science!

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!

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.

heartbeat underwater

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.

mr. minotaur

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

mythological

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.

brush pen part 2

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.

screwing around with a brush pen

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!

giants

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.

squirrels + magpies + owls

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.

tigers + galleries

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!

one double wide post this week + ape is coming! + trees

Ok, I was doing really good with two a week, but this week has just been toooooo crazy! So I'm just giving you one large-ish post instead. I've been getting my stuff together for APE and let me tell you something about getting organized: it's HARD, and it takes a LOT of energy. I'm in CalArts-crunchtime mode right now, with a wackadoo sleep schedule and I've been fueled mostly by big cups of tea (with the occasional soy latte for emergencies) and packets of Emergen-C. But enough about me. I know why you come here and it's not for the jibber jabber!

I made a little series of family tree paintings for these crazy, kitschy frames I found.

First, an awesome frame shaped like a house! I can't take credit for the creation of the frame, but I can take credit for filling it with art.




This frame was really, really hard to photograph. It has a shiny finish on it, but the pic makes it look super glossy, which it's not!



The little paintings are digital, and I printed them out, cut them out, and put them inside of this awesome frame. I've never seen one like it...I wish I could find more. I'd do a whole series.


I got some of these "family tree" frames, too. They were really, really horrible looking when I got them. They're made out of some awful fake pewter stuff, and they looked like something your grandma would have on top of her TV, but not like a cool old school grandma. Like a REAL grandma who likes things that are made from pewter and filled with embarrassing photos.

I turned the first one into a librarian tree, complete with Miss Lib herself, and her owl friend, a fox taking in some new fiction.



These frames are double sided, so on the back I filled the frames with pages cut from an antique book (which, in all respect to books everywhere, was an awful book and kind of deserved to be used as decoration).



Here's the actual little paintings, since they're kinda hard to see in the photograph. Taking good photos is HARD!





This tree is smaller, but it's the runaway hit so far.

On the front: a handsome, 1920's-esque family...




...on the back, cut outs from a vintage National Geographic.





And here are the subjects themselves! Sean said that they seemed to be from New England, and that they instantly implied a story to him. He asked me what the story was, but I leave that up to the viewer. I didn't have a really clear idea of who they were when I made them, I just know that I like them a whole lot.




These, along with quite a few other one of a kind framed prints, are going to be on sale at APE this weekend! If you're going to be there then you should stop by, get your button, and check them out in person. I'm really really reeeeaaaally curious to see what kind of reaction they get...they're kinda artsy, but kinda crafty, but quite character design-y. Oh yeah, and there's more pics of them on my flickr!

So, I've still got some printing to do, but I will take LOTS of pictures on my little San Francisco journey and let you all know how it goes.

See ya next week!