Get set...

Bit stressed out today.

BUT. Here's is shot 21 of my film, cleaned up and colored. I was testing out how brush pen would look, and I'm pretty happy with the result. Means a lot more stressed out days to come, but who's counting?

Tempus fugit

Hmmm, haven't posted in a while. Just been working on my film mostly...rough animation is almost complete!

Some doodles from the past few weeks--weird babies, Mr, Dursley, classmates.


Eeeh, my scanner is so lousy...

Dreams

I have really bad dreams a lot. It gets kind of annoying. This was one of the more vivid ones.

A quick comic I drew on the train after a particularly grumpy morning.
Speaking of dreams and comics, I recently read Julie Doucet's My Most Secret Desire. It's a drawn compilation of Doucet's dreams--disturbing and intimate. She dreams about being a man a lot and giving birth to cat-babies. I like reading about dreams; even though they're not real, I do believe they provide a lot of insight on a person's character. Anyway, I liked the book.

Oh yeah...my film

I guess I never mentioned it here, but I finished my intermediate film last December. It was pretty exciting on my part for actually completing the damn thing. Took over a year, plus a summer of slacking. Honestly, the choice came down to sweating over peghole-punched paper all day in my apartment or...go to the beach. Anyway, you can watch it here.



Some concept work I did for it back in the day. When plant had spots.

Uh...yayyyy!

Old stuff and sketchbooks

I recently started a new sketchbook. It's a 5.5 x 8.5 inch Canson basic sketchbook, black hard-bound. It's super tiny for my standards, but I wanted to try something new. I find that choosing a sketchbook that is going to be your companion for the next few months or so is like choosing a new jacket for winter. It's not going to be used forever, but you'll need it for a good while, so you have to make sure it fits you well.

So far I feel like my drawings have been less free, now that I'm confined to such a small space. I'm hoping in the next few weeks that I'll loosen up and learn to embrace my tiny companion.

Anyway, I have nothing to show from it for now. But I found a sketchbook I had from last summer that I abandoned for those nice 8 x 10 inch black paperback Moleskins. There were a few drawings in it that amused me so I painted them for fun.
I don't know why money stuffed in a dog's butt was funny to me 8 months ago. What specifically made me decide to do that? It's weird looking at old stuff. Even if it's only over a span of a few months, your work reflects how often your mind changes.

Or not. Some early sketches of Ice Cream Man characters. Still looks about the same.


Another oldie. Dated June 16th.
As I already told the 4 people who read this, I saw another guy jerking it on my street last week. Why me? I don't think I'll document it this time though.

I'm so distracted

Is it February already??


What an annoying feeling it is to have so many things on your mind when really you should be focusing on your work and not reading about pinworms on the internet. I recently learned about pinworms from a friend and am FASCINATED by the thought of them. These things crawl out of your butt at night and lay eggs around your anus. Then they secrete a substance that irritates your butt and makes you scratch it, thus spreading the pinworm love.


How utterly amazing is it that a creature such as the pinworm can spread and reproduce so easily simply by making their hosts scratch their butts? To think how often people scratch their butts! Parasites are ridiculous!

Snow was pretty

Girls girls girls

A mini-painting.

Channeling a bit of that fatass horse in What's Opera, Doc?

Hey everyone, go watch GATE OF FLESH (thanks, Harry). A Japanese B movie from the 60's, starring Gooooood ol' Chipmunk a.k.a. Joe Shishido, this pretty cool actor who had cheek implants. He's also in one of my other favorite movies Branded to Kill, which is damn cool.

Bye, 2008

Hey y'all! Hope your new years have all been great. Three more years until the apocalypse! Some stuff from vacation.
Christmas in Hong Kong. I've been there many times before, but I'm still in awe every time I see the buildings and lights and the ridiculous amount of people. My dad lives in Mongkok, a popular tourist spot and shopping area, which has the highest population density in the world. Every night, several streets are blocked off so there'd be enough room for the heavy flow of pedestrians. Shiiiit!
Some drawings of Hong Kongers.
More adventures in China. My dad and I flew to Hefei, a city about four hours west of Shanghai. We went to a car parts factory in the middle of nowhere. It was extremely unsettling seeing people toiling over machinery and breathing in all those toxic fumes. Yet strangely fascinating.

Then a drive south to Huangshan a.k.a. Yellow Mountain. We visited a few ancient villages which were prominent during the Ming Dynasty. There are people still living there, mostly now working in the tourist trade. I spoke to a woman who told me her family has been at Huangshan for generations, and she showed me a picture of her great-great-grandmother when she was a baby. Then she sold me some Mao Zedong trading cards.
Then we climbed up. Walked up and down and up and down miles of stone steps. It was beautiful. No picture will ever capture what it was like to be standing up there looking down at the clouds.


I finish with this quote I found engraved on a plague:
"A relaxed and happy feeling comes from the harmonious coexistence between human and nature."

Pigeon-man

I made a pigeon head this week.
It was intended for my video art final project, but now I think it was just an excuse to make a gigantic bird head. Looks good when you wear it though. Here are stills from the project.
The project I originally had in mind was gonna be this epic part live-action part animation thing, with nightmare sequences and dead pigeons dropping all over the place. There was gonna be this part where this pigeon gets pierced to death by seeds. Alas, I think my vision was just too grandiose. Oh well.

When I was a kid, my grandfather used to raise pigeons in our backyard. Every few weeks or so, my grandma would wrangle a pigeon from the coop, kill it, and cook it for dinner. I used to stand there and watch pigeons dangling from the doorknob for years. I guess blatant animal cruelty wasn't a big issue in my family.