Holiday Original Art Sale!

These paintings that I've been doing for fun are starting to stack up, so I opened a store to cut 'em loose. All pieces are watercolor/ink on bristol board.

I have no real experience pricing original art so I bet you could talk me down on the prices if you tried!! Check it out here: www.chrispurdin.bigcartel.com.

eVault Ad & Goodbye Laika Friends!

 I was recently commissioned by fashionbuddha here in Portland to design, storyboard and animate this ad for eVault, a server company. It's a pretty fun campaign where they've asked a bunch of different animators (you can see all the spots here: http://www.evault.com/BestCase/) to animate in a wide variety of styles. I (you know, the guy who's trying to get a side career in children's books going?) was asked to animate the script that involved a, let's say risquee film cast and crew falling threw a ceiling onto a server. I thought it was a pretty funny concept and it was a lot of fun to bring to life - it's not often in animation where I'm asked to design things pretty close to my own personal style and that was also great. I also purchased Toon Boom Harmony (the software I've used at Laika for years) to complete this and it worked like a charm.

Which leads me to one other piece of business - I resigned from Laika recently and am currently swimming in the freelance pool. Send business my way! A huge thanks to everybody at Laika for the last 10 years, we've been through a lot and couldn't have done it without their support. I had so many great friends there and hope we can all keep in touch and continue to work together.

Plesiosaur Watercolor

Gus & I were drawing dinosaurs and I decided to paint this friendly fellow up.

Page 3 of My New Comic + Process

And here's page 3 of this as-yet untitled comic. At this point I think it would time shift to the beginning of the story to tell how we've gotten to this point...which I still have to figure out. I've written pages of stuff down but nothing in script form yet - I am getting kind of excited about it now and am thinking about how best to create & distribute. Anybody with experience/opinions on that kind of thing, I'd love to hear them - I'm thinking of trying to do it as a one-page-a-week web comic and see what comes of it.

The linework was drawn in Manga Studio 4EX and colorwork in Photoshop CS6. Here are some early thumbnails for this page (used legal paper and pencil!), followed by the roughs for anybody that's interested in seeing that kind of stuff:

Page 2 of My New Comic

So a long time ago I posted the first page of this comic here. I got busy with other stuff and wasn't really happy with how that page turned out, I left it to ruminate for awhile. So I flipped some stuff around and decided to try it out this way. I still have one more page in this little segment of a much larger story and I may take another left turn with that - these are sort of my process testers for when I go full bore into this. All feedback is welcome, after awhile it gets hard to tell what's working and what's not!

It Always Feels Like Somebody's Watching Meeeeee!

Been getting the comment lately that my style may be better suited to kids that are a little older, so I thought it might be fun to try out some black & white, chapter book style illustrations. Here's my first and it was really fun to do - excited to try some more.

Octopus Just Inkin'

This started out as a sketch I did in a meeting at work (see below after the jump) that I dug enough to do something with. I got the idea to try setting it up as a screenprint but then got carried away with color and texture - still tried to keep it simple with bold color. Still like the idea and may re-purpose it that way (would love to turn this into a band poster someday - bands? anybody?) Also like the barracudas in the sketch and may turn that into something too... Check out the sketch after the jump:

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea - Family Movie Night

Been awhile since I've posted a Family Movie Night piece, and this one's been in the works for awhile. Did The Black Stallion before it but not crazy about how it turned out. "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" was one of my favorite movies as a kid and I was thrilled that Gus got just as into it - but c'mon, maybe the squid wanted to sing along too! Some process points after the jump:

Snow White at SCBWI Oregon Spring Conference - 2013

Last weekend I attended the Spring Conference for the Oregon chapter of the SCBWI and signed up for a homework assignment from Abrams Books for Young Readers visiting art director, Maria Middleton. We were given the text from Snow White with several lines highlighted and sent forth to illustrate that passage. It was a great opportunity to simulate an actual job by sending in sketches, receiving notes and executing the final piece. During the conference the attendees displayed their work and were able to get direct feedback from Maria (in under 2 minutes!)

I tried out some tweaks to my process and I'm pretty pleased with the result. I've included 2 rounds of sketches (the first round I ran by my critique group of Jenny Kincade & Gesine Kratzner - thanks guys!) so you can see a little how it evolved. Check them out after the jump:

Green Lantern Costume Re-Design

*Update!*
I couldn't stop thinking that this needed something more, especially since all the other superheroes I've done had two characters. Then I remembered how much I loved that there was a space squirrel Green Lantern named B'dg - there was no stopping me after that. Original is after the jump.

Comic Books!

Last November I noticed that a comic creation program, Manga Studio, was having a huge sale and I thought "that might be fun to try" given that I spend so much time reading comics with Gus lately. So here's page 1 (or maybe page 37) of something I've had rolling around in my head for a little while and it was drawn in MangaStudio4 EX and painted in Photoshop. I'm definitely going to at least do the 3 pages I've thumbnailed of this short story and see where it goes (there's a lot more story but I don't know that I like much after these first 3 pages...) Let me know what you think, this is a new world for me - the last comic I made was on notebook paper when I was in 6th grade!

Family Movie Night(Morning)- Jonny Quest!

So we watched an ocean documentary for family movie night this week but we got really amped over watching 4 episodes of Jonny Quest last Saturday & Sunday morning. I can honestly say the show is better than I remember it (which is barely at all) - animation is pretty much what you'd expect but the character & background designs and layouts (drawings the animation's based on) are top notch. It seems comic artist Doug Wildey was a huge part of what made the show so good. I've included a few images after the jump to show the (very quick) process that got me to the final brush pen/watercolor combo I ended up with.

Family Movie Night - The Lorax

 
For this week's family movie night we watched The Lorax by Illumination Entertainment and I thought I'd pull out a sheet of bristol board and do a little drawing since I'd seen it before. Last night I decided to go back in for a watercolor pass. Might make a tradition out of this, it was pretty fun. Hope you like it!

National Assoc. of Realtors Spot

Here's a new spot I did a ton of work on for the National Assoc. of Realtors called "Dreams". I storyboarded and layed out the whole thing, animated 4 scenes (2, 5, 6 & 7) and did about half the final line/"crayon-mation" The spot was directed by Mike Wellins at Laika/House, while all character and environment designs were by Jenny Kincade. Joe Meredith animated the other 6 scenes and Jon David Buffam did the other half of the final line/crayon-mation. It's pretty fun, right?

Creature Watercolor

We received our copy of Creaturebox's Kickstarted Monster Volume over the weekend. Creaturebox is Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin - Dave was my college roommate, one of the groomsman at my wedding, somebody I've known since around 7th grade, and one of my best pals. I can't begin to express how proud of him and excited I was at the success of their Kickstarter (they made over a 1000% of their goal!) and am equally excited to display their book in our home. Dave and Greg were also nice enough to include a ton of other goodies for us including a bunch of prints, a slipcover for the book and even a hand drawn and colored sketch of one of my favorite comic characters (Daredevil; he's blind, jumps around NYC and has radar sense - what more do you need?) So grateful to those guys and hope we can get together someday soon.

After that, Gus and I spent the better part of the afternoon drawing our own creatures and this image is what I came up with (I'll post Gus's to his drawing blog later this week). Wanted to play around with my new brush pen I recently acquired and then got the itch to add some watercolor. Was nice to play with traditional media and get unshackled from the computer. I also included the pre-color version below for any that might be interested. Hope you like it and don't get too creeped out!

Spike Wants To Ride A Bike - Hedgehog Hiker

So I'm posting up pages of the Hedgehog Hiker book as I finish them and am soliciting them for critique much the same as I did with Grumpy Gus. I've had a few images in mind from the beginning and have been just working those up and am making a dummy book at the same time so I know a good way to stitch it all together before I get too far. Hope you like it, but if there's anything that rubs you wrong please say so - I'm putting my nights into this so there's no point in making it less than it could be! This page would be facing a page of text.

Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child Illustration

Emily and I recently went all the way back to the beginning and watched the first ever eposode of Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child. While I loved it, you don't necessarily need to keep your eyes glued to the screen - so I started sketching, kinda liked it and decided to make a little promo piece for the original airing. Hope any of you Who fans out there dig it!