Ethan Inks One

Ethan did a swell job on Ernie here. I added my little nitpick notes. What Ethan did best was make all the lines come together to make a living character. It all holds together. Sometimes inkers will think of each line in terns of itself and then you end up looking at a collection of lines instead of a living breathing cartoon character. Ethan FEELS the life of Ernie and that's the ultimate goal. He also felt Jim Smith's style and did a good job bringing out Jim's natural feel for solidity and 3 dimensional caricaturing.

Stussy Puts the Violence Back Into Cartoons!

Hey I drew some more shirt designs for Stussy and the brilliant and innovative art director, Adam Jay Weissman asked me to make a cartoon to advertise it. Rather than just do a pure ad, I asked if I could make a little story and embed the ad in it. He said ok so here it is:

SEE THE CARTOON HERE

BEHIND THE SCENES SECRETS:

I Drew the storyboards with ball point pen on a crappy newsprint sketchbook.
Then I animated the cartoon on a cintiq using Toonboom's Animate program. It's primarily hand drawn with a few tweening cheats - and some afterfx in the middle by Kedz.

I worked with my core team of miscreants here in Northridge.

JOHN KEDZIE coordinated, did all the technical crap that I hate to do and even found time to create some cg stuff and animate it.
SARAH HARKEY was my main assistant animator and she also painted the tasty backgrounds:

SANDRA RIVAS joined us just a couple weeks ago and assisted and colored much animation.

DIVERSITY IN CARTOONLAND

I have also been training a virtual team of talented cartoonists around the world who have been doing assistant animation.

GENEVA HODGSON did some fine inking and coloring and inbetweening up in San Francisco.

AMIR AVNI (of Toronto) jumped in the pool at the last minute of production to help ink.

DAVID DE ROOIJ took time away from tempting Krampus to do some assisting in Holland.

BEN ANDERS played hookey from Sheridan College to clean up some scenes.

The great Eric Bauza and the manly Jim Smith did the voices of my characters. Eddie Cruz (owner of Stussy LA and Undefeated) provided the 'tude and the voice of the Stussy Rat.

If you like the cartoon, show your love by buying a shirt from Stussy and maybe they will sponsor a series of 'em!

Of course if you hate it, then you'll have no choice but to beat the bejeezus out of me in the parking lot at Target.
and we used music from the famous

http://www.apmmusic.com/

library.

Inking Jim Smith

I'm Jim 's biggest fan. He has a way of drawing funny and solid at the same time.
I have tons of his rough sketches and caricatures and thought I would attempt cleaning one up in illustrator.
It's very tricky trying to pick just the right lines to make thick and thin. I try to make every line mean something, not just float around inside the silhouette of the forms.

So for each line I ink, I look for the other corresponding line that describes a form between them.

It ain't perfect but it's fun to do. I think I lost some of the triangular shape of Duke's head.

If anyone is interested in practicing their clean ups, I could put more of Jim's drawings up.

We are doing a job together now and maybe we could use another clean up artist for him.

Let me know if you wanna buy any of his art too, because he has some for sale. It's genius.

Meet Jim Smith In The Raw Flesh

And buy some of his cartoon art! He likes man hugs by the way.

FACEBOOK ANNOUNCEMENT MYSTERY PAGE

Thanks To Our Brave Babies On The Front Lines Of Freedom

Jim Smith honors our fighting babies who suffer the unspeakable horrors of battle and wet diapers in order to preserve all we hold sacred.
To all the babies who fight and cried for us, thank you!

Let Jim Smith Turn You Into A Real Man

Let's face it. Most of us like to just sit on our butts and draw our little funny pictures, and that doesn't add up to a lot of muscle. But we'd all love to be big burly brutes and compete in the UFC.

"Hey, buddy. You look like you've had the Jim Smith Makeover! I bet you think you're pretty tough!"

Well Jim Smith has the solution for you and me! He draws the most manly men of any cartoonist I know and he can transform you in an instant!

YES! I WANT JIM TO MAKE ME INTO A HE-MAN!

Sunday Drive To Mars

3 SUNDAY DRIVE TO MARS (animated)

After church service, George and the kids are talking to the preacher next to their parked car.George: "That was a Jim-Dandy of a sermon today, Father!"

Preacher: Bless you my sons. May the rest of your Sabbath be clean and without blemish.

George: "Thanks Father!"

He looks at the kids:

"And Now that you've washed away all your sins, do you feel clean, children?"

Slab looks nervous and guilty: "I'm not sure, Unca George...I'm feeling an urge! Is that a sin?"


George winks at the camera: "That all depends on what kind of urge it is. If it's an urge to go for a Sunday drive in the family car, then that is a good clean urge!"

Slab: "That's exactly the kind of urge I have !

George: "Fine! It's a perfect day for a Sunday Drive!"

George and the kids get in the car and drive down the highway.

btw, look at these great drawings by Jim Smith!

When they come to a hill, they drive up and then keep going into the air.

They sail past all the other cars that are stuck on the towering rock peaks in Arizona.
http://georgecreativevibe.blogspot.com/2008/06/arizona-rock-formations-sunday-trip-to.html

Ernie: Hey Unca George, I heard this car gets 32 EPA miles to the gallon.
Slab, "What's EPA?"

George "It's the goddamn ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY! " A buncha tree huggers! That's why I love to leave the environment! We get even more miles per gallon in zero G!"

The God-fearing family leaves the atmosphere and heads to Mars where they stop at a lake of methane. They park and get out of the car. George still has his Bible with him.

He opens it and we see it's actually a fishing tackle box.

It's full of colorful lures.
George: "There's good fishin' here boys and no one around for millions of miles! Crack open that cargo hatch and haul out the gear!"

The kids unload the fishing equipment.

Ernie: "You sure got a lot of crap back here, Uncle George!"

George: "40 Goddamn cubic feet worth of crap!"



http://georgecreativevibe.blogspot.com/2008/06/mars-reference.html




Ernie asks" What kind of lures do Martian fish like, Unca George?"

"What else?" asks George. He picks out a beautiful 3 hooked lure in the shape of a gorgeous woman. "They like human women, just like the rest of us!"

He casts his line into the lake and yanks out a huge eyeball with fins. "There's one!"

Wipe the scene: to George closing up the back of the car. The cargo hatch is filled with their catch: piles of Martian eyeball creatures, flopping around.


They come back through Earth's atmosphere and land in George's driveway with 40 cubic feet worth of tasty Martian eyeballs.

Space Madness Gets Extra Credits

This was an episode where I had to go back to Vanessa and ask if we could give more credits upfront. "Oh, John...This one time only!" was the response. Then later I did it again for a couple other episodes.

Original notes from lunch with Jim and John about space episodes above, then turned into a simple premise below:

I had to rewrite the "crazy talk" speech about 5 times to get Nick to approve something. This is one attempt

Jim Gomez wrote up a more detailed premise, then I fleshed it out to a long outline and went through many passes and revisions with Nickelodeon. It's a particularly long detailed outline or I would scan it to show you.

I wish I could find the notes where they told us to "drop the space episodes. We don't like space." Richard, do you have them?Jim designed the look of the future for the show studying old Popular Science pulp magazines and books about the Streamlined decade and 40s vacuum cleaner catalogues. The Spumco book will have lots of his art.

Chris did some great designs while he was storyboarding at the same time. He did the long vertical pan of the weird machine in the History Eraser Button room for one.

Oh, and David Koenigsberg did the cool waving credits and fx at the beginning of the cartoon-the old fashioned way, under a camera with ripple glass!

Henry Porch picked out Dvorak's "New World" for the opening music, which lent the cartoon a very serious ominous atmosphere.

Bill Griggs did a phenomenal job editing the music and Tim Borquez killed himself coming up with all the cool old style science fiction sound effects.

Mike Fontanelli did the layouts of Ren and Stimpy at the end for the History Eraser Button Sequence. Maybe I have some frame grabs somewhere.

A lot of other good artists all worked on the show. A cartoon like Space Madness could never be made as an independent film - or even at another studio with all the same people. It took a lot of top talent, a production system designed for talent and a sympathetic creative director who urged the best from everyone - oh and a network executive who allowed it to happen. More than what we all thought we were capable of, I'm sure.