The Buzz on Maggie

Apparently good animation, art direction, and characters don't mean anything to Disney. The Buzz on Maggie is no more.

Lunchtime Birds

As I've said before, I usually try and carry a sketchbook with me at all times, and lunchtime is no different. I've been eating lunches alone recently (boo hoo!), but I don't mind it at all because I get to draw stuff! On the Disney lot there are tons of birds and squirrels running and flying around all over the place, especially around the commissary patio. I like to sit and watch them hop around trying to get food and whatnot. Some of them are pretty brave too! Yesterday this bird just came up and was hoping around on my small table eyeing my bag of chips and sandwich. He was chilling out 6 in. away from me for like literally 4 min. These guys above were my first quick sketches of some various birds. Most of them are jet black, so you can only see the shapes of their wings etc. when they're in the sun. That makes it kind of hard to see what exaclty's going on with their anatomy. But I guess if I really wanted to know, I could just look it up in a book or something.
Here's one of those squirrels I was talking about. If you crouch down with some food in your hand, they'll come running from 20 ft. away. But you'd better have something they like, because they seem to be picky eaters.
And here are some other lunchtime birds. They are also fun to draw, but at least the birds that fly don't give you weird looks for staring at them.
It was a strange thing to have models posing at lunchtime, but who am I to complain. Naw, these were just done from a magazine. I was actually just trying out these cool new brush pens last night and found some cool poses in a Louis Vuitton catalog. Ooh how fancy!

New Drawings

Howdy yall! Jeez, I haven't posted stuff in a while. I've been pretty busy with various freelance jobs taking up my precious weekends. But at least they're fun, awesome projects. Some friends and I get together once a week so we can talk about ideas and help each other out. But sometimes we haven't come up with anything new to share from the week prior, so we end up just drawing, which is a lot of fun. The burly man above and the gypsy lady below are characters that just came out of nowhere really, but I liked how they turned out. It almost seems that they could be husband and wife or something. That could make for a pretty interesting story...
This dude below is a chef who likes fish. That's what we were all drawing at the time, chefs. As my friend Ron pointed out, he kinda looks like Sloth from Goonies. Weird.

Below is another rendition of my Millionaire Cheetah character. I've been looking at a lot of M. Sasek lately, and have been studying his simplicity and basic shapes. I'm kind of getting tired of cartoon characters who are all squashed and two-heads high. I love elongated bodies, probably because I'm tall myself, as Gabe Swarr pointed out to me. He apparently likes drawing single shape characters, because that's how he looks.
And finally, at one point in the night my friends and I were drawing caricatures of eachother and of ourselves. So I whipped this self-caricature out in a couple of seconds, and actually liked how it turned out. To see some better caricatures of me and other people, check out Fred Osmond's blog.

Fancy Napkins!

My girlfriend likes to buy fancy party napkins with cool designs on them. And why not? They'll liven up any party! So there were a bunch of them on the table last night and I got inspired by the interesting shapes printed on them. And here are the results! Hooray!

Sunday Drawings!

"Yay! Finally something new to look at!" you're saying to yourself. That's right folks, it's a new post! I've been pretty busy this past week with freelance work and regular work, and will be more busy for the coming weeks probably. But, I'm trying to post as much stuff as I can, new stuff that is. I finally got some time on Sunday to sit down and draw some stuff. Lately, I've been trying to work on drawing more solid, solidly?, you get the idear. And so I found these great poses on the 'ol internette and got inspired. I like them because they aren't the run-of-the-mill model poses you see in most magazines.
In all of them the feet were cut off the picture, so I just added them in when I felt like it. I even tried taking the poses my self to see what they felt like and how the feet would be situated. And the thing I discovered is that I'm not as flexible as the young lady in the pictures. And though it may look like I'm scared to draw faces, her hair was indeed covering pretty much her whole face in every one. I've actually been practicing drawing girls' faces a lot recently, so I guess I could've tried to draw them, but I found that I liked how the hair added to the overall attitude of the poses. So why screw it up, right?!
After a while I got tried of drawing this girl, so I moved on some more cartoony stuff. The drawing below is based on a quick sketch I did on a paper towel the other day. Dang, I should've posted it, oh well, tomorrow. As you can probably tell, I draw the same characters a lot. It's mainly because they're trapped in my head and wanting to get out in some form. I've been developing a series to pitch based on them, but more recently I've been noodling with idea of a children's book. So once I get going more on that ,I'll start posting some ideas. I can't wait to see what jumps out of that closet!