Two-panel ink sketch for the Art House Co-op’s Photo Response Project.
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.
hodey-hodey-hodey-ho
I’ve been pretty quiet about it, but I’m one of a few artists whose characters Stabwool licensed to make into cool little needle-felted figurines and embroidered e-reader cozies. All of her stuff is fantastic, but when she sent me these photos of her posable figurine of Dalton I was tickled:
You can buy this little guy over at Stabwool’s Etsy store.
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.
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’.
Started a new sketchbook full of very pulpy colored paper. The medium that seems to work best on it is felt-tipped pens.
It’s been a while, I know. I’ve missed writing up a few movies, but I don’t recall which ones and, really, if I can’t recall that much, how am I going to remember enough to say anything about them? So instead, I’ll talk about a couple I’ve seen in the last week that you might get a chance to watch.
John Carter (2012)
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.
Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012)
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.
Soon:
- 21 Jump Street (2012)
- The Hunger Games (2012)
It’s my birthday today. I wouldn’t say anything except for the fact that Cathy made me this amazing alternate lyrics version of my favorite song to mangle:
