Bear Heads.....

Here's some random doodles of a bear character I had rolling around in my head. Lately, when I draw I prefer to use Polychromos because it's an erasable pencil and it has a nice flow. Years back when I was working on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures For Bakshi & John K. and Beany & Cecil for John Kricfalusi, I was used to drawing in Col-erase, however John quickly got me out of that and told me to draw with Prismacolors for my character layouts. Prismacolor Pencils have a nice flow and you can get a drawing down pretty loose and quick, but the main problem is that they're nearly impossible to erase with! In order to correct the drawing, you had to use white out. I got used to drawing with those pencils and still like to sketch with them as seen here with the bear heads. My approach with Prismacolor is simple; I'll do a very light underdrawing first, then go over it with bolder strokes.
Most of the time though, I'm using Polychromos or Ebony pencils for my sketching, but will still switch back to Prismacolor for fun or col-erase for animation work.

The trouble with pitching shows...

Here's another character of a rat recording details from a crazy crime scene. It was from a project I was actively developing about six years ago that borrowed heavily from shows about detectives from the 50's and 60's. The pencil media is Polychromos Blue.
Now don't get me wrong, there's some great execs who take pitches all day long that get the ideas you're trying to sell...but unfortunately, there are a good number who have a hard time comprehending a good idea...or any idea.
It dawned on me after some rather unsuccessful pitches that a show like this could never fly today. It had a couple of strikes against it from the get go which I'll share with you here.
Strike One - It references a different time period. Because this show evokes old imagery from the 50's and 60's, Executives feel the show would never connect with todays' viewers.
Strike Two - The main character is an adult rat wearing clothes.
This would never fly with some executives because there would be too many confusing questions about the humanoid rat. I.E., Why is a rat wearing clothes? Rats can write? Is the rat really a human that looks like a rat? Why is the rat a detective? Can the rat talk? etc. etc. The questions would be too numerous to answer in a single sitting.
Besides, the rat is an adult and could never relate to children.
Strike Three - The rat character doesn't sing or have a band.  The kiss of death for a show like this. You see no band, no show.
Strike Four - The cartoon is a bit clever.  If the show has an ounce of wit or parody, the kiddies will never get it.
Strike Five - The cartoon has slapstick humor. You can't have characters hitting each other over the heads because kids watching will get the wrong idea and repeat it on their friends. Can you imagine the violence that could erupt nationwide?
Strike Six - The drawings are too slick and professional looking. If the drawing is drafted well, overseas animation studios will never be able to copy it. Better to stick to childlike drawings that are simpler to draw and kids can relate to better.
In other words, strive for the lower possible denominator. It's no wonder why kids don't watch cartoons anymore!

Discarded Portfolio Drawings: ...With the fishes...

Just so that you know, I'm doing my best to publish one post everyday (at worst one post every two days). I apologize for abandoning the blog for so long over the last couple of years, but I had a whole lot of personal issues that forced me to put it on the back burner. I'm committed to keeping the blog fresh, interesting and up to date, so please stay tooned. If there is anything you'd like to see more of, let me know.
Todays' post is of some fish, which I pulled from my portfolio about five years ago. However, for some reason I didn't discard them (and I throw out quite a few older sketches!) probably because I liked something about the design. Actually I still do! Years back I was a dedicated Bluth fan, I studied some of the animation of the fish from 'Xanadu' and 'Banjo The Woodpile Cat' and those influences made their way into these drawings.
Drawn with an Ebony pencil on regular bond paper, these sketches have no construction lines. These sketches were drawn clean, locking down the shapes and then adding the eyes, fins, mouths, etc.

Ruff sketch...

Here's a little quick sketch that I did of a pontificating fellow.

It was done in with an ebony pencil with plain copy paper.

Never underestimate the power of copy paper for pencil drawings...it's a great drawing surface for a couple of dollars per ream!

If you've noticed, I haven't posted a whole lot of cleaned up drawings in the past. The reason is simple; there's a power to the ruff sketch that comes right out of the imagination onto a clean sheet of paper. There's going to be a bunch of imperfections, but the power of the lines and the raw attitude of the pose makes it much more interesting to me than a labored over clean up. Besides, I can rough out a pose like this in a minute or two whereas a clean up will take me much much longer to lock down.

Bottomline, I'm able to post quick sketches much more frequently.

To this day, I learn a whole lot from rough drawings. It's almost like you can see how the artist approached the sketch. There's something about a really great ruff sketch that gets me totally enthused. The vitality of the drawing really takes over and makes the thing alive!

Now don't get me wrong...a really well done finished drawing can also be terrific...with the emphasis on 'can be'. But the truth is, some clean ups are merely adequate, and lose all the flavor of the original rough drawing because the rough is traced.

A direct tracing with a clean sheet of paper over the original almost always loses something in the process. Unless you have a master artist doing the clean ups!

When a great clean up artist is at work, he or she enhances the original rough by redrawing it, trying to plus the original.

I've worked with a few clean up artists over the years and some of them should have been animating because they were just that good. But they preferred working in the trenches because they did their jobs well and didn't have to worry about producing 7 feet of quality animation in a week. Thank god that we had these people content in their jobs because they made the character animators look sensational!

Anyway, getting back to the rough drawing above, a friend commented to me that this drawing wasn't all that rough. His point was that most of the detail was there and locked down in single lines.

Well, I've done ruffs that resemble lollipops with scribbles for legs and I've done drawings that have many of the elements close to locked down. But even with a drawing that appears to be close to done, there's still things that I would like to add or change before I finalize it.

OH by the way, I did this drawing today...not in 01 as I mistakenly scribbled on the bottom.

New Website Address

Finally, after years of people telling me that my old website on AOL was a real piece of crap, I finally registered for my own domain name and will be posting new webpages there over the next couple of weeks. Currently it's under construction. Thanks to Kevin O Neil for pushing me over the finish line.
New site is $#@!#$%@.com, so keep it on your favorites list.

UPDATE!!!! AUGUST 17th, 2011

Actually with this blogger account, there is no need for a separate website anymore.

And BTW,

that other site hasn't existed for a couple of years now....