This is the view from the “front door” of our tent. It’s a very family-friendly campsite, lots of parents having fun with their kids.
Here’s our home-away-from-home, the venerable two-room tent, veteran of at least eight or nine annual family camping trips. We had a beautiful spot right next to the Big Sur river where the kids could raft down it and catch craw-dads in it. I drew a lot while camping, so there’s lots to post…
Our family will be off to Big Sur for a week-long camping trip! I’m planning on doing lots of sketching during that time, hopefully inspired by the beautiful surroundings. If I draw anything worth posting I’ll put it up here for sure…
My old roommate from Art Center, Marc Kolodziejczyk, has created a wonderful organization called the Special Children’s Art Foundation which, for several years now, has been helping kids with special medical needs by providing art therapy by doing large-scale mural projects with them. (He asked me a while back to design their logo, which I’m happy to see they’re still using.) It’s an inspiring thing he’s doing there. Please check it out.
Once again, taking a break from work to get some evening food, storyboard artists sit around and draw each other… Shocking but true!
Actually, it isn’t nearly as serious as it looks from these pictures.
We went to the Hollywood Bowl the other night, and thanks to some good friends who came with us, we were able to sit right up front just below the stage. We ate dinner my wife prepared and relaxed to listen to an evening of Ravel. It was great, and a great opportunity to sketch.
I just picked up a copy of Richard Williams’ Animator’s Survival Kit from Amazon.com. This book is fantastic — loaded with great techniques for fooling the eye in terms of motion, follow through, keyframes, etc. Something I can really use in making these previs animatics. Most of the information is geared toward traditional hand-drawn, finished animation, but all of it can be applied to keyframed timeline-based previsualization animation that we do with computers these days, whether it be After Effects or LightWave or Maya. Great stuff.
My son Jack and I made the annual pilgrimage to the San Diego Comic-Con via train from Union Station in LA last weekend. It seemed much bigger and more crowded than last year. Jack tends to look for action figures (this year was all about General Grievous), and game cards, whereas I like to get art books and see some original drawing and painting. The Comic-Con is such a great collection of characters, both in costume and presumably not, that I had to draw something. This sketch is from memory — we were walking along and suddenly the foot traffic came to a complete stop. I craned my neck to see what the hubbub was about and caught a fleeting glimpse of a woman in a white bikini and a man shooting video of her. What the heck?? Actually it’s not surprising, considering the male nerd demographic. Note the guy in the foreground with the giant earrings — he had holes in his earlobes as big as poker chips! (I actually saw him a couple hours earlier in a different part of the hall, but thought it would be good to include him in this sketch for color.) There was no shortage of Light Saber-wielding Jedi either. Most had some kind of new type with a fluorescent tube in it. We stayed for the day and returned in the evening. Quite fun. I picked up some great books, too. More on that later.
Jack (age 11) and I saw the latest Miyazaki film the other night, Howl’s Moving Castle. When we got home he asked me what we should do, and I told him I thought it would be good if he drew his favorite characters from the film. I drew Jack while he did this. Note his left hand covering what he’s drawing so I can’t see it until he’s done. I remember using the exact same technique in elementary school during a test so no one would copy from my paper. I got sort of a mini-flashback there…
Anthony Zierhut 