SWALLOW BOOK FOUR

On sale now, with art from myself and several other amazing artists including Toby Cypress, Bill Presing, Paul Pope and Teddy Kristiansen. Great printing, beautifully produced by Ashley Wood.

RIME MAGAZINE / NEW SITE

After seven years of publishing a print publication LA-based RIME Magazine, has put their experience and creativity online to create the same heavy impact they did with the print version. While the hard copys are still expected to remain in circulation, the frequency per year will reduce to 2 to 3 issues in a higher quality/book format, while the website will run as the flagship platform for Rime. Publisher of Rime, Jason Flores says, "We see a major advantage with our access to content and experience in this industry and we know we can be very successful in being a strong competitor online."

SOUL ASSASSINS CREW/ LOS ANGELES

Grand Theft Auto IV XBox 360 Elite/ SA Studios

In honor of the launch of the biggest game of the year, XBOX has put out a limited edition GTA IV Xbox 360 Elite console. Only 250 of these are available in North America, 500 worldwide. You can't buy these...
Only a select few "Taste Makers" were chosen to receive one. It also comes with an XBOX case containing a full line-up of Xbox accessories, 1600 microsoft points, 12 month gold subscription card all for XBox Live. My Agency SA Studios was in charge of Personally handling a list of these "Taste Makers" on the west coast.

Some Rough Stuff

Oftentimes I will sketch personalities from TV with the intention of refining and inking them up later, maybe even doing them in full colour. Here are a couple of recently rediscovered caricatures still in their embryonic rough pencil stage. I was combing through a file drawer full of rough sketches and came across these that I'd sketched a couple years ago, so I thought I'd post them up here just for the heck of it.

The one of Jon Stewart I believe I had sketched from when he hosted the Academy Awards the first time. I was planning to try drawing him again a couple times from "The Daily Show" before committing him to final inking, just to be sure I had the likeness to my satisfaction. That's actually something I often do, waiting for a few days at least before taking a look at a caricature anew with a fresh eye, just in case it then strikes me as falling short of being a good likeness. If I hurry to finish it up immediately after sketching it, I have sometimes been horrified to see that it just isn't the person I thought I had drawn when I look at it later!

In his book, "The World of Hirschfeld", legendary showbiz caricaturist Al Hirschfeld describes this very same dilemma back when he'd been commissioned  in 1967 to do a caricature of TV star Garry Moore for a network ad campaign. After tossing off a sketch of Garry Moore, one of Hirschfeld's neighbours, Mildred Jones, who was visiting with his wife Dolly passed his drawing table and exclaimed, "That's him all right - I'd know him anywhere. Buster Keaton!" Flabbergasted, Hirschfeld ran to his wife to ask her who it was. Without hesitation, she replied, "Buster Keaton". It took him many more furious attempts at sketching Garry Moore before Hirschfeld got a positive identification from wife Dolly, whom he claimed was his most honest critic.

This caricature of Uma Thurman has been languishing in my file drawer for two years as well, although I'm pretty sure it's her, as I had run it by several of my students at Sheridan that year when I was covering the art of caricature, and they all recognized it as lovely Uma. This is one that I really must finish up in colour someday.

Naruto Manga 392

This Manga starts off with itachi suffering from the effects of susano walks slowly to sasuke. Sasuke backs down with fear of what will happen. As itachi going for sasuke's eyes he dint pluck it out instead he touched sasuke forehead like what he always did when they were younger. Afterthat, Itachi collapses.

Is This The Climax of the battle? well find out in the next manga.

"My Friend Rabbit"

I was checking out some of my bookmarked blogs that I hadn't been to in awhile and decided to take a look at Jason Groh's Blammo site. I was quite taken with the publicity image that greeted me in one of his most recent posts, pictured at left, from a new show called "My Friend Rabbit", airing on NBC and also Treehouse here in Canada. Jason, a first-rate cartoonist by the way, is apparently directing this show at Nelvana, so I thought that I should make a point to catch it and see how it looks. 

I caught it on Treehouse today at 1:00 and was quite delighted with it. To be honest, I'm not much of a fan of today's digitally animated TV shows, but this one manages to do the best job I've ever seen with the software it utilizes. (ToonBoom, from what I gather). Yes, there is still some of the computer cutout look that I don't care for, but there is also a lot of real drawing integrated into the animation as well. For instance, when characters walk, their legs and arms are fully animated in the classic style. When they speak, their head shapes may remain static but the mouths are fully articulating the dialogue in a very pleasing manner. There are many original poses created for each scene rather than an over-reliance on "symbols".  But the thing that strikes one initially are the very appealing character and background designs - all rounded, flowing shapes in the more classic studio cartoon approach.

I noticed in the credits that it said that the series was based on the books by Eric Rohmann, so I wanted to see what the original look was that they'd adapted. Interestingly, the animated series put me in mind of Disney's "Winnie-the-Pooh", and seeing the source material from which it is derived makes the comparison seem that much more apt, as the original book illustrations share some similarities to the E.H. Shepard drawings in the Pooh books. Both the Pooh and My Friend Rabbit book illustrations feature designs that are quite charming but perhaps a bit too simplistic to make the transition to animated characters which, in my opinion, need fleshing out in the design to allow for more personality and animated expression. As such, I think that the design team on "My Friend Rabbit" has done a marvelous job at embellishing the designs to make them more appealing and more conducive to the medium of animation.

Though I may not be in the target audience for this show, I know that I would have enjoyed it and been attracted to the design style back when I was of pre-school age. Congratulations to all who are involved in this show - I wish you much success with it!