Monday, January 21, 2008



My Brilliant Other Career

Well, not exactly. Although I have sold a few of my watercolor paintings throughout the years, I have approached them as a personal pressure relief valve from my work in film. I became involved in watercolor when I was a teenager - when I first met Lee Blair - one of the guiding lights of the California School of watercolor which made national news back in the 1930's. I was so impressed with both the technique and the subject matter of those early California Style paintings. The technique was direct and spontaneous - unlike the East Coast and English Schools which are basically drawings that are then carefully tinted with watercolor washes. The Californians put it down quickly with broad strokes and very little preliminary drawing. The subject matter was considered ugly by some. Lee was especially famous for genre scenes of life in Southern California - sometimes showing the tawdry side of life. Some critics have classified these images within the "Social Realist" school.

My friend Steve Moore publishes "FLIP", an incredible monthly web magazine that just so happens to feature me in the month of January. I discuss my work in watercolor, what kind of thought that I put into each piece, and how my work in watercolor differs from my work in the animation industry. The images above are a couple of my favorites, and there's more at "FLIP":

http://flipanimation.net/

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Robot Chicken Storyboards


This summer I spent some time with the wonderful people at Shadow Animation storyboarding on Robot Chicken. This is one of the shows aired around midnight on Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" programming block. The pace is fast and furious putting out a show on a very small budget. One of the pleasures of working on the show was that production moved so quickly. The animators would begin working almost immediately on things that I storyboarded just a couple of weeks previously. The format of the show is sketch-comedy with some of the sketches being lengthy and some sketches playing as short as one or two seconds. Click HERE to see one of my favorite sketches from the Christmas episode.