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.

I want to show you two sites that showcase sculptures made from scrap. STEPHANE HALLEUX is a Belgian sculptor who makes incredible things out of bits and pieces of leather and old machine parts. His work is very inspiring and I recommend that you all take a look-see at his site. Click on each of the menus on the left side from “Personnages” (characters) to “Croquis” (sketches) to see a wide selection of his fantastic and whimsical creations, that include people, animals, machines, and vehicles. (Thanks to Tony for telling me about this artist).

The second site has been on my LINKS page for a while now but it seems appropriate to mention it again here in this post, because it too features sculptures made from bits and pieces of old junk. BENNETT ROBOT WORKS, as you’d expect from the title of the site, focuses exclusively on sculptures of ROBOTS in all shapes and sizes. They all have a retro-tech quality and a ton of personality, each being made entirely from a unique configuration of found objects. If you fall in love with one, the good news is that each of them is for sale.

I want to share with you some of the great artwork that I have come by in the past few weeks. My grimy little dump of an apartment is not worthy of these pieces, or the other great stuff I have bought recently. I don’t even have enough wall space to hang it all… and yet it makes me feel so good to own a growing collection of artwork by my pals…

First up is a great picture that my pal Rhode gave me as a Christmas present before I went home to Australia. It was wrapped in Christmas paper but I didn’t want to carry it on the plane and I didn’t want to wait till the new year to open it, so I sneaked a peek at this AWESOME pic just before leaving on my trip… only to behold the power of YODA and RHODE combined on the one piece of paper! TWO masters for the price of one… it was a powerful omen that this would be the best Christmas ever (and it sure was!) Getting a scan of this pic was pretty tricky because this piece BURNED MY FINGERS when I took it out of the frame. Get me an oven-mitt cuz this pic is HAWT!!

Next up are two magnificent pieces that I won at the last Maverix charity art Auction, that raised $9,500 for the Children’s Creative Media Arts Center of Glide Community Church.

This beautiful picture by Patrick Awa is called DRUM THUNDER GIRL. No scan can do this painting justice. It is finished in Gold paint, and it dazzles the human eye. I wanted this picture from the first moment I saw some early sketches on Pat’s blog and I battled fiercely at the live auction to win it.

At this particular auction I resolved to spend the money that I had budgeted for TWO auctions, because I had gone home empty-handed the last time, and so I was empowered to be an aggressive bidder at the live-auction…

Behold this whimsically beautiful pic of Rhode’s. I had bid on his artwork at each auction before, and had always been denied when others pushed the prices beyond my budget, but not this time my friends, Oh no! I was determined to possess one of his artworks (not knowing that I would get another for Christmas) and verily, this time it was I who prevailed, winning this great Rhode pic in yet ANOTHER live-auction battle.

I normally write a detailed account of the Maverix Auctions but this time I was on a plane to Australia within a few days and didn’t have the time to post about it until now. For more about the latest Maverix art auction, read Patrick’s Awa’s account, check out Carlos Baena’s photos and some more photos by Bosco Ng.

Randall Sly has put up a small ONLINE TRIBUTE to the late, great DAN LEE at the always interesting Character Design Blog. Many people here in the Bay Area animation community knew and loved Dan, but for those of you who may not have heard of him, he was one of the main character designers at Pixar, doing some GREAT work on FINDING NEMO and most recently RATATOUILLE. Dan died of cancer in 2005, at the age of 35.

One of the many fun things that I did when back in Australia, was to hook up with my brother Rob, my Uncle John and my old travelling pal Stuart on one sultry hot day in Sydney’s Circular Quay area. Before getting some coffee by the harbour, we all attended an exhibition of artwork by TIM HAWKINSON, that was on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. (The MCA can be seen on the left of the pic of Sydney Harbour).

The show was called Mapping The Marvellous, and although the subject is often mundane, such as a sculpture of an eyeball (made in part out of discarded green pens) the intricate way they’ve been executed is indeed marvellous. The artist seems obsessed with playful representations of the human body, but his musical mechanical sculptures were what took my fancy. There was something ingenious and wonderful about them.

The piece called DRIP fills a small room and looks like a vaguely sinister deep sea creature. Entering the room, you hear a dripping sound as water spurts out of the cling-wrap tentacles and strikes pie-tins held inside an array of buckets below the gently pulsing alien polyp overhead. Although the sound is initially reminiscent of rain drops, unlike them it is not random but rhythmical and musical, due to an elaborate hand built mechanism that opens and closes switches in the creature according to a musical score. This interplay of simplicity and complication, organic forms and mechanical gizmos, intricate work that somehow seems fresh is what I liked about his work.

Hawkinson is originally from the Bay Area (though now based in LA) but I had not heard about him until I travelled all the way from the Bay Area to Sydney. I will definitely keep track of his upcoming exhibitions, in hopes of seeing the UBERORGAN; musical sculpture on a colossal scale. It recently filled up THE GETTY with its whale-like honking bulk.

One of the fun things about making my own self-published comic books has been the chance to see OTHER people draw my characters. I’ve put out more pages of Rocket Rabbit comics than anything else but the character of mine that gets the most attention from other artists is SEPHI (AKA Squid Girl or Nauti Girl) and here are two more super new pinups of her. The action pic on the left is by MonkeyFeather (secret identity: John Hoffman) and the relaxed pic on the right is by Atomic Terrier (alter ego: Josh Hughes).

 

Click on each picture for a closer view, and please check out both John and Josh’s websites (by clicking on their names) for more great artwork.

Seeing these lovely Sephi Pinups has really inspired me to do some more comics with this character. In fact, I have had a few stories roughed out for some time and I just need to knuckle down and clean them up for next year.

To see ALL the pinups of my characters by other artists, (including these) go HERE.

These days, many artists (even those still in school) have their own web-sites, with links to artists who have influenced them. Hop-scotching around the internet from site to site has been a great source of inspiration for me in recent years. You can see links to artists that I admire on my LINKS page, but some of those who have influenced me the most have been those that I have worked with personally, and in many cases they don’t have websites and are therefore unknown by people who have not worked with them too.

Part One: Early Influences
I didn’t attend art school. When I started working in animation, at the age of 17, I was trained on the job and there wasn’t time for much “proper” training in the midst of production. So, while a lot of people remember the early influence of their art teachers, I am grateful to those few artist/co-workers who took time to show me some tricks and give encouragement when I was starting out, and had even less idea of what I was doing than I do today. Here are a few of the cartoonists who influenced me early in my career.

JON McCLENAHAN is an American, but he entered the animation industry in Australia, which is where I met him, when I started out at Hanna-Barbera’s Sydney studio, as an inbetweener. Jon was already an animator and he was the first artist ever to take an interest in me and I owe him a lot for that. He gave me encouragement and help with some animation I was doing in my spare time, because I was getting frustrated with being an inbetweener. Partly due to that after hours experimentation, and Jon’s encouragement, I did eventually get a chance to animate. Jon was, and still is, a very focussed, hard worker and he got a lot of work done by staying in his chair all day and drawing, rather than yakking with co-workers, which was my habit back then. I have since acquired his ability to work hard, day after day, but sadly I have never been able to apply Jon’s straightforward approach to creativity; he doesn’t second guess himself, and forges ahead with his first idea. I admire that approach very much and tried to adopt it for myself, but sadly I am rarely happy with my first idea, and so my method is is to “noodle” and try alternatives and throw away a lot of work along the path to making something I am proud of. Years later, after Jon and his family had moved back to his home town of Chicago, I had a chance to work with him at his own studio, called STARTOONS. Fans of Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, Tazmania and other quality TV cartoons from the 1980s and early 1990s may have heard of that studio because many of the funniest (and Emmy winning-est) episodes of those popular shows were animated by Jon and his crew.

Jon and I haven’t worked together for many years but we are great friends to this day.

Simon and Chris. These guys are often mentioned in the same breath by people who know them, because they are such complementary friends. When I first started working, they were like the big brothers I never had as a kid. In addition to picking up a cynical sense of humour that I hadn’t really earned yet, I learned a great deal about animation and cartooning from watching these two blokes:

CHRIS HAUGE has animated on the influential Gorillaz videos, including that first one for “Clint Eastwood” that blew everyone away (I must have watched it about 100 times). He did those when working in London for Passion Pictures. Before being part of that buzz, years and years earlier, Chris turned on a light bulb over my noggin when he was the first animator who explained to me that animation wasn’t just individual drawings or even pretty drawings… it is the relationship between those drawings that is important; he made me think about TIMING, which is something that he excells at himself. Chris showed me how to plan out the action in thumbnails first so as not to jam too much “stuff” into a scene, and ensure that the drawings each had enough screen time to “read” for the audience. That may seem obvious, especially to those of you who have had formal training, but it was a revelation to me when I was 18. (He later tried to teach me to surf, with much less success. My thrashing and splashing around made him look “uncool” in front of his surfer peers). As well as enjoying working with Chris at Hanna Barbera in Sydney, I also learned a lot from him when we both worked on commercials at Colossal Pictures in San Francisco (my favourite company I ever worked at). Chris now has his own animation studio in Sydney called HALO PICTURES with not only a great showreel but also a great location; near the beach. (Being close to the surf was one of the major factors in choosing a studio location for Chris).

Chris is the only of my art-pals on this list who actually does have a website, so please check out his animation for GORILLAZ and various other bits and pieces of coolness.

SIMON O’LEARY has worked on projects such as Disney’s Tarzan (in the Paris unit) and now directs commercials in Sydney. His cartooning ability, dry sense of humour and unpretentious approach to working were all major inspirations to me when I started in the animation industry and he inspires me to this very day. He is one of those guys who can do FUNNY drawings… drawings that’ll make you blow your coffee out your nose; you are laughing so hard. This is especially so when he busts out a savagely accurate caricature of a co-worker (or YOU) or a funny doodle based on something that happened at lunch hour. For 25 years or so Simon has both written and drawn a comic strip called Fred Gassit which runs in the Australian Motor Cycle News magazine (and several other motorcycle magazines around the world). While the strip is ostensibly related to the world of motorcycling, the humour is really about Simon taking pot-shots at the world in general, via the persona of Fred; a sarcastic dog-like character who is a cantankerous bastard but appealing none the less (much like Simon). Both the humour and the artwork are vulgar yet sophisticated (much like Simon), which is a winning combination for me; the hardest laughs happen when neurones within the low-brow and the high-brow are firing simultaneously. I have a collection of these strips that is a treasured possession I look through when I want a laugh or need to swipe ideas on how to draw a vehicle, a goon, a bikini babe, or anything for that matter. To my mind these cartoons are insanely funny and I wish that Simon was rich and famous as a result, but the fact is that he doesn’t even sign them let alone “promote” them. Self-promotion is not what Simon is about. Which explains why he doesn’t have a website and why you probably haven’t heard of him.

I have worked with Simon in Sydney, Paris and San Francisco and I look forward to working with him again some day.

DEANE TAYLOR may best be known as the Art Director on the Nightmare before Christmas (and a spin-off game). He also did design work on the animated shows Cow and Chicken and I.M. Weasel by Dave Feiss (yet another animation hero of mine, from later in my career). But years before that, Deane ran the layout department at Hanna Barbera in Sydney. After I had been animating for a few years, Deane offered me a chance at learning layouts under his supervision. Consequently, most of what I know today about composition I learned from Deane, or picked up by working with him and watching him go. He was the most prolific artist in the department. He has a very dynamic drawing style, featuring a clever use of shape and silhoette, that many of his trainees tried to copy, but nobody ever matched Deane for graphic dynamism and energy of line. He taught me some simple compositional guidelines that I learned to apply over and over again, but apart from art tricks, he also showed me quite a bit about work ethics and attitude. Even though the shows we worked on were pretty crappy in those days, and many people just went through the motions when making them, Deane was one of the few who tried his hardest on every show, no matter what. He took pride in his work. He respected people who did a good job on whatever they were given to do, rather than those people who will work on only 2 cylinders, saving themselves for the big deal job on the distant horizon.

Deane taught me to always think of how to “plus” the material that came across my desk. That is certainly what he always does.

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I am very lucky in that I have worked all over the globe, at some really great studios, on some quality productions, with loads of amazing artists over the years… but these guys listed here had a huge influence on me, disproportionate to the quality of the projects we worked on together. In many cases the stuff we collaborated on was a lot of crap, yet these artists are still some of those that I respect the most.

Bold Brian Kalin-O’Connell has recently wrought a powerful picture of Rocket Rabbit dodging disaster; a snarling, super-sized simian! I’ve already had the pleasure of seeing a few people do pin-ups of NAUTI GIRL (which you can see in my COMICS section under the “Pinup gallery” link) but not too many people (apart from my nephews) have had a crack at drawing Rocket. Perhaps Brian will inspire a few more?

To behold the full-size majesty of this super pin-up, get on over to Brian’s Blog and click on the small sized preview he has posted there. And while you are over there, don’t forget to look around and see more of Brian’s artwork.

For the past few years I’ve been posting about the elusive comics/animation artist Tony Salmons, both in this here blog (see posts here and here) and also on forums devoted to drawing (such as the DRAWING BOARD threads here and here.

A lot of people I know feel that Tony should be a lot more famous than he is, but part of the reason that more people don’t know about him is that there hasn’t been any one place where you can track the guy down and see his work (or even send him work) as he moves around a lot from place to place, and from industry to industry.

However that may be about to change, as the man finally has a site of his own where you can get all the Salmons you need in one hit. And if you still want more you’ll be able to contact the mysterious man himself for some commisssions.

The site is still under construction, but the best part, the art galleries, are already there; a very tasty two of them hilariously labelled “babes” and “brutes.” If you are a fan of fearless pen and brush work then get your bad self over to the official Tony Salmons website right now and start clicking!

Due to my special inside-track relationship with Tony Stacchi’s webmaster I have the hot tip of the week: There has been a BIG upload of new artwork onto Mr Stacchi’s website. The FOLIO section at www.STACCHI.com now contains about twice as many pics as before.

Tony is one of the directors on the forthcoming CG cartoon called OPEN SEASON, which will be SONY’s first foray into the world of feature animation. If you want a laugh, and can’t wait (till september 2006) for the movie then check out this thread on a hunting forum where a bunch of hunters get upset about the “anti-hunting propaganda” that they thought they saw in the trailer for this cartoon.