Shana Tova!

Mazel Tov!

 

 

 

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Just a depiction of Jesus and Joseph having a gay Jewish wedding. No big deal. As long as I don't draw Mohammed.

And go Patriots!

At my friend Bruce's house growing up, they would say grace before meals. His dad usually included the Red Sox or Patriots, even if he had to amend someone else's grace. I paid homage to that in "Shrinkage."

Little or Big

Sometimes it's fun to do really simple drawings, like these question cards I made for a documentary that interviewed kids back in 2009. I just got around to putting it up on the site.

The third-to-last question WILL get a song in your head.

Buster McKilty

Mike Petit of Boston-area Petit Productions created a character named Buster McKilty, who is a singing Scottish baseball. He asked me to bring him to life last April:

Having Buster march directly at the camera was a fun animation challenge. Here is the digital "pencil test":

And here's what it looked like before I added lipsync, and before we decided that showing his face head-on was terrifying:

Try not to let that haunt your nightmares!

Insane, Creative Minds

This week I subbed in at Cabot After School in Newton, where I used to work every day. It was great to see everyone again!

The kids at Cabot are very talented, and over the years I've taught a lot of them how they too can be professional animators like me (their parents must be so excited...)

Here's some amazing hand-drawn work from the kids (ages 7-11) in my "Animation Club" last year:

Watching this makes me miss having the insane, creative mind of a child.

I'm currently developing an animation class just for Cabot, coming this winter! So look forward to more crazy and awesome stuff!

Enticing

For future reference, the absolute best way to make me want to take on an illustration is to say something like this:

"Also, fair warning, we went for broke on the scene being ridiculous."

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Lots of fun to draw! For those of you who are nerds like me, I did the character art in Flash and the background and glowy effects in Photoshop.

The middle on the money-rocket, Matt, received this as a birthday present from the other two guys. I think he liked it...

Happy Birthday, Adam!

Adam is my annoying baby brother, who stopped being annoying roughly eight years ago, and stopped being a baby roughly twenty-one years ago. Older siblings often say things like this: it's weird that he's 23 now and not still 12.

Adam is a Salsberg, so he's awesome by default, but in addition to that he's ridiculously talented. He's a musician and audio engineer. He does almost all of the music for my animation. I'm constantly impressed that he can translate my embarrassingly non-expert instructions ("I need something kind of rockin', but, like, jazzy and sort of psycho. Well, not psycho, but about psychology, but also kind of fast, but not too fast...") into musical scores that are perfect for my cartoons.

He currently plays in a Chicago band called Cage Match. Check them out!

And if you want to hear some of his finest work for me, go watch Shrinkage, which he wrote several pieces for!

Happy Birthday, Adam!