whipped up a flawless gouache sailboat, and to my right is Patrick Awa, who made this totally lovely piece appear out of nowhere. We had about 45 minutes, I think.

Here's what I ended up with:

Except kitty never really brings me pretty flowers. In fact I think she hates plants (she destroyed the potted plant in our living room by shredding it, the booger). When I finished it was raffled away to a lucky winner. I hope they like cats!

I didn't have a sketch or anything for this, I just did it on the fly! It was very small, only 5"x5", and you can tell from my giant paint tubes that I used acrylic. I did, however, have a little practice drawing the kitty:

She is hard to capture. Like most cats, she has a very serious, and often psychotic expression, yet she is also stupidly cute.

A got a couple good Lila drawings in there, too!

In case you were wondering if my household was turned upside down by the arrival of kitty, let the following photos assure you that she is fitting in quite nicely with Lila the dog.

She's much bigger in this second photo...Lila likes to look out the window into the courtyard and then bark like a crazed banshee when anyone gets close.

Yay for pets! Furry little muses.

there is just one moon, and one golden sun

2011-09-12T23:34:00.000-07:00

....and a smile means friendship to everyone!

This is my piece for the Gallery Nucleus It's a Small World show that opens this Saturday, September 17. I made a diptych, which is fancy speak for "two paintings that are supposed to go together". They're both about 10"x20" and acrylic on board.

I wanted it to capture the happy, peaceful, slightly psychedelic feeling that you get from the ride. I have been on that ride (at Disneyland, and once at Tokyo Disneyland!) a lot of times. Once, we got stuck inside in the same spot for about 15 minutes, which could easily be obnoxious, but there's so much amazing design to look at that it was actually nice. Slightly hypnotic, but nice.

Messing with the colors was a lot of fun, and I actually indulged and bought new, non-bargain price paint for this project! Well, I say "indulged" but most of my paint was pretty much dried up crust in a bottle and not usable. Plus I've got more gallery shows coming up and I like to be prepared!...or try to be.

Classes at CalArts started today! I'm teaching a class about making awesome portfolios (a class I wish had existed when I was there). I'm slightly nervous, more because it's hard to get up in front of people and talk than anything else. My first class is Friday, so I still have to time to prepare! I'm going to practice my lecture on my dog. We'll see how that goes.

Work work work!!

puss in boots

2011-08-30T23:44:00.000-07:00

Hello out there in blogger-land! In a nutshell: I've been working a lot, and not blogging very much, and having adventures, and taking pictures, and making plans, and writing 100 e-mails, and maybe spreading myself a little too thin. But what can you do? Sometimes life is like a roller coaster, and you just gotta hang on!

I wanted to update with SOMETHING, for heaven's sake, since it's been a whole month already. But I have very little lying around that I can show to you all, because so much of it has to stay secret for what feels like forever. What I found when I rummaged through my files was this sample piece I did for a Puss in Boots book. I ended up getting the gig, and spent aaaaaaalll of last month crunching like crazy to get it done just barely by the deadline.

It will be out in October. So you can sink your eyes into it then!

In other news: Guess who is teaching a class at CalArts this coming school year?

More on that later! Time for this moi to catch some snoozes.

CHEER!

2011-08-01T23:21:00.000-07:00

I told you I had a lot of stuff to share, and I wasn't kidding!

About a year ago I was asked if I'd be interested in illustrating a series of books about a teenage girl. That sounds kinda cool, right? BUT, her primary interest in life, besides boys, and clothes, was cheerleading. I know most of you don't know me personally, but perhaps you can tell by the overall impression of moi that you get from this blog, that I could give a care about cheerleading, or school spirit, or anything remotely involved with liking high school at all. I didn't enjoy high school one bit, myself, and I was about as far from a cheerleader as you could get.

It sounded like such an un-ME project that I almost said no. But then I said yes.

And now those books exist, in the world, and my name is on them!

The first two books (in a series of five) are out now, and although they're chapter books they are riddled with illustrations. I plucked a few of my favorites out to share with yous!

The illustrations are meant to be doodles and sketches by the narrator/star of the book series, a teenage girl named Maddy. She wants to be a cheerleader SO BAD which I SO CAN'T relate to, but she is also an artist, and I CAN relate to doing silly drawings of things!

Like wishing your nerdy best friend would dress cuter...

...or your best friend making faces at you...

...and getting dagger eyeballs from mean girls!

It's a trip to see my own handwriting in a book.

Ultimately, I'm really happy that I decided to jump into this book series. The sketches are fun I make a point of forcing them to be interesting by inking them with a brush pen. That way I can't noodle them forever (like in photoshop) and you get little spontaneous surprises sometimes.

Plus they are supposed to be kind of wiggly and sketchy. It's hard for me to avoid making them all clean and nice sometimes, tho...

So that's what I've been up to. I wish I knew more tween-age girls, cuz I love to know what the intended audience thinks of the books.

Now, back to work!

simone and dottie and speck

2011-07-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

Hey out there! I'm super crazy bizzy with making books, going to weddings, painting paintings and stuff, but I had to stop and breath and update!! A whole month went by. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

I'm in the Pee Wee Herman show at Gallery 1988 this month, and these are my pieces. I seem to gravitate towards to peripheral characters when it comes to these themed shows. Since Pee Wee's Big Adventure is one of my most favorite movies EVERRR, and because I don't think these ladies get enough credit for making that movie as great as it is (Dottie is adorable, and Simone is super soulful!) I dedicated them to paint.

PS, I've been to Cabazon, where those dinosaurs are, and it's actually much weirder than it is in the film. Plus there's a stupid BBQ restaurant or Burger King or something right in front of them.

Dottie! I like you Dottie, LIKE you, LIKE!

Both of these gals are available on Gallery 1988's website now. They are all framed and pretty. Take them home and love them forever.

Okay guys, there are lots of updates in the near future. I actually have a lot of things to share, but not the time to post about them yet. Soon!

bring your record player

2011-05-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

Another painting for the Norman Rockwell show in July! It is the horizontal sister to the other painting of teenagers. I took these pictures really quickly and sloppily immediately after I finished it, and then I packed it up and sent it on its way.

This is my favorite part.

A portable record player is a good thing to have. I've got one. It's not pink though, unfortunately.

A big gross mess! I used that brown paper (actually cut up Trader Joe's bags) to wrap up the two paintings. Recycle and stuff!

I kind of went with a different process for this painting than I did for the other. I didn't really make an initial sketch, instead I did some little studies and then drew the sketch directly onto the primed board. Then I scanned it (in pieces...I hate doing that) and did a digital color key. I always like the way the sloppy color pass looks better than the finished painting. It has more something. I'm not sure what.

I'm not quite as pleased with this one as I was with the other one, but c'est la vie. I was also in a tremendous hurry to get this one done, and I'm sure that had something to do with it. Working under pressure is tricky. Sometimes it forces you to be more awesome in a smaller amount of time, and at the end you are so happy and you feel like you WON! But other times you can't escape that gross feeling that you really just don't have enough time and what you're trying to do isn't going to happen, and you go into lazy auto-pilot mode.

In any case, it's time for me to drink an iced coffee, so til next time!

this painting has no name

2011-05-19T18:45:00.000-07:00

The finished painting! I realized as I was writing this post that I haven't yet named it. I've been trying to stay looser in my paintings, and let go of that holding-your-breath-trying-to-make-it-just-so feeling. It's bunches more fun if you are not freaked out every time you pick your brush up.

Sorry about the quality of these images. I don't have a real camera (these are iphone pics) and the painting is too big for my scanner. Yes I know I could scan it in pieces and all that jazz, but who has time for that?! (I do not...as I type this I ought to be working on something else, but I get excited when I finish something!)

I know you guys like seeing the painting surrounded by the chaos of my table top...

That thing in the upper left corner is my color work book. I had to paint what felt like a billion swatches of different color combinations, plus shades and tints for each combo, for a painting class I took at city college. The class itself was pretty useless, but I've kept and used that color work book ever since. It's a super helpful thing to have, if you have the patience to make one.

doodle explosion

2011-05-16T23:36:00.000-07:00

I've been doodling a lot lately. I'm in this Norman Rockwell tribute show in July, and I'm doing a couple paintings for it. I'm using one of my favorite (and one of Rockwell's, too) subject matters: teenagers. They are pretty wonderful. This is my very sloppy color sketch for one of said paintings.

Here are some sketches that I coughed up in preparation for this piece. I decided not to edit them or make them pretty, so, what you see is how they were drawn on the page.

Doodles!

Some of these were done from photos. It is hard to find good photos of teenagers. The best way to observe them is in their natural habitat: walking home from school. In photos they either look like children dressed as adults or they are trying very hard to appear attractive. In person they can't hide all their appealing imperfections though.

Most of these are not even whole ideas. I just needed to warm up. I tend to give up on a drawing half way through if I think it's not going where I want it to. That's probably not a good habit. But I keep doing it anyway.

Even though this was drawn on a huge slice of 16 field animation paper, somehow my favorite drawings are squashed up against, and cut off by, the bottom of the page. Mer.

This girl is a prototype of the one from the color sketch. I think I did a bazillion drawings of her before I found one that I really liked. My thought process was something like "This girl will have cute short hair. What kind of shirt would a short-haired girl wear? She will wear a skirt because she's afraid people might think she's a boy if she doesn't, because she doesn't know how cute and girly she is. She wears a lot of necklaces for the same reason..." etc. etc. Yes it's fun to invent people.

That head right in the the middle is my favorite thing that I've drawn in a long time. I like that shoe too. I considered giving her motorcycle boots, but I like cowboy boots better. Plus it fits the 'Americana' theme of the show.

I like that girl on the left a lot. I wish I hadn't drawn that creepy man head so close to her. It looks like he's trying to smell her hair or something. Gross!

I hope you still like me now that you know I do lots of ugly and awkward drawings before I get to a good one.

(Whoooooaaa blogger is all different now! I like it.)

Till next time, when I will have a lovely finished painting to show off!

my fun fun fashion blog

2011-05-05T18:34:00.000-07:00

I started a style/fashion/clothing/I'm obsessed with shoes blog with my good former classmate/hilarious friend/fellow artist ED Juan!

We really just started it for fun, and because we are both constantly and consistently preoccupied with clothes. It's been getting a pretty positive response from our friends and the like, so I thought I'd share it on my 'real' blog.

What's on it, you ask? Stuff like this:

Drawings of my outfits...

Cute pictures of my mom from the 60's...

Very poorly taken iphone photos of my clothes...

It's located right HERE!

It's been a ton of fun to update. Good times.

twelve dancing princesses

2011-05-03T15:39:00.000-07:00

My book Twelve Dancing Princesses is out this week, officially, in the world, for you to buy, and love and cherish!

So I thought I'd go back in time to when the book wasn't finished, to when it was barely just started, because it didn't just materialize out of thin air and Photoshop. Like most big projects, it developed in phases and rather slowly. There was lots of sketching and doodling and revising and things that didn't really look like anything that I'm surprised my editor could even understand!

Let's start at the beginning, when I chose what era I ought to place this far away kingdom in. I did NOT want to just do whatever-fantasy-far-far-away-princess-royalty-mashup. I love fashion history, and costumes, so I had to be specific. I liked the idea of doing an 18th century Mary Antoinette fanciful French style, but that has been done, and very beautifully, and one of my own favorite illustrators Kay Nielson, and I can't front Kay. I chose the 1830's-40's, because the kings were dapper, the ladies had big fantastic hoop dresses, and the shoes were appropriately similar to ballet slippers!

See?

I love how GIANT the dresses in that era were! Can you imagine wearing something that big? Everyday? Fitting through doorways in it? Going to the bathroom in it??

I did a few very rough and tumble character designs, for proportion and stuff. All twelve princesses are basically the same princess with different hair and dresses. To design and re-draw and remember all the puny details of twelve separate princesses sounded very not fun to me. It was challenging enough just fitting all twelve into each composition!

Since the story was already written and given the a-okay by my editor, I moved along to thumbnail sketches. They are very rough, and very small: I drew them on 1"x1.5" post-it notes. I did that so that I could doodle a composition and then if I didn't care for it immediately peel it away and draw another one. I went through an enormous stack of tiny post-it's in such a way. The compositions changed very little from what you see here.

This is the whole book in post-its!

I did all the final illustrations in Photoshop. I had to BUY Photoshop, because I had previously had only bootlegged versions of it (from being a student and to be fair, no student can afford that schnazz), and it kept crashing and asking me for serial numbers, and finally just wouldn't open at all. SOOOO expensive, but worth it in the end for a version that actually WORKS. It was a serious crisis for me for about 3 days, back when I was just beginning to work on the final art.

Yes there's like 100 layers, and they are all labeled appropriately. Virgo style.

What I take away from making this book is basically this: I really love making books. I'm beginning work on a new one...but that's for later!

flapper paper doll for the goods

2011-03-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

I made this flapper paper doll for McSweeney's The Goods

That means it will be in the two papers that carry The Goods: The San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. If you wanna get this cool stuff in your own local paper, then you should call em up and tell em so!! Otherwise how will they know? Also, The Goods could use your support.

Paper dolls!!

kim and jim

2011-03-23T12:09:00.000-07:00

So, I was invited to be in this show. I watched this movie and did a bunch of sketches, and then decided that I'd feature the 'villain' of the story in my piece instead of the hero, because while Edward gets a lot of love, poor, beefy, angry Jim (Anthony Michael Hall) gets nothing.

Also, I thought it'd be fun to document my painting process. Why not? I'm not sure that you'll be able to glean any "secrets" or "techniques" or any of that stuff from these pictures, but at the very least they're interesting to look at!

I started off with a little doodle of what I wanted the painting to look like! This sketch is really only like 1 1/2" tall. It doesn't need to be much bigger than that to get its point across. You can pretty much tell what's goin on, compositionally.

I scanned it, brought it in to old photoshop, and did some color stuff! I did a bunch of different color ideas but this one (which was pretty close to what I'd imagined) was the best.

I got this big piece of very cheap board from an art store and cut it down to the size I wanted. I didn't gesso the board, I just gave it a coat of really ugly bright magenta paint. I don't have a good reason for choosing that color. I just had a really big bottle of pink paint that I wanted to use up. Anyway, once I had a layer of paint down the next few coats of paint had something to grab onto, so that's what that's all about. Please note: my paints are mostly of the cheap-o variety.

I took a big turquoise colored pencil and sketched in my dinosaur bush, Jim and Kim. For some reason I suddenly felt that I should switch Kim with Jim so they're different than they were in my first sketch. I don't know why! It just seemed right! Also I started to lay in some paint, mostly just for texture and rough shapes. It looks awful at this point, doesn't it??

Nooooow it starts looking a little more like something, although not much more...

It's slowly coming together, but only sort of. Usually somewhere in the middle of working on a picture you have a moment where you think "This is awful. This isn't going to work. What was I thinking? What IS THIS??" I was having that thought about here. If you recognize that feeling, you know it eventually goes away if you keep working...

I don't have a hierarchy of what I work on first or last or whatever. It's usually more like, "What do I feel like painting now??" I felt like getting Winona resolved. Winona Ryder is hard to catch a likeness of. She's pretty and all, but she kinda doesn't have any really defining features. Anthony was pretty easy. I just had to make him look angry and red.

Finally past that "this is garbage" feeling! It's starting to look like a painting!

OH! THAT'S what it's supposed to look like! The piece is BIG (for me at least!) and won't fit on my tiny scanner, so you will have to be content with these grainy iphone pictures of the finished product. I like how it came out.

It was missing something, so I added leaves and branches to the ground around the dino-topiary. It gives you the feeling that Edward was just there, even though he's not in the picture at all.

Grrrr!!

wednesday weirdos

2011-03-11T12:22:00.000-08:00

Watching TV and doodling is a thing I like to do. It's nice to turn off your brain and draw stuff that pertains to nothing. I remember doing a great deal of that before I went to art school, and especially during school, but once I began to draw things for a living somehow drawing becomes a chore! Probably because it's very cerebral when you are doing it for a specific purpose, or person, or job. You have to think hard.

When you don't think hard, or barely at all, because you are watching Ghost Hunters (again?), so half your brian is distracted by ghost evidence, you end up with a lot of weird stuff. Here are my weirdoes!

Have a nice weekend you!

my first ever give-away!

2011-02-21T22:22:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: A winner has been selected. Congratulations Christen Krumm! The give-away is over now, but you can still comment if ya like.

Thanks everyone who entered!

Well, I got a big box of Princess Matching Games in the mail last week. I got more than I can possibly play with alone. So I'm giving one away!!!

Here's all you need to do to enter the give-away:

Leave a comment. Make it something amusing, for goodness sakes. And don't forget to put your e-mail in there so I can get in touch with you if you win!
Wait a week. I'll be picking my winner via random number generator on February 28!

SO EASY! The matching game is not technically out yet, so you'll be getting it before ANYONE ELSE. That's really special. There's 72 pieces of matchy-match fun in that box. It also has a magnetic flap closure, which truly elevates it beyond simply a cardboard box full of cardboard bits. Really!

If it goes well, I might do a stationary give-away too. We'll seeeeeeee...

Here's some images from the matching game pieces! These are my favorites. The little black dog is my actual dog, Lila. She really sleeps on a pillow like that. She's such a princess.

The Queen

The King

Royal Dog

The Castle

Princess Lilac

Good luck!

dress shoppe stationary

2011-02-05T14:57:00.001-08:00

Hello to you out there in the blog-o-sphere! I know I've been neglecting my blog, and that's not fair. My little bloggy blog has
done a lot for me, and yet I ignore it. No more!! I'm going to start posting more regularly now, I promise. I've even got a few ideas for regular/weekly/feature type blog updates so that even if I have nothing of my own to show you I can at least post something. Keeping it fresh is important, dontcha know.

In the mean time, just to prove that I have not just been sitting around my apartment eating bon bons and painting my nails (although I do so in moderation when the mood strikes), I'd like to present one of the projects that has kept me away from bloggin' as I should: my Dress Shoppe stationary set! I know I mentioned it before, but I got the thumbs up to do a more in-depth post on it, so here goes...

I wanted all the gals to look different but like they are from the same universe, too. This first lady in the suit might be my favorite. She's like the ultimate chic housewife of the decade. I imagine that she wears this outfit to the supermarket to buy 50lbs of meat to store in her giant freezer in her turquoise and pink kitchen. "Off to buy some haaaaam!"

This gal might look familiar because she is a re-incarnation of my Librarian Paper Doll. She was the inspiration for this set. (I still really want to do a straight up paper doll book or magnetic paper doll, by the by.)

I love this color combo: red orange, pink, minty green.

And one last sunny yellow dress! Actually, this might be my favorite. She's more 60's looking than the rest, but I love her flats and pink gloves. I pretty much gave her an outfit that I'd like to wear.

I made the set for Chronicle Books and I have to say, they really do a bang-up job on the graphic design end. The style of the set is super girly and very 50's, and I had the pleasure of working with folks who totally understood what I was going for and had a lot to add to it. Look at the little photo shoot they did for the back of the the box:

So perfect!!

It comes with stickers so you can stick accessories on the gals, like little glasses and purses and flower brooches and hats. And pink envelopes! Did I mention that they stand up? They do. (PS, please excuse the general crappishness of these photos.)

Anyhoo-a, you can pre-order them on Amazon
OR on the Chronicle Books website, but you wont be able to play with 'em til March. :)

the book is out of the bag

2010-11-10T20:54:00.000-08:00

This is the cover of that book that I made! You can see it on the Chronicle Books website right HERE!

You can take a peek at the Princess matching game, too:

AND the stationary set. It's a mid-century dress shop, and it comes with STICKERS!:

I've been a busy, busy bee. The book & game don't come out til February, and you gotta wait til April for the stationary. It's crazy and surreal seeing my work on a website all professional-like. But it's also awesome.

beetlejuice beetlejuice

2010-10-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

I decided to be Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice for Halloween! I've got a black wig with a big back combed ponytail and pointy bangs, and a camera! Naturally I had to watch Beetlejuice for reference, and naturally I had to do some drawings with the brush pen. I'm doing an upcoming project all in brush pen, so I'm attempting to get real goodsy at it.

Beetlejuice is one of the movies that was in heavy rotation in the VCR when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure I didn't understand most of what was going on, as is the case with most movies watched in childhood. There's so much cool looking stuff in the movie though, you kinda don't need to 'get it' to appreciate it.

Winona doesn't look too great in the movie, actually. I know she's supposed to look all death-y but she really does. I actually cut my bangs like Lydia's when I was a teenager, all pointy...bold!

I love Catherine O'Hara. She's one of the few actresses that I think I'd really truly freak out about if I were to run into her in person. She's perfectly insane in the movie. I got a pretty decent Gina Davis over there, too.

I was a big fan of the Beetlejuice cartoon, too, even though it has barely anything in common with the movie. By the way, don't even bother google image searching the cartoon unless you want to see a LOT of fan art with the potential to hurt your feelings. Learn from my mistake.

...and then I watched Ghost Hunters!

Happy Halloween, Halloweenies!

update!

2010-10-13T23:40:00.000-07:00

It's October! I bring you a spooky fairy flapper:

It's hard to update the old blog consistently when I'm drawing all the time but not for myself. I'm trying to draw more just for funsies but I tend to just go back to the same stuff over and over, like flappers. I could draw flappers til the sun goes down. Maybe I should take requests to mix it up a little. SUGGESTIONS??

I must note that it incredible that I have so many blog followers when I've been so awful at updating. Thanks all you followers!

In other news, I've had to shut down my etsy shop for good. It was becoming very time consuming, and although that's good because it means the shop was overall successful, it can become a big cluster f*$% when you have deadlines for multiple projects whizzing by and also a life. I find that I'm a much more peaceful individual when I'm not packaging orders and responding to e-mails from people asking where their stuff is, and traipsing off to the post office alllll the time.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses is due out in February! You can pre-order it on Amazon.com, but there's no image, so you still can't see what it looks like! Isn't that weird? Who would do that??

Book sneak peak!

2010-08-01T14:45:00.000-07:00

Where have I been all this time? What've I been up to? Well I haven't been lounging next to a pool working on my suntan (although I've wanted to). I've spent the majority of my summer on a project which is very important to me, and which may be the most important thing I've done yet, as someone who draws pictures for a living: a book!

I got the OK to put a few teaser images up here. They are not full pages, just little snippets to give you an idea of what the book will look like. Enjoy!

cyndi is good enough!

2010-05-28T00:10:00.001-07:00

This is my contribution to the Goonies Show at Lunar Boy Gallery in Astoria, OR! You have to be preeeeeeetttty hard core nerdy about Goonies stuff to appreciate the following:

...or you just have to watch this and THEN appreciate it afterwards.

science!

2010-05-14T22:39:00.001-07:00

Some character studies for incidental characters in my book. They are meant to be intelligent, learn-ed, men of science from the 1830's. Typically, dudes like this would have had outrageous hair-do's and jackets adorned with medals of a mysterious nature.

I haven't done any character designs in a looooooong time...perhaps that's obvious, but I liked how they turned out!

city park swarovski short!

2010-05-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

Long time no post, faithful blog followers! I can only give you excuses about how I'm really busy working on my book and stationary set, but excuses are not as interesting as stuff to look at. So here's a stuff to look at!

This is a short I worked on for Swarovski crystals. I did the backgrounds and character designs. The rest of the credit goes like this:

Directed by Courtland Lomax
Music by Brian Young
Compositing by Ethan Metzger
Backgrounds and Character Designs by Brigette Barrager

Animation:
Jennifer Hager
Jules Soto
Destiny Wood
Matt Pugnetti
Philip Vose
Courtland Lomax

Cleanup:
Esther Shin
Matt Pugnetti
Daron Nefcy
Destiny Wood

Congrats, everybody! It looks great! Now I must return to hunching over my wacom and drawing princesses.

just messing around

2010-02-23T17:12:00.000-08:00

Here are some drawings to keep my blog alive! Some girls with cats. These are related to nothing, except for the last lady, who is a rejected design for a project I'm working on. Sorry lady, you didn't get the job.

back from the dead + some weirdo drawings

2010-02-12T21:22:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody! I'm back from my blog sabbatical. I'm working away on a stationary set for Chronicle books right now. It will have stickers! I haven't done much other drawing, but I did these to warm up a few days ago, and although they are friggin' weird drawings, I thought I should update with SOMETHING before you all forget my blog exists, so here they are.

Whilst foraging for mid-century fashion magazine scans, I ran across some photos from the 20's and 30's, which is one of my most favorite eras for fashion. Ladies were petite and robed in satin, and covered with flowers, and encouraged to be dainty (not that any of those qualities is present in these drawings, I'm just sayin').

I like how this one turned out.

Flickr is my favorite thing to search for images on. It is about 100x better than google, because people just scan images from books and such, and you get a lot of obscure stuff. These weirdo-weird drawings are me biting off some obscure French illustrator whose name I immediately forgot. The flower-crotch is all me, though.

I'm doing a guest lecture in Ethan Metzger's class at CalArts next week. If there are any current CalArts kids out there that want me to talk about something specific, now's the time to ask! I'm going to explain my process for doing digital paintings. I'm going to share all my secrets with you. I'm bringing my dog.

last post of the year.

2009-12-30T17:52:00.000-08:00

One last post before 2009 is kaput.

It's been a looooooooooong year. I think 2010 is going to be about 1,276x better. I have a good feeling.

Hope all your holidays were remarkable and fantastic! Thanks for all the love, blog followers. It really does make me feel good about the things I make to know that so many people (mostly complete strangers!) support it. Cheers!

BIG news!

2009-12-03T19:09:00.000-08:00

Okay, first I'll give you the small stuff and then we can work our way up to the big one. Here's a drawing I did for some freelance recently to accompany the nooz:

NEWS!

-I received a shining endorsement on the Publishers Weekly blog! Thank you, Alison!

-The paintings from my last post are for SALE on the Bear and Bird Gallery site! Buy 'em up, make my day!

-LOTS of the paintings (and some prints) from my previous show are up at Una Mae's, a really cute boutique in my neighborhood. Support a local institution and a local artista, and go peruse their stylish duds and take home a painting.

-I'm going to be at Unique L.A. this weekend! Come by and visit! Me and my tiny pink X-mas tree will be happy to see you. I've got paper dolls to peddle!

-And finally: I'm going to be both writing and illustrating two books for Chronicle. They are awesome folks. I can't give any details yet, but I'm super excited. For anyone who ever doubted that their biggest craziest wildest dream could come true, let me tell you: if you keep hammering away at it, someday it WILL. And on that day your heart will explode into stardust and sprinkle itself all over the universe, covering all those who know you in a glittering blanket of AWESOME. No seriously, that's how it works.

SO, I've been busy, to say the least. Hope all you's Thanksgivingses were grand!

small cats

2009-11-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

These are going to the small stuff show at bear and bird gallery in Florida. They're small! Only 5"x5" each.

I'm trying to get bolder with my colors, and a little looser with my paintings. I tend to paint really, really, really anal-retentively, leaning over the painting and holding my breath and stuff. I think things come out a little stiff sometimes because of that though! These were small and simple enough that I could just kinda do them without over thinking.

The first one is based on my cat Milo. He was orange and crazy! Now he is a ghost cat.

The siamese is based on nothing, because I never had a siamese myself. Or maybe its based on my awesome vintage TV lamp that Sean got for me... (that is not a photo of MY lamp, but mine is seriously identical)

They're off to Florida! By by kitties!

paper gal!

2009-11-01T23:56:00.000-08:00

The actual "making" part is done! Now I have to print em out and test how everything fits. I have a feeling that they're going to be a pain in the butt to cut out...

Yay!

work in progress!

2009-10-28T12:36:00.001-07:00

This is still a work in progress, but I thought it was about time for an update here in blog-land.

She has lots of outfits, and when she's done she'll be in my etsy store. She's also going with me to Unique LA this year, so if you're in the area you can swing by in December and grab one! I'm also hoping to have another paper doll, maybe a tattooed lady, or a flapper, or a 17th century lady. I was planning on having her done in time for APE but I underestimated how time consuming/technical/hard it is to make a good paper doll, so that was a no go. APE, by the way, was not particularly successful for me this year (but I get the impression that it wasn't too great for anybody exhibiting). I'm putting my hopes in Unique LA, hoping that people get into the X-mas shopping spirit by then!

In other news, it's almost HALLOWEEN, the best holiday ever! I don't know about you all, but I can't ever seem to really get IN to a holiday unless I watch an appropriately themed cartoon first.

Yay!

HMMM...

2009-10-15T00:23:00.001-07:00

...what can this be?

...or THIS, for that matter?!

Getting ready for APE. More later!

I'm gettin' hitched!

2009-10-06T23:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posts in recent days. I have a really good excuse: I'm getting married this weekend! And I'm planning the whole wedding myself! Does that sound like intense times? Well it is, just busy work and detail-wise. There's so many little variables to plan for, and combine that with the fact that Mercury was in retrograde for most of September and you've got (and by "you" I mean "ME") quite a snarl-ball of logistical and creative stuff to deal with.

When I say that I'm planning it myself, what I really mean is that me and Sean argued about how to appropriately 'art direct' the event, and we made everything ourselves: invites, programs, decorations, the whole she-bang. Then I spent a lot of time+energy making phone calls and writing e-mails and sending faxes to make sure everything got taken care of. I've been drinkin' a lot of coffee!

So here's the image that went on the front of our invite. We took it one morning before Sean went to work. I love that dress.

You shan't be hearing from me for a little while, cause I have to attend to the business of being a bride, but I'll be back soon-ish!

P.S.,

Got the buttons made. They're really cool!

buttons! buttons!

2009-09-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again: I'm getting all my goodies together for the Alternative Press Expo next month. That means I've got to order some new buttons, among other things, but the other things are boring. Paper and ink and plastic sleeves are not half as good as shiny new pin back buttons!

I want your opinion on these buttons, k? In the past I've just kinda picked at random whichever images I think would look good on a button, but then I end up with none of one kind of a whole bunch of another kind left over. My preference would be to have no buttons left, because they are happily living on your jacket or book bag or wherever! SO, vote for your favorites (as many as you want!), and I'll make buttons of the most popular picks. This is especially easy cause you don't even have to leave an actual comment, you can just click on this little poll-thinger!

Click click click!

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Or, you know, if there's something you think would be cool as a button that ya don't see here, I'm open to suggestions.

mythological prints on etsy!

2009-09-17T17:21:00.000-07:00

mermaids, minotaurs, neptunes, griffins, gorgons, and water nymphs!

Take one home.

griffin

2009-09-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks everyone who came to the opening last Saturday! Here's a griffin:

Life is pretty busy in my little corner of the world right now. Lots of wedding planning stuff is happening. There's less than a month left til the big day! Plus APE is coming up, so I've got more than enough to keep me occupied.

I'm a busy little bee!

Opening! This Saturday! Come out and play, Los Angeles folk!

2009-09-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

I'm having a little opening at Occidental College this weekend! Saturday night!

+there will be cupcakes
+there will be drinks
+there will be me
+it is in a LIBRARY

How often to you get to hang out in a library and drink? I'm going to guess not that often. I'll have framed, signed, large versions of all those mythological creatures I've done lately for sale. Plus, the library at Occidental is really pretty! It's worth checking out. Even if you can't come on Saturday, you can go look at the stuff later: the show will be up aaaaaalll semester (until December).

The details:

where: Mary Norton Clapp Library, at Occidental College
when: 7pm - 10pm
why: eat cupcake, hang out in library with mythological creatures

View Larger Map

the book!

2009-08-29T22:13:00.000-07:00

It's right HERE on Amazon! I illustrated this book last spring for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which is coming out pretty soon...

I thought I'd just share some pages, since it's been released into the world already. These don't have any text (although you can obviously spot where the text belongs), and also the book doesn't exactly look like this, since it's a fancy 3-D book that comes with fancy little 3-D glasses. The effect is actually pretty neat.

Drawing food is a tedious affair. It really forces you respect the little glinty grease bits on a pizza or the texture of scooped ice cream when you are required to duplicate it...

These aren't all the pages, they're just the best ones (as far as I'm concerned).

I watched "The Lady Vanishes" while doing this page. Now when I look at it I think about terribly upright English people on trains.

Yay! I bought a copy at Borders and it was right next to my buddy Christian's book on the rack. Small world!

heartbeat underwater

2009-08-23T14:02:00.001-07:00

I have been wanting to do these pieces for sooooooooooo long! Like, years.

I love mermaids. My inner 7 year old is singing right now.

gorgon lady

2009-08-19T22:21:00.001-07:00

A gorgon is like, the generic term for a Medusa type lady. They are fierce and scary creatures, with snake hair! Except for when they are wearing fancy flowery robes and sitting on urns.

Something about this bugs me but I haven't figured out what it is yet. I'll come back to it later.

mr. minotaur

2009-08-17T09:49:00.000-07:00

He likes apples, but don't get too close or he'll bop you one with his club.

mythological

2009-08-12T22:55:00.000-07:00

I have a show at Occidental College later this month. Can you guess the theme? Did you say "mythological creatures"? If you did then you're right!

I don't usually put up rough, ugly, crazy sketches like this, but I feel guilty for not updating in forever, so you get a sneak peak at my process...whatever that may be.

Right now I'm focused on creatures of the mostly Greek in origin. Later there will be fairies! I like to delight and indulge my inner seven year old with the skills of my outer 24 year old sometimes.

There's a lot of mental static on these pages. I do a lot of thinking/drawing/scribbling when I figure stuff out for pieces. I know a lot of it probably doesn't make sense to you, but that's okay. I'm the only one who sees it most of the time anyway.

I've had a lot of these guys rattling around in my brains for a while. Like Mr. Poseidon.

Mermaids! Yes!

More soon.

life stuff + some house of cats model sheets

2009-07-24T17:45:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated in a looooooooong time, but I assure you it's only for the very most legitimate of reasons!

~I moved! Just 1.5 blocks down the street, but it's a big deal for me and Sean! We have our own place now, all to ourselves. We even painted the walls (we kinda had to because the color they were was about 10x brighter than what we can handle). Moving is HARD. Especially when you have lots of books. They're heavy.

~I got a dog! Her name is Lila. She's very small. She's black. She sleeps under my desk.

~I've been wedding planning! It's not too hard, you just have to be super duper detail oriented. Which I am.

~I've been at the beach. It's summer!

Anyway, enough of my jibber jabber. Here are some model sheets from the House of Cats project!

Thanks everybody for the kudos/kind words. We're working on the next one!

brush pen part 2

2009-06-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

Hey! I've been sick aaaaalll week! It sucks. I really thought I was better last night but after being in denial most of the day I finally took a Sudafed and passed out. At least I woke up breathing through my nose, which was a major improvement! I've been sucking down tea and hanging around my apartment for daaaaays and started reminiscing about last weekend when I thought I had beat my sore throat and went to brunch at Alcove, the favorite breakfast-at-noon spot in my neighborhood. It is full of characters, myself included. Here's a few that I encountered:

The lady on the right had a whole lot of look happening: a big woolly oversize sweater, a ripply tunic or dress (it's hard to tell which sometimes but this was supposed to be a dress since she wasn't wearing anything under it), giant chunky rock necklace, crazy gladiator sandals, and the ultimate accessory: a small dog. The dog was cute but ultra tiny! It looked fragile and fluffy. Her friend was tiny and had worlds largest handbag.

This girl is a cupcake. She was really working that romper. Except for the back, where the edge of her butt cheek kept peaking out...but I did you the courtesy of only drawing her from the front.

This was a tall, skinny, lanky couple. They looked like they just rolled out of bed to have a tall, skinny, lanky brunch together.

Also, I added a whoooooollle bunch of new prints to the shop this week. All stuff from my show last month. Lots of the originals are still available too, but I'm still considering whether to put them up in the store or not. I haven't had much luck selling OG's on etsy.

This will probably be my only post this week, since I've spent most of it laying around watching Grey Gardens and eating cough drops like candy.

drawings that I did from the balcony in the dark

2009-06-12T16:48:00.000-07:00

I saw Camera Obscura last night at the Henry Fonda in Hollywood. They are sooooo great! The not great thing was that we had balcony seats. They are good for seeing the stage, but not so good for dancing around like you are supposed to do at a show. I tried to make the best of the situation by busting out my brush pen to doodle...but the only surface available to draw upon were cocktail napkins from the bar. So here are some doodles that I doodled out in the hot smelly balcony in the dark!

Anni Rossi opened. She plays the viola and sings and stomps on a suitcase wearing big boots for percussion. It took me a few minutes of watching her to realize that I went to CalArts with her! I think we had some classes together. People used to say she was awesome, but I never saw her perform until last night. Sean says I jacked her pretty hard in this drawing. Sorry Anni. You stomp out a song real good, though!

...THEN a band called Agent Ribbons played. They looked like a band of wind up dolls that played instruments! They had a great cello/violin player. She had a flower in her hair that was probably as big as her head.

I could not tell you what this bird guy was all about. He must have been over six feet tall, wearing a bright pink suit with a bird mask, and a moon shaped tambourine in one hand and a boxing glove on the other. If you are confused by these drawings, then imagine how I felt when this was actually happening in front of me.

Camera Obscura! They are a big band, and their lead singer has what I call a "cupcake" body: kinda thick, but not fat, but cute and appealing all over. Like a cupcake.

Yay!

screwing around with a brush pen

2009-06-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

I just got a brush pen! I've never really messed around with one before, and I don't really understand how to use it. I understand that it makes whatever you draw look about 300x cooler instantly, but they are very sensitive instruments and I'm used to hammering away on paper with an unsharpened Ebony pencil, so it will take some getting used to. These are just some experiments from last week...

I saw this girl at Trader Joe's last week, when it was all weird/rainy/cold outside. It literally looked like she had just wrapped a tea towel around her shoulders and pulled on the most ridiculous, bright leg warmers she could find. I thought to myself, "Really?? Are pants really that hard to come by these days??" And flip flops, in the rain? What?

But that is why I love Trader Joe's in Silverlake. So much style, so many varieties of tortilla chips!

les demoiselles de rochefort

2009-06-03T00:29:00.000-07:00

Obscure films, how I love you so.

I really failed to capture how beautiful these two ladies are, and how dreamy and vibrant the film looks...but I think it turned out kinda cool anyway.

sketch bits

2009-05-31T23:39:00.001-07:00

Arrrgh I can't believe it's Sunday already! What! Here are some sketches for you. Just stuff from my sketchbook, really. Like this 18th century lady with trees for hair, and this 30's bathing beauty...

I haven't drawn from life much recently, because honestly, it bores me. How many images of people in a coffee shop do I ever want to look at? Not very many. Animals in a zoo mostly just stand around. I do love Sean to pieces though, so drawing him lying in the grass reading Walter Benjamin (a smart person book of some kind) is pretty fun.

I've been thinking about mythology a lot lately.

I tried to personify Hollywood, but I don't think she'd really be this trashy/stupid.

I'm gonna color this in and it's going to be pretty. These girls are from "Les Demoiselles de Rochefort", a very beautiful and melancholy French movie with Catherine Deneuve and her sister, whose name escapes me. The art direction is soooo cool!

Check back for it later this week!

after 100 years...

2009-05-27T22:28:00.001-07:00

...the project that I worked on for Swarovski is FINALLY online!

I don't know why it took them so long to put it up on their site, but it's THERE, and you can watch it now!

RIGHT HERE!

Up to 2:53 is the part I worked on.

And now to answer any questions you might have, I've written a little FAQ:

You: "Wait, what did you do on this??"

Me: I designed the characters based on the crystial figures (which already existed...I had nothing to do with how they look) and did model sheets, and I also painted the backgrounds.

Y: "Wait, what is this for?"

M: It's basically a commercial for crystal figures. They don't have much personality on their own, so they needed a little help from good old animation know-how.

Y: "Did you do that whole thing???"

M: Nope. I just designed the characters and painted the backgrounds. Courtland Lomax directed/produced the whole shebang, Sean Jimenez drew the layouts and did story boards, Ethan Metzger after-effects-ted it (with help from lots of others!), and just about every animator I know animated a few seconds here and there. Unfortunately a whole lot of the folks who worked on it don't have a blog or website or any other kind of presence on the inter-webs, or else I'd link to them right now. Get with it, guys!

Y: "What did you do the backgrounds in? Is it paint?"

M: They're digital, 100%. I have like a hundred photoshop brushes.

Y: "What's Swarovski?"

M: They make crystals. Or, more appropriately, I should say that they manufacture crystals. They don't dig them out of the earth, they melt quartz and sand and colors together and then grind them down to make them amazingly shiny and pretty. They are very expensive. I've been to Austria twice and visited Swarovski HQ and stolen their markers and abused their espresso machines, and I love them for giving me the opportunity to do so.

Y: "Are you going to work with them again?"

M: Yep! I'm working on the designs for the next round of figures right now. It's fun.

Y: "Which one is your favorite?"

M: I really love how Emily turned out. Animation wise, Jen Hager hit the nail on the head with Marie and Pierre...they are PERFECT: they're on model, they move beautifully, and their acting is spot on. Camille is pretty cute too...I'm impressed with how she spins around on the lazy susan. Props to P.Vose for painting that slice of cake over and over again.

Y: "Where is this playing? On TV?"

M: No, it won't be on TV. It'll be on the website and probably in some Swarovski stores. Notice how there's no dialogue/talking/writing except for the cats' names. Swarovski is way international, so this could be playing in a store in Japan or Italy or somewhere right now for all we know.

Y: "Who did the music?? It's so charming."

M: My friend Brian! Check him out!

Okay guys, I know that the lack of images on this blog lately is way lame. I promise that NEXT TIME I post, there will be images aplenty!

uuugh friday

2009-05-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

I spent a good chunk of this week working on a new portfolio to send out to some folks. I hate how portfolios always seem so innocent, easy, simple, and then end up taking forever because of getting things the right sizes/the right color/cutting the edges cleanly/the right order/best format or whatever. Ick! Anyway, the new portfolio has been sent, and I took the opportunity to update my online portfolio at the same time.

Other things I've been up to:

-cleaning my studio
-getting my hair done
-seeing movies at Grauman's Chinese
-sitting around coffee shops with my favorite guy and watching the cute dogs walk by
-working on secret stuff that I can't show you!

And here it is Friday already and I've got nothing blog-worthy. Maybe I'll post some yucky sketches later.

pics from the show!

2009-05-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

As promised, some photos from the show this past weekend, courtesy of Jules! (As you may know, dear blog reader, my camera has resigned to paper weight status, and so I have no pics of my own.)

Sorry to anyone in these pics who would rather not be. If it makes you feel better, there are pretty much no flattering images of myself to speak of.

Bert approved.

Cute children and cute dogs liked the show, too...(that's my friend's baby Kaitlyn and my sister's baby Bambi).

Yep. Good times.

that book...

2009-05-11T12:23:00.000-07:00

Remember that book I illustrated, and how I had to do it really fast and I didn't update my blog for like a month because of it? Well here's proof that it exists!

Right HERE!

I can't tell you how crazy it feels to search my own name on amazon and actually have something come up! By the way, I'm not responsible for the cover...that's just a screen shot from the film (weird). It's not actually available until August, but I was excited about it regardless.

AND my gallery opening was last night and it was great, if I do say so myself. So many people showed up to be supportive and check out the work and that was super awesome, and my friend Jenny + pals played some great music, and my bff Matthias made vegan cupcakes which was so sweet of him. Pictures coming soon! In the meantime, here are some little paintings from the show that were very spontaneous and fun to do...

lillian gish as the L.A. river

2009-05-08T13:49:00.001-07:00

I know that when you hear "L.A. river" a bunch of clever, mostly negative quips come to mind, like "what river?" and "why isn't there any water it it?" and "oh that big cement thing?" and "that's not a river it's a jumbo sized storm drain!" etc. etc. and on into infinity. But I've actually hung around the LA river before, and yeah there's water in it, fish even, lots of birds, lots of bugs, some garbage, trees, reeds, and sometimes a rogue shopping cart. It doesn't smell very good and I wouldn't swim in it, EVER, but it's there and it's actually a pretty nice place to hang out in certain spots. Like all things in Los Angeles you have to seek it out and know exactly where to go and when. To me it's just another one of those magical secrets hidden away in the city...

AND, this is the last time I'm going to shamelessly advertise my show this weekend (Sunday) at Pehrspace. I'm going to be there all evening, from 6-11pm, eating Newman-O's and generally schmoozing, so if you're in LA you should stop by. There will be lots of paintings for sale, including this one! Next post will probably be photos of the show, so if you are inhabiting remote lands, don't fret! You'll still get a peak.

Kudos to all the folks whose films I saw at the CalArts Producer's Show last night, by the way! Good show, everybody.

flying coyote friends

2009-05-06T00:58:00.001-07:00

They're pretty cute, huh?

Yep. Just getting ready for the show on Sunday...fun fun!

By the way, thank you to all my (as of today) 100 followers for following this little old blog! Thank you bunches! I wish I could bake you all cupcakes.

shy couple + LA lady

2009-05-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

I went with pink. (They look much nicer in person.) Acrylic and gouache on 7"x7" wood plaques. They'll be at Pehrspace with me and this gal...

She did NOT fit in the scanner. This picture is a composite of a few different scans which is actually pretty wompy.

Just come see them in person next weekend!

building fun!

2009-04-30T02:20:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna remind you right now: I have a show at Pehrspace next month! The opening is the evening of May 10, which is a Sunday, and there will be musics and alcohol stuff and also CUPCAKES! Cupcakes with stupid plastic googly finger puppet monsters on top! You can't miss out on that!

And if you've got crazy money burning in your pockets, you can even buy one of these...

...or you can just run up and touch one while I'm not looking, stuff your face with cupcake, dance around and leave.

Either way I'd like you to go if you can!

Color, color, who's got the color?

2009-04-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna paint these guys. I pulled these awesome color schemes from some cool vintage fabrics I found. If you're gonna bite, bite from something totally awesome, right?

I am leaning towards pink (#4), but because I am interested in your opinion, and also because I've got nobody around to bounce it off of, I'm having one of my ol' fashioned votes.

#1: Turquoise and yellow...pretty but kinda plain. My first impulse. This is the color scheme I first imagined it in.

#2: Green and orange-red together, like something you'd find in a thrift store.

#3: More muted pink and blue and warm grey...gives it a whole different feeling, doesn't it?

#4: Think pink! My favorite so far...but I like the others too...maybe it's too pink? A little too saccharine?

I'm painting it tomorrow, so don't think about it too long!

audrey

2009-04-20T01:21:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's Monday! Here's a painting!

It's to big to fit in the scanner. The little chunk that did fit in there didn't even scan right. Blargh!

Because my horrible disappointment of a camera is pretty much a paperweight now, I had to steal Sean's iphone to take these pics (while he was sleeping! in the middle of the night! sneaky!).

Pink and mauve trees.

Also, my work space is now a total hole. Yuck! But it's gonna be that way for a while still. More later...

audrey sketch

2009-04-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's just nice to draw someone that you utterly admire.

friday paintings

2009-04-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

Some odds and ends for my show at Pehrspace next month. I wanted to take pictures, but because my camera has decided to suck no matter how many new batteries I put in it, I had to cram them into my scanner instead. Sorry about that. They're all real for real paintings, done with gouache and acrylic and brushes and water.

Pijon!

The scanner messed this one up pretty badly...

Coyote in the roses, drinking a strawberry crush.

More soon!

sketch fun

2009-04-11T19:16:00.000-07:00

Sketches for paintings in the works...

Inspired by houses and apartments in my neighborhood.

background sniplets

2009-04-09T17:10:00.001-07:00

Yes I'm back from the dead! I can't show you anything that I've been working on for the past month, but I'll be sure to keep you updated when it's time for the book to come out, sometime in August. Now I can finally get back to normal (whatever that is) and start working my pieces for my show at Pehrspace next month. I've got lots of ideas piled up in my brain and I'll be busily planning and keeping the old blog updated from here on out. Yes, that means twice weekly updates again! Yay!

In the meantime, here are some snippets from the project I spent most of last summer and fall working on. I know they're not super exciting and dynamic on their own, but I swear they look really, really cool with the characters walking around in them. The project was supposed to be viewable online, but I sure as heck haven't seen it anywhere and I've been googling it like crazy. If it turns up I'll let you know.

Later this week: painting sketches. Yay!

giants

2009-03-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

I took the Adventure Time character design test like a million years ago (or so it feels, I think it was actually about October). I still like these giants.

Other than that, I've been working like crazy madness on getting the book done. I feel like I'm revisiting crunch time at CalArts, a crazy, insane time where you do nothing but work, eat, work, work, drink tea, work, drink more tea, get hungry and then realize that's because you ate 7 hours ago, work more, and then suddenly it's 3 am and you feel that you've got nothing to show for sitting in front of the computer for so long. But, whatevers! I'm used to it! I do get kinda cabin fever-ish at home all day, by myself, but so it goes. It'll be done soon, and then I can go back to normal, whatever that is.

those foxes!

2009-03-11T01:44:00.000-07:00

It looks like I'll be under the avalanche of my illustration project for a while, but here's those other two fox paintings!

This little trio of foxes is going to be up for sale in my shop next week, along with some other original paintings that have been hanging out for a while...call it spring cleaning, if you will. More details on that later, so stay tuned!

petite fox

2009-03-04T18:39:00.000-08:00

Where have I been?

Well, working on the previously mentioned illustration project. If you're curious about that, you should click right here.

At this very moment, however, I'm awaiting feedback from the publisher, so I spent today (which was rainy and cold) painting this little fox and listening to music and drinking tea. I posted sketches of a trio of foxes waaaaaaay back in December. They were overdue for some attention! I'm not crazy about the way that it came out, but I kinda view those little paintings as more "painting practice" than "work of art".

Other things I've been doing lately that have distracted me from blogging duties!:

-making a moss garden
-going to Disneyland and having impromptu super fun hang out time with friends there!
-getting long forgotten sewing projects out of the way (busted off buttons, torn hemlines)
-watching LOTS of Twin Peaks and Boris Karloff movies (compliments of Mr. Brigette)
-cleaning out closets, which is probably one of the best things to have done, cuz getting all that junk out of my life has improved the feeling of my apartment exponentially!
-listening to the cool and creepy and trippy Paranormal Podcast
-re-reading Weetzie Bat
-planning my show in May
-doing pilates in my pajamas
-sketching the rest of the circus folks...they're comin'!

So yeah...sorry for the extreme blog update delay, but I've been keeping myself seriously preoccupied. I'm sure to have another update later this week, so stay tuned!

bang!

2009-02-13T21:37:00.001-08:00

As you can see, I went with #3. I just really didn't want to make Jon Klassen sad.

I'll probably tweak this and that before I say it's totally "done", but it's all there!

AND: I've been pretty good about updating twice a week for a while now, but I think I'm going to have to downgrade to one for a couple months. I've got a big illustration job and I'm going to be crunching and not having a life, CalArts style. So booo to less blog material, but yaaay for moneys!

yuki colors

2009-02-11T17:54:00.001-08:00

I'm trying to decide what colors to go with for that Yuki poster. It's hard, cause I like colors so very much, and the feeling changes lots depending on what you pick.

I like these blues. Blue roses could be really cool.

I think I'm most attached to this one.

This one is really nice too, but it has a much girly-er feel to it.

Something appealing in this too though...

I give up. What do you think?

What's your vote? I like #2. But maybe #3... See? I need a second opinion.

Now I'm gonna go work the kinks out of the drawing. I'm enjoying the chilly, perfect-for-drinking-tea weather in LA today.

ALSO: I saw Coraline again on Monday night, and I have to say, I liked it even better the second time around. It's one of the best films I've seen in a long time. All you guys who worked on it should buy yourselves ice cream sandwiches to celebrate.

coraline!

2009-02-07T17:52:00.001-08:00

I saw Coraline last night! It was spooky and dream-like and totally beautiful. I know a lot of people are probably going to pick it apart and dissect all the reasons why it should not be successful according to the tried and true story formulas and paradigms that audiences are used to seeing, but I really loved it. It is totally unconventional and it really stays with you...I went to bed last night thinking about it and I woke up this morning STILL thinking about it. I think it's got what me and Sean call "That Wes Anderson Thing": there are movies that are created for instant satisfaction, to deliver their messages in as clear and straight forward a manner possible, and then there are movies that don't put everything on the table all at once, approach film making from a unique vantage point and overall challenge an audience to think and explore and come to their own conclusions, and I think Coraline is one of them. (Obviously, Mr. Anderson isn't the only filmmaker who makes movies of that nature, it's just a good contemporary example. I had to see The Royal Tenenbaums a couple times before I liked it at all.) When I left the theater last night I was kinda "Well it was good, BUT..." while secretly my inner 7-year old was jumping for joy, and at present I'm thinking that I really would like to see it again.

Also, did you know that there are Coraline shoes?? I know the Laika/Nike connection is totally obvious to all you folk in the animation spectrum, but it's still pretty cool that they made them. I guess they are impossible to get ahold of. You have to win them or something.

Also you have to wear socks made out of cotton candy with them.

squirrels + magpies + owls

2009-02-04T18:39:00.000-08:00

I did these drawings last winter when I was in a certain European country for a couple weeks. They didn't actually use any of what I worked on while I was there, but they seemed pretty happy with it at the time. I did these with marker on this totally bizarre round paper that they had. I could've used photoshop, but they only had old crusty PC's (which I hate) and the keyboards are different in Europe (like the z and c keys are switched I think?? or something?) and all the keyboard short cuts were different too, and photoshop is just no good without shortcuts. So I went for markers and paper. Also, I don't really know how to use markers! Obviously!

Sometimes you do a drawing and look back on it later and think "oh yuck", and I don't quite feel "oh yuck" about these...they're slightly above yuck. I may decide that they are yuck later but I'm strapped for blog content right now. I fear that I will soon be posting pictures of my feet or something.

Anyway, they were fun to do. It was really liberating to just hang out and drink free cappuccinos from the fancy espresso machine in the office (Alpenmilch! Yum!) and mess around with markers, and then go eat a pizza and watch Pippi Longstocking on TV.

I promise not to lame out with only one post like I did last week. I had been doing so good posting twice weekly!

And last post was my 100th! I forgot to mention it at the time, but it kind of fills you with a feeling of accomplishment...even if it took over two years to make it to 100 and most posts are just a bunch of my gobbledy gook writing anyway.

more yuki sketches + friday already? seriously?

2009-01-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

I'm trying not to procrastinate. So far, so good!

I think this is what my Yuki poster is going to look like, roughly of course: pink skeletons, birthday cake hat villain, lots of roses and pink because I'm a girl and I like those things. Don't look for the pink yet cause it's not there.

I know my sketches are really rough and sometimes indecipherable, but it's all I got right now! Isn't there a movie or something with a skull that has jewels in its eyes? Where am I lifting this idea from?? I couldn't figure it out, but I know I've seen it somewhere.

Little thumbnail sketches...

At a CalArts Halloween party one year I saw some guys (more than one, like three I think) dressed in suits and sunglasses with hats shaped like birthday cakes with illuminated candles. Obviously, the image stuck with me. What kind of villian wears pastries as headgear? I leave that to your imagination.

This week went by really fast. I seriously am having a hard time believing that it's Friday. What have I been doing??

amyloid awareness film

2009-01-23T13:51:00.000-08:00

Lots of people have asked me what I'm working on recently and I'm always kinda like "Errr...you know, like freelance stuff..." It just takes so much energy to explain what you're doing when you make a living off of obscure projects on the very outside perimeter of the animation world (which itself is already pretty obscure and hard to explain). Plus I usually can't show anybody what I've been doing, you know, non disclosure and all that jazz. So let me tell you what I've been doing, since I have a rare opportunity to actually do that for once: right now I'm working on illustrations for a short film to educate doctors and other highly edumacated medical peoples about a rare, hard to explain, obscure disease. Amyloidosis! I can't really tell you what it is because I don't really know! I'm only responsible for a little segment of images in the film, and my segment has no cells/amoebas/little squirmy things in it. Mostly it's just doctors and people standing around. And some grandmas and grandpas.

They're pretty straight forward. None of them is on the screen for very long so it has to be a quick read!

I like the colors in this lab the best. I think I did a pretty good job on that microscope too, if I do say so myself!

I just don't want you guys to think I'm hanging out eating bonbons all day in Los Feliz.

Did anyone else go to the Char Anim Show last night?? Soooo fun!

you're invited + valentine's day shop special + show

2009-01-21T11:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not like, this awesome graphic design person or anything, but I did design this flier for an upcoming show that I'm in.

It reminded me of a graphic design class I took in high school, where we would be given a bunch of images in a folder and then would try to figure out how to put them together in a combination that didn't scream "high school graphic design assignment." It seems like only yesterday that I was making my first layer mask, and trading in my Brightness Contrast window for Levels. Le sigh.

Anyway, Valentine's Day is coming! And I know that because I have seen all the pink and red and white and lacy, fluffy, heart shaped items in every store I've walked into for the past week. I love Valentine's Day, not because I'm romantic at all, but just because I love the decor. It makes me happy to see "I Love You" posted up all over the place. So I'm having a little special over in the shop to celebrate. Go check it out!

ALSO, I just got myself a solo show at Pehrspace in Echo Park. It's not till mid May, but I'm excited! I've got my work cut out for me, and I'll be making a LOT of new work very, very soon, so stay tuned!

der alter fuchs

2009-01-17T14:43:00.001-08:00

Check out this amazing sweater I got!

It's got animals on it! I think they're supposed to be foxes, but their color kind of suggests coyote. In any case, WOW. Awesome score for me. Check out the eyeballs on the smaller fox...it looks like his papa fox just told him the facts of life or something equally awkward. Or maybe he's just a little retarded.

The trees wrap all the way around the back!

And surprisingly flattering for such a ridiculous garment, too.

Have a happy weekend everyone! Go frolic in your backyard like a happy fox!

sketch book dribble

2009-01-15T20:05:00.000-08:00

I have to resort to my sketchbook this week for blog content. How did it get to be Thursday already??

When I sketch it's usually not to make pretty pictures, and definitely not to impress anybody with my mad crazy drawing skills, which I think is why a lot of people keep sketch books. Perhaps that was my M.O. once upon a time, but these days it's just a catch-all for ideas. It's like a big old net for my thoughts, and the drawings in them are usually pretty subpar, scribbly garbage. But guess what? Scribble garbage is all you get today!

Speaker skirt girl.

Hey, Yuki sketches! Just generating some ideas...

My own personal version of Witch Baby from the Dangerous Angel books by Francesca Lia Block. I ate those books up when I was in high school. They're just written so lovingly. They fanned the flame of my enthusiasm for Los Angeles by making it seem like a magical, lyrical place, which I still think it is.

Roller skater...I see now that I forgot to give her a butt. Oops.

Sketch for a painting, and sketch of my beloved. He would not appreciated it if he knew I posted this drawing, so don't tell him, k?

Guess who these two fine fellows are!

It's a tiny, tiny doodle of little Pete and Artie, and Strongest Man in the World. Can't you tell?!

Okay, back to illustrating for me. I have a super awesome sweater to show you on Saturday, so stay tuned.

tigers + galleries

2009-01-10T21:02:00.000-08:00

I've been busy doing freelance stuff all week (and probably will be for the next while), so I had to dig around in the crusty archives of my tiny little computer to find something half way decent to show you. I found you some tigers and puppies. You love tigers and puppies!

I love tigers. Somewhere in the great gobs of stuff from my childhood that are gathering dust in my mom's garage there is a collection of stuffed tigers that I curated. I touched a baby tiger once. It wasn't soft...it was close in texture to dog hair. Not very baby-like at all.

I had to do these really fast, so they're not super immaculate in their presentation or anything. They're marker and colored pencil on animation paper.

Also, for everyone or anyone who has asked me when will you/have you ever/are you going to have your work in a gallery, I can finally say "Why yes, yes I will!"

I'm going to have a little show at the Occidental College Library this coming fall! A few quick facts about Occidental College, if you're curious: it's in Eagle Rock, Barack Obama went there for a while before transferring to Smart People Who Will Be President Someday College, and LOTS of movies and TV shows have been filmed there, including your secret favorite movies, Don't Be A Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and Clueless. I realize having a show in a library may seem a little hokey-pokey but I almost can't think of a place more appropriate for me to display my stuff. I really, really love libraries and books and my second best job ever was working in the library at CalArts because I got to look at cool stuff in books all day and smell that paper-slowly-decaying scent. It's nice that it's so far in advance too, since I have time really get together a big body of new work for it (plus more time to procrastinate).

But that's not for quite a while. In the mean time:

I'll be in participating in a gallery show and weekend sale at the Partow Gallery here in LA on January 31st-February 2nd. More details to come!

I've been asked to contribute to Kevin Dart's forthcoming book "Seductive Espionage: The Art of Yuki 7", which is like the biggest compliment ever. There's going to be a show at Gallery Nucleus in July when the book is released, too. I'm really determined to do a super good job on my piece so I've already started sketching stuff and gathering my ideas together.

So yeah, not too shabby a start to the New Year, I don't think.

I'll have some new drawings for you next week. Really!

new year's resolutions + black cats + store updates

2009-01-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

Okay, time to end my holiday blog break. It was nice to get away from the keyboard but now it's time to get back into the swing of updating twice weekly again. It's been a pretty hectic couple of weeks, actually. Here are some cute spooky black cats!

They're kind of quick and sloppy but I did them in a rush right before Unique LA. They were in little frame ornaments hung from my pink tree. I don't know what it is about black cats, but people who have them just love them to pieces and are attracted to anything that has a black cat on it, so these sold most quick. I like all kinds of kitties, personally, but I'm probably most drawn to giant filthy three legged ginger tabbies if anything (my mom has a cat that fits that description to a tee: Zeus).

I usually make a resolution every year on New Year's and then totally forget what it was a week later. This year those resolutions will be archived right here, so I can't forget them! My 2009 life improvement plans are as follows (in no particular order):

-Get a dog! I work at home and it kinda sucks being alone all day while Sean is working. It would be ever so nice to have a little pooch around, although I think that might not happen until we move out of the apartment we're in now (no dogs, no cats). I'm quite partial to small dogs, cause you can take them everywhere with you. And while I love cats, I just can't picture having a cat without having a whole house and yard for that cat to rule, where as dogs don't really care where they are just as long as they're with you. I like daschunds and frizzy little terriers that look like they have sideburns.

-Be kind to myself...basically, treat myself the way I'd want to be treated by me if I wasn't me. Fancy words for "take better care of yourself" I guess. Not that I'm bad at it, I just think I could be better at it.

-Draw every day. I haven't drawn in a few, and it was a nice break, but I really just need to get into the habit of getting something down in my sketchbook everyday. It's really helpful when I do: it keeps ideas flowing and of course I discover things that I wasn't even looking for when I just doodle...also, it's fun! Drawing is way fun. It's one of the funnest things ever. It's easy to forget when you do it for a living, but it really is my preferred pass time.

-Join wardrobe remix on flickr. Why? Because it's FUN! I don't know how you, dear reader, may feel about clothes/fashion/getting dressed, but I think it's just plain interesting to look at what a whole bunch of other clothes obsessed people are wearing and then add your own concoction to the mix. Plus clothes have everything to do with your design, in a character design sense of the word. What you wear really affects your shapes and proportions, besides revealing a good deal about your personality. See? I just made clothes seem like art. My only reservation about it is having to take a picture of myself nearly every day, which seems like a lot of effort, even though I know it's totally not. But I'll do it! I will!

-Get married. Oh, what? Didn't you know? I'm going to be Brigette Jimenez come next fall. We have got soooooo much wedding planning to do, I can't even begin to think about it. BUT it will happen, and it will be great fun.

-Write. Not "write more" or "write my memoire" but just plain write. I really love writing, and reading, and I even went to CSSSA for two years for writing, and I think about writing all the time, but I barely ever put pen to paper. I write this blog, sure, but that doesn't count!

Also, in the shop now: little frame ornaments, new buttons, rainy day print, and bearded lady print. Go get 'em!

grampa's christmas cards + winter break

2008-12-19T00:01:00.001-08:00

I don't think I've ever mentioned this before, but my grandfather on my dad's side was an artist. He worked for a company called Josten's that made class rings and diplomas and such in Owatanna, Minnesota, for several years. Like any good artist, he made a new Christmas card every year (a tradition that I have yet to catch on to...maybe when I have some dogs or babies to show off I'll get into it). Last November when I was in San Francisco for APE my uncle handed me a big, fat stack of those Christmas cards. It seems that the responsibility of cataloging and sorting through and sharing-with-the-rest-of-the-world of grampa's work has come to rest on my shoulders, so here's a few cards that I liked the best. It's their internet premiere, and probably the first time anyone besides family has seen them in many, many years...

There's more of these guys on my flickr. I finally broke down and got myself a flickr pro (200 images is really not that many). Merry X-mas to me!

I never knew grampa that well as he died when I was only seven, and he wasn't around much before that. I do remember him sleeping on the couch in our living room with the TV on and wondering if he would wake up if I changed the channel to cartoons...

What do you think? Did I inherit any of my skillz from this guy?

Also, I'm taking a Winter Break from my blogging responsibilities. Don't be sad, I'll be back after Christmas! I've just got so much seasonal stuff to do: bake vegan goodies, watch like 1000 hours of TV, and go to Bahooka for my yearly Hawaiian Christmas fix. I know Christmas + Hawaii probably doesn't make sense to you, but if you go to Bahooka and check it out this time of year you won't regret it. Me and Sean have made it a holiday tradition. We're going to take our dogs or babies there with us when we have some! I'm spending Christmas by the seaside this year in my hometown, and although it is without fail a green Christmas every year, we may actually have rain, which sounds just utterly cozy to me. Hopefully when I return from my break I'll be recharged and fat and rested and ready to take on some smashing New Year's parties.

Here's wishing you a Merry Christmas! See you later!

the new buttons + christmas cartoons

2008-12-17T19:09:00.000-08:00

Print versions of the Shangri-la paintings have been added to the shop! Later this week I'm planning on adding the remaining ornaments that I made for Unique, and the new buttons, too. Here's your button sneak peak:

Half are the same, but the other half are new. The tattooed lady and the coyote with his cup of tea seem to be the most popular...I know because they were at Unique with me last weekend too.

Okay! It's almost Christmas! I really want you to watch some seasonal entertainment! I'm an American, and I live in Southern California where there is almost no weather, and so I cannot really tell what time of year it is unless the TV is telling me. And that's nothing to be ashamed of, cause as a result I get all warm and fuzzy over YouTube, and that's a pleasant feeling. So here's my top picks, hand selected for your nostalgic viewing pleasure!

It actually doesn't really feel like Christmas if I don't watch this one. Something about watching all the toys march around, and the way the cozy house actually feels cozier than any house I have every been in... I really like this maniacally giggling version of Santa. So jolly!

You know how I feel about Donald. He's my favorite, and there's sooooo many good cartoony moments in this one. I especially like how the snow makes a raspberry sound when it lands on him at 3:32-ish. Yay!

I think they got EVERY Muppet and Sesame Street character into this special. Seriously.

I watch this every single year. My mom taped it off of TV when I was a kid, and until the VHS just plain wouldn't play anymore we watched it. Some of the clay puppets are pretty creepy, like the pigs, for instance. They're weird man/pig things. But the majority of it is pretty magical and Christmassy! I think my favorite bit is the California Raisins singing Rudolph. Yeah.

Of course, you should also watch the Charlie Brown Christmas special, and all the Rankin/Bass stuff you can get your hands on, but I just figured that goes without saying. Happy Holidays guys!

doodles + unique pics

2008-12-15T21:57:00.000-08:00

I don't have any pretty pictures for you today, AND on top of that I DB'd last week and only posted once. Bad show, very bad show. But I did manage to get in some doodle time while sitting behind tables the last couple weekends!

Hip girl rocking the shorts/tights/Tom's shoes combo. Her hair reminded me of when my hair was really short, and her big Ray Bans reminded me of how I almost spent a grip of cash on awesome limited edition Ray Bans like six months ago.

Doodles...I still have a really hard time drawing roses. Whenever I feel discouraged I like to write "note to self: I am a genius" on a post it note and stick it to my desk. Strangely, it forces you to be both confident and not take yourself very seriously at the same time.

This guy was lurping around the GOOD local world's fair...

Sketches of cats with many legs and booties and knitted hats. Mom has a cat that had to have his leg amputated a few months back and I guess I was thinking about cats with odd numbers of appendages...he's fine, by the way. I don't think he even misses his leg.

...the BIRDS!

A girl I saw last Saturday with amazing hair (the amazing part doesn't really come across well in the sketch), some unfortunate looking girls, and Brigitte Bardot (I copied you Jo! Sorry.)

And now here's some pics of the Unique LA show!

Setting up on Friday...

I made that "brigette b" sign, and those wood panel dealies with the paintings hanging off them. I wanted to make a really elaborate table cloth by sewing together like a hundred doilies but I ran out of time.

...waiting oh so patiently.

INTENSE!

It really was a good weekend. I sold lots of prints and buttons, and some framed stuff too. I met some super duper nice folks too, and some blog readers, and even some people who recognized my work from etsy! I discovered lots of cool people/art/stuff too, but I'm saving them for another post. This one's long enough already.

Oh yeah, and I'm having a little special in my shop right now: buy something and I'll throw in a 4x6" 'baby' print to go with it, your choice. It's a little X-mas bonus for you!

rainy day

2008-12-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

Way back last January (which feels like just about another lifetime compared to the present) I got an idea to do a painting of a girl walking around in the rain with an umbrella. One BAZILLION years later I finally got around to doing it.

It totally changed from the originally intended version. The only similarities are the girl, the umbrella, and the vertically inclined composition. I didn't get started on this image way back when because in part it really bothered me that I couldn't figure out what was going on with the girl. I didn't know what she was all about, or what the image was supposed to be about for that matter. I had to change it around this much to make it feel right. It's kind of an intangible thing and it looks pretty hokey in writing, but oh well. Sometimes making art is a hokey business.

In other news, Unique LA is this coming weekend and I have sooooo much stuff to do still to get ready for it! So I'm gonna go do that stuff!

shangri-la's + upcoming holiday events

2008-12-01T22:49:00.001-08:00

I spent most of today painting these guys. I can't believe it's so late! I was so wrapped up in painting that I didn't even notice the time passing and I almost forgot to eat dinner!

You should watch this video! Then you will understand what is so fascinating about these ladies and their shiny pants!

I know there are four in this clip and I only did three. I'm really, really bad at math guys. Not really...the 4th Shangri-la just wasn't always around. Sometimes she's there and sometimes she's not. Ultimately, I just thought a triptych looked so much nicer than a whatever a group of four paintings is called. I also took liberties with their long poofy sleeves because c'mon, those sleeves are just silly.

I'm gonna be really busy the next couple weeks, because I've got all this stuff coming up:

Handmade Brigade, Dec. 6th

GOOD Local World's Fair, Dec. 7th

Unique LA, Dec. 13th and 14th

Yes, very busy indeed. Wish me luck!

oh here she is!

2008-11-30T15:51:00.001-08:00

She's all done! Yay! Now there are four circus folk paintings. I think I may want there to be six, but I'm not sure which freaks I should go for next...suggestions? Maybe I should just watch Freaks?

Now I'm going to go get myself a soy latte from my favorite coffee spot, and paint some Shangri-la's.

work in progress

2008-11-29T23:32:00.000-08:00

Bearded lady. She's not done yet! I have to keep up with two posts a week though, so here she is, just in the nick of time.

Yep, she's gonna be blue. I like blue better.

AND: the three lovely ladies in the former post were none other than the Shangri-la's! They've got shiny, shiny pants. Hope you all are having a lovely weekend.

sketches + my movie picks

2008-11-25T21:52:00.000-08:00

I don't have a lot of pretty shiny colored work to show this week, but I don't really think anybody does. You know why? Because THANKSGIVING! That's why! Everyone is too distracted by pies and dealing with their own crazy families to be looking at blogs, or drawing pretty stuff, or posting fancy paintings. But because I promised myself I'd keep it up, I gotta get my two posts in this week, and here's one of them. These are all sketches which are really plans for paintings, and they'll be paintings very soon. Sorry they're so messy and incomprehensible.

First of all, a triptych with these three lovely girls. If you can guess who they are I'll give you one hundred points.

And some little foxes...

And this girl and guy, who are cut into slices like that for a reason, I swear! It'll make sense when it's done. They're shy.

And now, my Thanksgiving weekend movie picks! Stuff to watch while you are recovering from a day of eating till you almost explode, and then eating some more!

Charade: The 60's, Givenchy clothes, Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Paris, Saul Bass titles...it's like they made a movie just for me. It's not fantastic, but it's highly watchable and very stylish. It's light hearted in nature for a mystery/thriller too, so it won't upset your tummy by making you all tense.

Nightmare Before Christmas: In kid logic, this is the perfect Thanksgiving movie because just like Thanksgiving, it takes place between two vastly more important holidays: Halloween and Christmas.

Better Off Dead: It kind of takes place at Christmas time, well some of it anyway. I know I've blabbed about it before but if your sense of humor is anywhere near similar to mine, you'll probably fall in love with it. It has a very young John Cusack, exploding faces, dancing hamburgers, skiing, Barney Rubble, aardvark suits, raisins, and all those other things that make a film great.

The Sound of Music: YEAH. So I love The Sound of Music! Yes it's a story about a nun, in Austria, and they sing on mountains while riding bikes. It's great. If you can't at least appreciate the wonderous filmmaking in this movie, apart from all the singing and nunnery, then I think your soul may be a little broken. It's just beautiful to look at.

Smokey Mountain Christmas: Although technically a made for TV movie, this one really makes or breaks the holiday season for me. They used to play it every year on USA, channel 7, at least a hundred times between October and January. It has, hold your breath, Dolly Parton as a country singer who returns to the log cabin of her youth to find some X-mas spirit. There's orphans in it! It's undeniably hokey, and there's singing in it, but me and my little sis eat it up every year. So ridiculous it's good.

Three Caballeros: It doesn't go anywhere, and it doesn't have to. I think most of the time is spent watching Donald Duck chase women and have strangely psychodelic visions of cacti and flora, but it's so beautifully art directed, who cares? And how can you beat lyrics like "Three happy chappies in snappy serapes"? You can't.

I will probably watch all of these this weekend, after I eat my Tofurky and homemade cranberry sauce. Have nice holidays everybody!