Tokusatsu show and .....prints!!

Some of you may know already...but mark your calendars for Sept. 15, 2012...We're having a HUGE show with over 100 incredible artists...celebrating Tokusatsu!!..
Tokusatsu (特撮^?) is a Japanese term that applies to any live-action film or television drama that usually features superheroes and makes considerable use of special effects (tokusatsuliterally translates as "special filming" in Japanese).
This includes your favorite giant lizard monster and even Power Rangers! ( although we already had a Power Rangers show last Nov)!!

One of my personal favorite shows growing up was Ultraman!!
Which brings me to my latest project...I've started to do paintings of all characters from the original Ultraman series. This is a major undertaking so we'll see how far I get..

I've already completed 5. Which is basically the first 4 episodes. I'm already working on the sixth and seventh in preperation for the Tokusatsu show.
All of them are available as 13x19  archival prints @ Q Pop.

Ero-G: Erotic Grandpa

Touma and Friends Show!!

I just did a piece for my friend's (I'm one of the "friends") show at Munky King.
The exhibition runs until August 12, 2012...so if you're in LA or around melrose...drop in and definitely check it out.
Touma designs a lot of toys in Japan...his own characters and customs...but also for the likes of Bandai, etc..
My piece takes one of his better known characters...Goon....and transforms it into something we don't normally identify it with...a woman!

Tarantino, the Bros., and a whole lot more...

This is a really old post...for some reason it stayed in "draft" format...better late than never??




So, yeah, I haven't posted in ages. Anyone who bothers to even check my blog...I apologize. BUT, I'm posting now..haha..woohoo..

For those of you who don't know by now....I opened a shop!! It's located in the historic Little Tokyo area of downtown Los Angeles. It's called Q Pop.

Check it out at:

www.qpopshop.com

Let me just say right off the bat...running a shop is NOT easy. For those of you who think it must be some kind of piece of cake..Think AGAIN!!..

It can be a royal pain in the a**. We just aren't able to hire a lot of people to help out also.

But it's also been a lot of fun...and I get to meet some of the coolest and most interesting people. And a lot of great friends HAVE helped out...otherwise we probably would have quit by now..haha..

We've had 2 events at the shop..The last one being a fundraiser to raise doantions to help Japan in it's current crisis. Both of them were extremely difficult to organize in different ways. The fundraiser was organized in less than a week by only Miki and myself and we had over 100 donated pieces of art and hundreds of artists to deal with. It was insanity. But somehow, we managed to pull it off...with some help from friends..and we raised around $9000 to boot. Not bad for a shop that's only been open for 5 months.

Apart from all the shop stuff,,which takes up almost ALL of my time.. I also had the luck to be asked to participate in the Quentin Vs Coen show...a tribute to Quentin Tarantino and The Coen Brothers. I managed to squeeze this into my schedule and it was a lot of fun.

I struggled a bit trying to figure out what to do for my piece. Was it gonna be Coen or Tarantino?...

I actually hate Tarantino and most of his films..but that doesn't necessarily mean he's a bad subject for a painting.

I love the Coens..but which film? What character? There are sooo many good ones to choose from..

I toyed around with different ideas. Even something from True Grit(which isn't one of my favorite Coen films).

I finally decided on one of my early favorites..Raising Arizona. When I saw this film it was with my good friend Mark Kennedy...and we were in high school!! It was seriously one of the coolest, funniest films I had seen. The direction and camerawork were so inventive and off beat..it influenced my ideas about what could be done in film...especially on a low budget.

The character I finally picked was the Lone biker of the Apocalypse, Leonard Smalls.!!

Day 2

Day 2 and still posting...only doodles...but something...

Quality Art

So after talking with my friend... I am deciding to post some quality art every day...Here's Day 1..yay!! You may recognize some of the characters...like the hairy butt.. so popular in his day..

Exquisite Corpse

Been really busy as usual lately. Apart from working on the vis dev at Disney Feature.....I recently just finished 6 pages of comix for a group comic book titled Exquisite Corpse. This project was originally proposed years ago and it is finally nearing completion.

Honestly, it was quite difficult to do for me. At least...when I was starting out. You'd think that doing storyboards would be similar to doing comics...but it's not. Comics require a skill for consolidating and economizing panels. What I mean by this is...in storyboards...we can draw 8 panels of someone opening a bottle...but in comics...in one panel...you may have to show someone opening a bottle with 12 breakdancers spinning in the background while a meteor shower is happening. And all of it has to read and be clear.

That kind of discipline is also similar to one panel gag cartoons where many elements need to read to form the gag in one picture. This was definitely a challenge for me.

The other difficult thing...was deciding what style I was going to do it in. Since I'm not a comics guy...I had no set way of doing things. This was VERY difficult..and there were several attempts at the first page. I finally decided to do something in a limited palette....Grey tones and B&W...and I used red for effect.

I was actually pleased with the finished result...and the best part of this experience was...I had so much fun doing it..I think I will continue this comic...and see where the story goes...I'll keep ya posted..In the meantime..Look for the anthology when it hits the shelves. In the meantime...here's a preview of 2 of the pages(not in order):

New designs for poster..

Wow...I haven't posted in sooo long..as usual..Been so busy with the shop, Q Pop....and also working a full time gig at Disney Feature Animation...I know, I wasn't wanting to go back to work in animation. But the guys at Disney are really nice..and the project actually looked good for a change.

Anyway, in my spare time I have to design the flyers and posters for the exhibitions at Q Pop....

Sometimes using artwork that is in the show by other artists...but also sometimes making new art specifically for the event flyers...

like I did for the poster for the next event at Q Pop..

This is actually a combo of 2 heads I painted for the show itself..

The Super Big Micro Show

Hey Everyone!!

I have a small piece in the Super Big Micro Show coming up at Gallery Nucleus. Of course it's small, it's a micro show...duh. Here's a peek at the rough sketch for all you guys that won't make it.Everyone else...there are so many good people in this show..you are dim in the wits if you miss it!

No Time

As a lot of you may already know by now...I'm opening a shop/ mini gallery in Los Angeles. It's called Q Pop and if you haven't been following our blog yet..please do so here.....http://qpopshop.blogspot.com/

The blog is in it's infant stage but I plan to update it quite often...probably more often than this blog(which wouldn't be hard to do)..haha..

But anyway, opening a shop is a pretty big deal...and it is very time consuming...so I haven't really had time to post any artwork lately...but I will be posting some in the very near future...so please be patient and check back soon.

Sweet Streets 2 Show at Nucleus Gallery...still time..GO!!

A very good friend of mine Sebastian Hiroshi of 6% DokiDoki fame was doing a fashion show in the new Sweet Streets Show at Nucleus Gallery in Alhambra...and the curator Caro was nice enough to ask me to do a painting for the show. This actually was the 3rd opportunity for me to be in a Nucleus show but for some reason(mostly my laziness) it just never happened before. This time I completed a small painting and was in process of finishing a bigger one but just couldnt manage it on time...just not enough hours in the day to do everything...But I AM finishing it up anyway..and will post it soon to get some feedback from all you guys. In the meantime...here's a look at my piece in the show. It's all real paint..no digital..which I don't do that often. It looks even better in person so if you can make it to the gallery..please check it out. Plus there are some other amazing works there.I think it's still going on for another 14 days so you got time.

New Post!! Unbelievable!!!

HAHA!! It's true...this is actually a new post!! And this time I swear it won't be one year before the next one...promise. Anyway...here's some sickie monsters I sketched...have fun..more to come..

Oh, and I apologize to any chinese fans who got accidentally deleted from my comments...I was getting a lot of chinese spam so I had to delete it all..since I can't read chinese..there may have been some casualties..sorry!!

Cloudy End Title Sequence

So Cloudy came out and thankfully it did well..YAY! Thanks to all that went and saw it.
Those of you that saw it may have noticed the 2-d animated end title sequence.A lot of people have been mentioning it and most recently there was a post on Cartoon Brew about it..with a link to an interview with the director Todd Hemker of Yellowshed.Sadly but not surprisingly, there is no mention of me in this interview...but more sadly..I seem to have been missing from the credits of designers(this has been corrected now..Thanks Justin!!!). Well this was most disappointing and I thought I'd have to write and explain exactly what I did on this thing anyway!!!HAHAH..
Basically...There were 3 designers for the look of this sequence. Justin Thompson(who production designed the entire movie), Paul Rudish, and myself.And I need to also add Mike Kurinsky here for color keying it all.. Originally, we wanted to actually create all the assets to the piece ourselves...but as we realized the schedule was ridiculously short..we had to relinquish some of the work to Duck Studios who was handling the production side of things(animation, etc).. It appears Soyeon Kim did an amazing job of finishing what we couldn't..Paul Rudish did most of the main character designs..I did a few and Justin did a few.. Paul basically boarded the sequence..and all of us did BG's...Justin and Paul were in charge of directing Yellowshed...and of course we were ALL working under Chris and Phil(the directors of the movie).I never got to meet any of my fellow workers at Duck because I would stay back at Sony and try to push out some more paintings.It ended up being very collaborative and the end result came out very impressive considering what little time everyone had. Check out the interview and then check out the sequence on youtube if you haven't seen it yet.
http://www.artofthetitle.com/2009/10/26/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-meatballs/

Here are some of the character designs and Backgrounds I painted for it. The BG's were done as assets and multiplane camera moves were going to be applied so they aren't really layed out to be looked at as non moving pieces of art...anyway..enjoy!

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS!

It's finally happening. The movie I was so busy working on....is finally coming out!!!! YAY! It starts tomorrow Sept. 18. And I have to say..I've never been happier to have worked on a project. It came out AWESOME!!! Those of you who know me...know that I am NOT easy to please. Sure, there are some things I wish hadn't been edited out or killed by studio interference...but I can safely recommend it to anyone who likes real cartoons...funny ones..Not the ones that make you all sad with miscarriages or barrenness or whatever.No offense to any movie in particular but it seems to be a trend to get VERY serious with our animation lately.Nothing wrong with serious films but what happened to being funny? I like the funny ones. I like rubber hose animation and stuff you can't see in live action...More of that please! So everyone go see Cloudy and have fun and look at all the pretty stuff all the talented people made. And please stay for the end credits..because I designed them with my buddies Justin Thompson and Paul Rudish(I'll post some artwork from that soon).In the meantime...here's some screen graphics I designed for Flint's lab computers. These aren't in the "art of" book..they dissed me..haha..but hopefully you will enjoy.And please tell everyone you know to go see the movie! So we can make more good ones.

No more eggplant!

Here are some really quick sketches I did of my lovely friend Jeya."Quick" being the operative word here..I'm still working on it. Maybe in 2 decades I'll be able to capture how beautiful she is..until then I'll just draw her hideous.

Kaiju Krisp

Here's a little something I did for the Cereal Killers Book that Kreepsville Industries will be putting out. I was having some trouble getting my file over to Victor Von Kreep and I hope I made it on time(last minute as usual). If not then this may be your only chance to see this.Enjoy!Please check out all the other really great artists doing work for it too..and don't forget to pick up a copy.

Q POP GREETING CARD #2

YAY!My 2nd greeting card just came back from the printers.The character's name is CHEW.He's a bit emotional as you can tell from the solitaire tear from his eye.HA! But just like Q-chan..he's part of the new world I've been developing.More fun stuff will be on it's way soon but in the meantime you can buy some awesome cards.They're available on their own or you can get it bundled with card #1 in a pack of 10(5 of each type).Just click on one of the buy now buttons to the right.Hope you guys like it.

Bob Logan's Rocket Town!

My friend Bob Logan made an awesome book! Please check it out..it's the perfect gift for the holidays!Available at his site:
bobopoly

GREETING CARDS(not just for New Years!)

Special Thanks to all that have bought the 1st greeting card. If you haven't yet you can now buy them right here on this blog!!! Just look over there in the right corner and you will see the BUY NOW buttons. I encourage all to buy, of course...and of course please buy the 10 card set(cause you have so many friends to send to!) I also wanted to clarify my crappy marketing in the last post....this card is NOT specifically for New Years(you can send it all year!) so please don't think you're out of time..You have many months to enjoy with your new card friends..

NEW YEARS CARDS!!!

It's finally happening. Q POP(my company with Miki) is just about ready to launch! The website should be finished in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, we've already begun to sell some Chinese New Year's cards for the Year of the Rat 2008.You can use these cards for regular New Year too..AND you can also use them afterward too. "Gung Hei Fat Choi" means "Congratulations and be prosperous" so you can send them out whenever you feel like spreading the warm fuzzies! That's our company mascot, Q (Q-chan for our japanese friends)giving some Emmentaler to his furry friend. The card is nicely offset printed and comes with a plain white envelope. It's blank inside so you can write whatever you want. Please get some and support your old peeps(me).. We put a set of 5 and 10 up on ebay right now(search "q pop card"). You can also just message me if you are interested in some.Free Delivery in LA..haha. Even if you don't usually send cards out, these are worth a go.. non?