captain scratchy beard

Hey, so, I graduated from CalArts quite a while ago, with a degree and everything, but somehow I never got around to posting my films online.  Booooooo on me.  I know.  It's especially terrible because SO MUCH of your life in the Character Animation department at CalArts is spent on somehow, some way, producing a cartoon.  All by yourself.  It's an absolute miracle these things get made at all.  They're hard to do!!

So today, after almost 6 years of sitting on the server at CalArts not being seen by much of anyone, I finally got this thing up on Vimeo!  (I needed help from one of my students to make this happen. Learning never ends, people!)


So here it is, my fourth year film.

Captain Scratchy Beard from brigette b on Vimeo.

Yes, I made cartoons before I made books!  And the girl in my cartoon is reading a book.  How's that for foreshadowing.

Oh yes, by the by:

I get a lot of e-mails from folks (students, mostly) with a lot of questions about a lot of things. Mostly art things.
I'm going to try and do a master "frequently asked questions" post soon, so if there's anything, anything, ANYTHING you wanna ask, please feel free!
You can ask in the comments or e-mail me:  brigette.b@hotmail.com
If you've already e-mailed me, please don't feel bad!  I just get too many to answer individually, and lots of them are the same questions over and over, so it'll be better for everybody in the end if I can just get them all answered at once.
Cool?  Cool.

back from the dead + some weirdo drawings

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.

duck and robot reprise

During my second year of CalArts I got that terrible "sophomore epic" bug. I planned out a film that was way too long, complex, and whose execution was faaaaaaaaar beyond my ability. I had been chipping away at it for a while when I heard a little voice in my head saying, "THERE IS NO WAY YOU CAN EVER FINISH THIS, JUST STOP! DO SOMETHING ELSE!" I was already pretty invested in the first idea, and I didn't exactly have a back-up plan...but I did have some drawings of a duck, and a girl robot (who was the girl robot from my first year film that will now sink into obscurity forever since it no longer exists digitally). So I said to Sean, "I uh...I have an idea. A duck, and a robot, go on a picnic. And I don't know what happens in the middle but it ends with dancing!" And so, with about two and a half months left to go, I belted out a couple minutes of cartoon.

That was like, three years ago. Most people would just get over their student film characters and get on with life, but I kind of adore my obnoxious duck and silent robot. So I developed their universe more and pitched my idea to a studio today. Nothing came of it, it really wasn't what they were looking for. But it was fun to hop back into duck/robot world for a while.



There's the robot, the duck, their mailman the International Carrier Pigeon, and their antagonistic television friend. Below that are some little vignettes of stuff that they could do. I might still do some color keys just for kicks!

Also, I had a great birthday with cake and art and presents!

SPEAKING OF CAKE...click this. Thank me later.

ALSO: I would like to report that I just got back from seeing Sleeping Beauty at the El Capitan, and not only was it totally beautiful and great, but I saw June Foray and she was wearing a necklace with a HUGE shiny silver Rocky on it, with rhinestones and everything!! I was so excited that I made everyone else look at it too even though they really didn't care. Someday I TOO will be an aged lady with cartoon jewelry!