Two-panel ink sketch for the Art House Co-op’s Photo Response Project.
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Two-panel ink sketch for the Art House Co-op’s Photo Response Project.
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This probably won’t be meaningful or even that interesting to anyone who isn’t a member of my family, but for the Art House Co-op’s Map Project, I tried to draw the layout of the farm where I grew up.
Some of the details aren’t quite right, and some of them directly point to different years or even different decades than others, but this is roughly the “real” version for me, with all the most prominent and important details still standing in memory where they’ve decayed and fallen in real life.
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You can buy this little guy over at Stabwool’s Etsy store.
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A zhulong, which is a sort of pig dragon.
Well, that’s the last of my AlphaBeasts. I skipped a huge swath of them in the middle, but you can see the rest of the ones I did all together over here. I had a lot of fun with this series—it was a fantastic challenge to try to interpret a completely foreign thing every week instead of just drawing cute little characters all the time.
The next challenge, insofar as I’ve heard, is AlphaBooks: literary characters. I’m excited! Drawing humans who all look unique is an entirely different sort of challenge.
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The monster everyone picked for AlphaBeasts X. The xenomorphs are really cool, though, and there aren’t a ton of other creatures I can think of that start with ‘x’.
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Started a new sketchbook full of very pulpy colored paper. The medium that seems to work best on it is felt-tipped pens.
]]>John Carter takes place on another planet, but it’s more high-fantasy than science fiction. The universe of John Carter is manipulated by godlike beings whose unexplained powers might as well be magic, and Mars itself is peopled by fantastic creatures clearly intended as analogues to races and animals in our world. That’s not to say the movie isn’t successful. As a pulp fantasy story, it’s well-crafted, with only a few missteps in tone, none of which were fatal to my enjoyment of the movie. It’s nice to see a film like this mostly avoid the pitfalls of this genre—epic slow-motion battles were thankfully rare and short, and fight scenes didn’t suffer the disorienting editing that is miserably common in modern big-budget action films.
John Carter’s greatest achievement is knowing when to stop. It gives us some scope of the film’s world, but it keeps its eye on the story. I think the director has something to do with it—you might recognize Andrew Stanton’s name from Pixar favorites Finding Nemo and WALL-E. It’s a shame John Carter is being viewed as a huge bust, because it’s better-made and more entertaining than the sprawling CG messes that have dominated the fantasy genre since the Lord of the Rings movies.
I like Tim and Eric, but their first foray into feature-length films feels like a misstep. The fundamental nature of the medium pulls them away from one of their strengths: brevity. A product of two guys best-known for rapid-fire absurdist sketch comedy, Billion Dollar Movie is saddled with the unfortunate need to be funny all the time, which turns it into an uncomfortable onslaught of things you want to laugh at but can’t. This isn’t a problem with the material per se, but just that if it’s all stuff you’re supposed to laugh at, your laugh circuit shorts out pretty fast. There are a few bits that are delightfully memorable (the first fifteen minutes or so are gold, and there’s a scene where Tim steals a man’s son that is perfect in its cruelty), but there’s a lot that seems like filler. Surreal filler, stylistically-interesting filler, but still filler, needed to pad out ninety minutes for guys who are used to working in 1-5 minute chunks.
Their TV show Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! transcends into a level of comedy I didn’t even know existed, and I suspect the movie will be a revelation for people who haven’t yet seen the show but have the right sense of humor to enjoy it. But to me it seems more like a novelty intended for existing Tim and Eric fans, and not really satisfying them either.
Doodles from the last couple days.
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Letter to my childhood home, for an Art House Co-op project. Transcription follows.
]]>Oh, darling,
You were old already before I knew you, before we changed the orange shag carpets and turned the upstairs bedroom into a haven of pink hearts for my sister and me. But you seem older now, when I come by and see the old barn gone and the orchards burned black.
Do you remember the sound as we stampeded across three rooms to answer the phone? The dogs going off like bottle rockets every time a raccoon crept through the yard (it was often)?
And what happened to your ghosts, my sweet? Did you finally purge them? Perhaps they were gone already by the time I left. Or perhaps instead they pulled out the top drawer in the wall of the downstairs closet and slipped into the secret room—that space between the walls, full of cobwebs and mouse bones—to wait for more children to come.
Now that you shall be leaving our family soon, I don’t know what will become of you. Will they tear you down, or just transform you into an unrecognizably sterile semi-rural paradise for someone richer than we ever were? Your fate is mine. A part of my soul faded into your walls, and it can’t be painted over.
May the mice crawl you forever.
Ever yours, Kris
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A swamp creature from an episode of Night Gallery, which I’ve gotten hooked on watching lately.
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I haven’t seen The Great Mouse Detective in years but I have the fondest memories of it.
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