Monday, December 24, 2007

Christmas Greetings from the White House

Here's a classic bit of Christmas cheer from Laura "Pickles" Bush as featured a couple of years ago on the Mike Malloy Show.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Sketchy Women



After several months of neglect, I finally decided to acquaint myself with my recently purchased Motion Computing Tablet PC. Although I had doodled a few minutes at a time on a few of the drawing and painting programs I have loaded on my machine, I hadn't really sat down and got down to the business of doing some serious digital drawing. So I opened up Sketchbook Pro and started playing around with some of the tools. Oh how I love the custom brush tool! Being able to create a brush that responds and acts exactly the way you want it to was a revelation! And having the ability to have multiple undos and several saved versions of a drawing was an added bonus! My first drawings here are of Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past...probably one of the most bad-ass femme fatales to walk all over a man in film noir history. I didn't capture much of a likeness, but I was happy that the versatility of drawing digitally had the effect of helping me loosen up a little. I took my tablet to a life drawing session at Los Feliz Life Drawing Workshop last night (http://myspace.com/losfelizlifedrawing ) and started doing gesture sketches with it, but by the time we got to the longer poses, my battery was wearing down, and I had to switch to my backup, a sketchpad and a ball point pen. Here are a couple of those sketches.

-Anson


Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Beyond Our Borders (Part 1)

Over the years, I've managed to collect a lot of really excellent comic art and illustration from all over the world. While a good number of these foreign publications make it your local US retailer, there are quite a few that don't. I thought I'd share with you a few samples from my own collection that I think are some of the best around.



I visited China a few years ago, and while browsing in a bookstore, I stumbled across this book, which is a full-color, beautifully illustrated collection of 120 Chinese maidens. Luckily, I got the last one. There were so many incredible images in this book, I had trouble picking which ones to include in the blog.









L'Association consistently publishes some of the best comics being made today. Francois Ayroles' "Notes Mesopotamiennes" is no exception. This comic caught my eye at a party that took place in the Last Gasp warehouse in San Francisco during APE a few years back. There was only one copy, but one look and I knew I had to buy this. Francois Ayroles artwork is spare and each panel is brilliantly composed. A great inspiration for any comic artist.





By the way, if any of you out there can read French or Chinese and would care to translate, please feel free!

-Anson

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

What's Been Bugging Me Lately


Here are a few examples of some concept and storyboard work I created for a computer game called Insecticide, by Crackpot Entertainment. The game is scheduled to be released on PC and Nintendo DS in January of 2008. Check out the website at http://www.insecticidethegame.com.

-Anson