I’ve been spending a lot of time a lot of time thinking of all the ways to make this a better page. From tweaking the look to doing everything I can to make the archives easier to navigate.
Finally I’ve take the first and easiest step of adding an “about” page. For the longest time I never saw the point of them, they were the text equivalent of an elevator speech or a way of packaging the character page and a few other odds and ends that the page already had. But I’d been hearing from a lot of people in cartoonist forums so I figured it wouldn’t hurt me to put one up as I’m starting to overhaul the page anyhow.
This week I decided to give myself a nice break and sat down to enjoy some films from one of my favorite animation studios… Aardman Animation. I’ve been a fan of Aardman since Creature Comforts, and have been enjoying their work eversince. Along with admiring their meticulous craftsmanship of clay stop motion animation I’ve always liked their simultaneously dry and slapstick sense of humor a la monty python along with their essential britishness which doesn’t pander to the common Hollywood denominator.
The first for this week was a long time, Chicken Run. Featuring a wonderful cast of character actors (and Mel Gibson) Chicken Run parodies POW camp films in general and the Great Escape in particular dealing with a flock of chickens trying to escape from a Yorkshire Chicken farm before they are made into chicken pie’s.
In the process we have life in the camp… er farm meticulously created with a great ensemble cast (I especially like Jane Horrocks as Babs) and one hilarious gag after another. Despite e all of this it stays entertainingly grounded.
Our second takes to a golden age of Piracy that never happens with The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (or as it’s called over here, The Pirates! Band of Misfits.)
Once again we have an all star cast with Hugh Grant as the Pirate Captain, Martin Freeman as his first mate with David Tennant as Charles Darwin. It’s all about an incompetent band of Pirates led by the Pirate captain who is desperatly trying to win the Pirate of the Year award. He gets a chance when they capture Charles Darwin who see’s that the ship parrot, Polly is actually a Dodo and convinces them to go to London with him to enter Polly in the Scientist of the Year competition from there things get a little silly, with Darwin’s chimpanzee butler, Mr. Bobo, and an ax-crazy Queen Victoria played by Imelda Staunton.
THis is all a fantastic roller coaster ride where nothing is too ridiculous or too silly and all great fun.
All in these are two great samples of what Aardman is capable of and I can’t wait to see what they do next.
Some concept design I was playing with for an upcoming story line. I was trying to go for a cryptozoological approach with something that is in the same family as a Koala but clearly is something else (in hindsight I imagine such a creature would have better camouflage than it’s more herbivorous cousins.)
I’m mostly happy with it though I’m worried that it may still look too cuddly (but one could say the same thing about tigers and grizzly bears)
Today’s sketch is from this month’s free museum Thursday which I would have shared earlier if I hadn’t been distracted by the Seahawks game going on at the same time.
Anyway this one’s my latest try at drawing the Baptism of Christ by Giovanni Battista Foggini. Between it and Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Massimiliano Soldani Benzi this is an ongoing challenge I like to take a crack at every couple of months since depending on the angle, not to mention the complexity this is a sculpture that gives me a completely different sketch every single time.
I confess I don’t think this one of better ones. The excuse I’m sticking to is I was sitting too far away from it.