Kid Suburbia

This is a drawing I did for one version of a children's story I wrote a few years ago. I don't usually depict the landscape with deep perspective like this. My compositions tend to be flat––all subject, no background, no context––so this was a departure. Even when I am in a realistic mode, with perspective and everything, I tend to imagine the drawing rather than working from reference. This filtering subtracts extraneous material and adds the quirks and oddities that make the art personal. This is probably as photographic as I get, but the light is flat and the background is blank. It's the suburbia I remember from years ago, a bit like the world Charles Schulz depicted.

Kid's Books

Nice thing about a blog: you get the chance to show-and-tell stuff that you love, sometimes stuff that never materialized into a book or a product or an ad. This is one such. A fun concept, an idea pitched to me from someone's I-Phone in NY, drawn that evening, then we all went on to other ideas and forgot about it. My files are populated with orphans like this. Cute though.

Cute Kid

Last year my state fair people were all over the MTC buses, which was a cool thing, although it made my driving a bit erratic whenever I spotted one.

One of my greatest pleasures is simply inventing people: odd, familiar, usually comic but sometimes surreal or sinister. This crowd was pure friendliness. I was watching some 50s Warner Brothers cartoons over the weekend and was reminded of where my line comes from when I'm in this comic/friendly mode. The brisk, bright colors overlapping the lines, the uncompleted textures and jotted in backgrounds. I could imagine living in that world, or creating such a place for an animated film sometime. Anybody got a story that needs visualizing? Anybody know anybody at Pixar?