The Lost Boards part 2 January 22, 2013 12:12

Something I forgot to mention yesterday, which is that observant readers might have noticed the big stone menu suddenly changed into a flat rock after the first few panels.  I'm pretty sure that the flat stone menu came first, and then I decided that since it was a menu, it should look more like a menu.  So I changed the first few drawings.

Anyway, today's offering is from the same sequence.  In the opening minutes of The Croods we need to get an idea of what life is like for our caveman family.  In early development days we had the men out hunting and the women gathering.  This didn't mean that the women had things any easier than the men.  This was a little sequence where Eep is picking berries.  The plan here was to have Eep doing battle with an extremely aggressive flytrap-ish botanical.  Eep likes this sort of stuff, she's probably the most aggressive and certainly the most fearless of the Crood family.

I draw these panels with a black china marker, which is a crude sort of drawing instrument - basically a giant crayon.  It keeps things fast, as sharp detail is impossible.  There are a mixture of finishes in this sequence.  The first five panels are a second-pass over my initial rough drawings.  Panel six, through thirteen are my first rough sketches.  If I had more time I would have cleaned these up to look more like the others, but they are a good example of the sort of energy I want to capture in my drawings.  It's pretty obvious I didn't spend much time on them, probably less that fifteen to thirty seconds.  A second pass will take more like three to ten minutes per drawing, depending on the complexity.  Panel 21 took about ten, as I wanted to clearly describe how Eep was using her body weight and leverage to subdue the plant.

Croods Update - The Lost Boards part 1 January 22, 2013 11:16

As I write this I am at Skywalker Sound in the Kurosawa stage where we are working on the final sound mix for The Croods.  This means I have a bit of time to finally get this Blog going again - and not a moment too soon!  Croods is due to be released on March 22.

I drove up from Los Angeles so I could have my bicycle here.  On weekdays I ride from the inn where I stay on property, to the tech building and back again.  On the weekend I punish myself by going into San Francisco and riding up hills till I barf.  More on that later.

This morning I am publishing some deleted story panels from the movie.  I have a big box of them - I'm still in the dark ages when it comes to boarding which means all of my panels are still on paper rather than in a computer file.  This is a little series where Grug, the caveman father is getting ready for an early morning hunt with his son, Thunk.  On the outskirts of their hunting grounds there used to be a massive menu, which I imagined had been there for generations.  With only two items, it isn't really much of a choice.  After picking what they'll be trying to find, Grug leads Thunk over to another rock.  This one depicts all the things that they need to steer clear of - all the things that can kill them.  There are more things in the Crood world that can hurt you than can feed you.  Pretty much everything on that rock is in the movie, with the exception of the exploding cactus on the upper right of the painting.

I really miss the exploding cactus.

Then Grug and Thunk move on to choosing their hunting tools, which consist of either a stick or a rock - the idea behind all of this was to show how spare their caveman lives are.  Grug and Thunk do a round of Rock, Paper, Scissors to determine who gets what, but since there is still no Paper or Scissors, they each choose Rock and their match ends in a draw.  So in the end, Grug flips Thunk like a coin.

The only bit of this that survived was the coin toss, which is still in the film.  Only instead of flipping his son, Grug flips his mother-in-law.

Cave Girl Drawing September 24, 2012 08:35

As you can probably imagine, I've been drawing a lot of cave related things the last few years.  Cave bats, cave bears, cave centipedes, etc.  Put the word "cave" in front of anything and it changes everything.  The next time you can't think of what to draw, try it.  Cave Christmas.  Cave unicycle.  Cave birthday party.   You get the picture.

This was drawn as an invitation to a Croods dinner.  I wish the cavegirl's menu had been more cavey, but I ran out of time.  Earlier in the making of this movie we did have a caveman menu.  I was quite fond of it, and it made several appearances in my storyboards before ultimately being dropped for good.  My caveman menu varied in its appearance, but it was always huge.  In its simplest form it was a series of things painted on an outdoor rock wall.  The cavemen would gather around it to choose what they would try and hunt for dinner.  In it's final form it was two huge slabs of rock, angled against each other like an open menu.  It dwarfed the people that used it.  There were only two things pictured, one per page.  On the first, a bird, on the other, an egg.  Presumably the bird was the same one that had laid the egg.  The point being that there were few options in the Croods' world, all of them being pretty simple.  The more subtle message was that the Croods didn't have a strong hold on life - if that bird ever disappeared the Croods wouldn't be far behind.

This drawing would represent a slightly different take on the Crood world.  A slightly more comfortable version.

Cave girl on her way to dinner.

Mugs ahoy! September 21, 2012 10:40

Good morning!  Well, a lot's been happening since I last posted.  Croods is zooming along (more on that later) but on the home front the interesting thing is that our mugs have been selling well, and all have been arriving at their destinations in good time.  Meanwhile, I've been scouring the country buying up as many of the Indian Red Polychromos pencils that I can, because I discovered during Dragons that I like drawing with them.  The brick color is easy on the eyes and I think it blends nicely with the colors I might wash on afterwards.  Unfortunately I ran out and after trips to three art supply stores I came up with only five pencils.  So I began searching the internet and found that they seemed to be missing from the planet in general.  There didn't seem to be a lack of green or blue pencils, leading me to wonder where Indian Red ones were coming from.  I have several theories, ranging from dried reddish lemur dung to a deep mine in Mojave run by a smallish tribe of night dwelling trolls.  The latter theory would explain the sporadic supply, as trolls are lazy and only trade their precious red minerals for bags of uncooked black beans and lengths of the manilla rope that they favor.  It must be especially harrowing for the art-supply employee, elected by the choosing of a short straw, to drive into the desert at night and sit by the entrance of an open shaft with his bags of beans and coils of rope to listen for the scrabbling and scratching of troll claws as they come out of their terrible holes, offering handfuls of red mineral by moonlight.  The skittish pencil salesman would allow his pockets to be filled with the precious red dirt and endure the occasional exploratory bite on his hands, then bid farewell to the monsters as they drag their rope and beans underground, chuckling and burping.

Thanks to the bold and adventurous men and women of the art supply industry I'm happy to report I received several boxes of the rare Indian Red pencils yesterday.  So now I'm drawing again, and will be for many months before my stock is gone.

I've been writing Kiskaloo, preparing to start drawing again in late December.  I always try to have a backlog of comics written before I draw, as my greatest anxiety is the writing.  Once that's done, the drawing and inking is fun.

Girl with coffee

Pink Zebra July 26, 2012 23:58

Okay, so I did the pink variant.  I also added a pupil to the shark, which I didn't think I would like, but I did.  So then I went back and added one to the blue version.

But the really important thing is that the new run of the Ogo mugs arrived today.  We checked the first box and they look perfect, so soon you won't have to buy the haunted ones from Ebay.  Last preparations are falling into place for the store, and it will be open within a few weeks.  I'll keep you informed of the progress.