JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

One of the many things that amazes me about PIXAR is that the employees work at such a high level during the day, and yet somehow find time and energy to excel in their own projects and personal lives as well (I have never figured out how to do all three; If I work hard at one aspect of my life, the other two go all to hell). Many Pixar artists’ websites have already been listed in my LINKS and BLOGROLL, and the list grows daily. Check out a few MORE blogs by the over-achieving A-students at PIXAR:

SpudVision is Steve Purcell’s blog. Steve has been an inspiration to me since long before I had the good fortune to work with him. When I first came to America as a tourist in 1989, I stayed in an apartment where there was a big pile of indie and underground comics, including SAM & MAX, which is a hilarious book as anyone who has read it will surely agree.

Bill Cone was the production designer of Bug’s Life and Cars, who I first met when we both worked at Colossal Pictures many years ago. His new blog features his beautiful plein air pastel pictures and some of his observations of light and colour effects, which is a real treat for those of us who are chromatically challenged.

Shublog is the outpost of super-talent Jay Shuster, designer of cool machines in the STAR WARS prequel films. He is now at Pixar and designed many of the characters in CARS and WALL-E. His new blog displays his sketches (freehand drawn in ink) and photos of his furniture made from aircraft parts and other bits and pieces..

Caveat Productions is where Pixar story-artist Dan Scanlon posts about the live-action movie he has been making over the past few years. Anyone who not only works in animation during the day but makes a film in their spare time has my undivided admiration. Dan also posts lots of other funny gags and drawings, so please go visit his blog.

Cooley! is a place for funnyman Josh Cooley to ramble on about all manner of subjects. He posts essays on his Television obsessions, ideas for inappropriate Children’s books, and some funny sketches and paintings and other glimpses into the ID of a Pixar story-artist and pop-culture afficionado…

Leonardo is a blog where another Pixar storyman, Jim Capobianco, keeps us up to date on his personal film, an animated film this time. Jim also posts about other projects such as his work on the MY FRIEND THE RAT short. I don’t know how he finds the time to do all the stuff he manages to do.

A few years ago I posted my Pin-up of Charles and Edgar, two outrageous characters created by my pal nate Stanton and featured in his contribution to the Afterworks 2 Anthology. This composition here was one of the other ideas I had for that original pin-up and I tidied it up this week as a Birthday present, which I will give him in person, later today.

Happy Birthday, Nate!

After a long hiatus, there has been an update in the ARTWORK section of the site. Frequent readers of this here blog may have seen most of the 72 new images already, as I mostly post my artwork here first. There are even more pics uploaded onto the site that haven’t yet been integrated into the artwork galleries, but if you visit the FOLIO section and click ALL GALLERIES you can see everything that I have organised so far.

Here are some MORE exploratory sketches from my BABES in SPACE story, starring Nauti Girl.

These are some sketches from when I was trying to figure out what Rocket Rabbit looks like. They must be from around 10 years ago. I have some even earlier doodles some place but I can’t lay my hands on them at present. I will post them when they turn up.

With great relief, I delivered yesterday some artwork on a job that I have been working on off-and-on for quite a while. One of the aspects of working at home is the lack of structure and, for me, that sometimes can be a drawback in that it results in a lack of focus… There are those days where a good drawing doesn’t seem to flow out of the pencil…

On days such as those, while working at a 9-to-5 job in a company, surrounded by producers brandishing schedules, I’m obliged to stick at it until a good drawing does appear or submit whatever comes out of the pencil, no matter what it looks like.

But when working at home, it is tempting to walk away from the desk and wait until the muse magically appears… That tendency was compounded by the fact that this particular job had no firm deadline, which allowed me to procrastinate, spin my wheels and meander to my heart’s content.

Until last week anyway, when the hammer finally came down and I was told to wrap it up this week, which required a desperate push to tidy up all the scribbles I had been doing over the past few weeks and arrange them into some kind of a presentable package…

Maybe I need to work in a shared studio again… I am getting a little weary of working at home and stewing in my own juices

It has been a while since I posted any pictures from my Dad’s elephant limerick book. This one illustrates a news story (and accompanying limerick) about the Thai Elephant Orchestra. Elsewhere in Thailand, there are also elephants who can paint pictures, (the elephant book features a limerick about them too, see this earlier post for the illustration). The pachyderm artists live in a refuge for rescued elephants called the Maesa Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, and recently, I saw an amazing YouTube Video of one of those brush-wielding elephants in action, painting a self-portrait. Even though the elephant was trained to paint this image, it is still pretty amazing to watch an elephant holding a brush with its trunk.

Here’s the last batch of scribbles from my cheesecake job, showing quite a few variations on similar poses. I’ll post the final character when I have inked her.

Here is another page of sketches from my super-fun cheesecake logo-character design job.

OK, that’s enough fun for one day, I have to get back to all the OTHER stuff I have to do…

Here are some exploratory sketches I did for my short story in the Babes In Space anthology a few years back. These space-faring giantesses were adversaries for Sephilina the Nauti-Girl (AKA: Squid Girl). As I mentioned earlier, I usually spend too much time doing sketches thumbnails, and not enough time actually making finished product and this situation was certainly typical. I have pages and pages of sketches of these gals. I will post the rest later.