Slappy Halloween!

New Book: Caffeine for the Creative Mind
The other night I attended a mixer celebrating the release of a new book, Caffeine for the Creative Mind, by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield. Stefan and Wendy are part of a small, hot-snot ad agency called The Brainyard, which has been a client of Slappy Pictures for several years now (click here to check out a fun cartoony flash piece I did for them a while back).

Caffeine for the Creative Mind is a huge collection of short creative exercises designed to get your brain working and keep you thinking outside of the box. I've seen a lot of books on creativity over the years, and while most of them are a load of hooey, this one is actually pretty darn good. Peppered throughout the book are interviews with assorted creative types, and I was one of the people they interviewed. I'd love to paste the text of the interview here for you to read, but then you might not buy the book and Stefan would come over here and pound me. Stefan is 6' 8". If you want to find out more about the book, check out the website, http://www.creativestretching.com/.

In the back of the book, they had each of the interviewees complete a simple drawing exercise, which was to take a doodle and create whatever image that doodle sparked in your brain.
Here's the doodle they gave us: Here's what I came up with:

I contributed some other stuff to the book as well, from caricatures of the authors to artwork used as raw material for a couple exercises. It's always fun working with Stefan, and overall I think he and Wendy did a great job with the book.

Sketchbook Pages

More Dusty Old Neverhood Stuff...
Here are some of my storyboards for the Weasel Chase movie, the first long cutscene in the game, which was directed and animated by Doug T. It's a shame he doesn't animate anymore -- his stop-mo work was always so funny and full of life.

Neverhood Fans -- Here's a Couple From Long Ago
Seems many of the first people to stumble across this blog are migrating over from Doug TenNapel's site, so here's something for you fans of the Neverhood, our stop motion PC game.
These are the first drawings I ever did of Klaymen, from a 1995 sketchbook. Doug T had just shown me his concepts, and I started drawing to get my head around the character for the first animation tests.

These are a couple Polaroids (that's how long ago it was) I took after sculpting the original Klaymen in plasticine over his stop motion armature. The mold from this sculpt was what we used for all our Klaymen puppets over the next few years, so this was where we locked down his final look. The colors are irrelevant, since the plasticine is destroyed in the mold making process -- I just used whatever colors we had handy.

More Sketches

More Random Sketchbook Doodles...

Blogging...
If you're actually reading this blog, then more than likely you have at least a passing interest in something that has to do with animation and/or illustration. Either that or you're my mom. If the former is true, you should check out these two blogs:
500 Toons
ANIMITE!
These are two artists that I admire, both for their love of their craft and their work ethic. They draw for the joy of it.
If the latter is true... Hi Mom.

Some Sketchbook Doodles
I had westerns on the brain.

Okay, I'm giving the blog thing a try. Let's see if I manage to post more than twice a year.