Category Archive: cartoon and comics

Oct
29
2011

Branding the Asian Art Museum and it’s ‘Maharaja’ exhibit

The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco revealed a new logo recently as they re-brand the museum for the future. The new logo is this upside-down ‘A’ below which at first had me baffled, but as they describe….

Why did you change your logo?

The museum is reinventing itself to engage a broader audience. While the logo is a visible part of our new brand, the real change is in how we’re rethinking the experiences we deliver. Our focus has shifted from presenting stunning artworks to delivering captivating art experiences centered around stunning artworks.
…
Why is your logo an upside-down A?

You recognize the symbol, but you’re looking at it in a new way. This is what our curators do in creating art experiences. Our logo catches attention, clearly communicates a new perspective, and is a welcome sign to all. We LOVE that an upside-down A is the mathematical symbol signifying “for all.” Our Asian art experience is for everyone. For all. At the end of the day, it’s all about standing out, and triggering interest, discussion and visits.

…which makes sense. The design does stand out and smartly designed it to be modified with colors and patterns which make it customizable inside a simple bold graphic that will age gracefully and last for a very long time. It’s nice to see a graphic that is functional in such a strong way.

But the Museum also took another bold step to attract new/young audiences who sometimes avoid things that don’t look fun with special branding of their new exhibit ‘Maharaja’ featuring the illustration work of Sanjay Patel (gheehappy.com) who has published books with his clean digital art of Indian themes as well as worked at PIXAR animation studios. The move was bold and exciting to not show the actual historical pieces in advertising, but modern illustration art that is very graphic in nature and could reach out to new audiences.

For me the changes have worked and I think this represents the way of the future as art presentation shifts to being “captivating art experiences”,but that also means that the lines to what is art is also changing too with merchandising, multimedia and theatrical flair thrown into the mix.

Interesting and exciting time are ahead.

(above) Outside the building is list with pink lights that match the color on Sanjays illustrations like the one below…

(above) The illustrations look to be drawn in a vector based program like Adobe Illustrator and feel very much like they are inspired by the work of artists from the 50′s and 6o’s like the Mary Blair who designed the look of ‘It’s a Small World‘ and ‘Saludos Amigos / Three Caballeros‘ for Disney.

(above) The color pallet is browns and pinks and blues and golds. Unusual mixes of colors that work great.

(above/below) Tight pencil drawings are blown up as decals on the walls for a stunning effect. To find out more about planning the use of the designs, check out this post on the official blog.

(above) Love the elephant.

(above) One of the murals inside the museum.

Click here to find more Books by Sanjay Patel on Amazon or click the book cover images in the article.

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Oct
15
2011

Video: Craig Thompson “Habibi” at the Cartoon Art Museum

by Brian

On September 28, 2011 I had the pleasure to attended a talk by Craig Thompson as he talked about his eagerly awaited graphic novel Habibi at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. I am a huge fan of Thompson’s art and have been following the creation of Habibi on his blog. Nathan Parker was nice enough to post some short clips from the talk on his YouTube page which I have posted below.

It’s inspiring to hear the artist/author talking about his processes as well as the artistic growth that were part of the process.

I would love to do a formal review of Habibi, but I do not feel confident in writing it just yet, but I can tell you that I have read the whole 672 pages and it is pretty amazing. The book is pretty adult in nature and not for kids, but I can whole hardly recommended it. The art is beautiful and the pacing and storytelling flow effortlessly with the author controlling the flow to amazing effect. Even the book in it’s epic hard cover form is part of the experience.

Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, HABIBI tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them.

At once contemporary and timeless, HABIBI gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.

View the next parts at the videographers YouTube pages HERE.

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Sep
09
2011

CAM-JAM 2011 #2 this Sunday Sept 11, 2011 at the Cartoon Art Museum 11:30-5:00

by Brian

Once again I am helping organized another CAM-Jam with InkDrinkDraw San Francisco and the Bookstore at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco CA. Were calling it our Spectacular Super Sonic Paper Monster Party X. The theme will be making Paper Toy Monsters from basic shape constructed of card stock and decorated to add details the models do not have. See below for all the details or visit

Where we meet next:
InkDrinkDraw presents:
Spectacular Super Sonic PAPER MONSTER PARTY X

Location: Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission St. San Francisco, CA http://www.cartoonart.org
Date: Sunday September 11, 2011
Time: 11:30am to 5:00 pm
Being an artist can be a solitary job, so we want to find a way to meet more like minded artists who are interested in Comics, Animation, Illustration, Video Games and more! After all what’s better than to meet, talk and network with people who “get” what you do as a creative!

For our September InkDrinkDraw SF Meet we have teamed up with the Bookstore at the Cartoon Art Museum for another of their CAM-JAM events aimed at artists of all levels.
In the past we done everything from create animation to draw full mini-comics and even designed a tarot deck, but this session we will be having
a Spectacular Super Sonic PAPER MONSTER PARTY X.

In last few years some new type of art forms have appeared, making customized toys with artistic flair. For us we will be cutting, folding and customizing simple paper shapes into characters, embracing the limitations and letting our imaginations go wild.

Participating artist can sign in at the front desk and then you will be able to come in and have some fun with us. Planning on coming, why not RSVP to us or to the Museum’s Bookstore at bookstore@cartoonart.org.

Note:
We are asking for a $2 donation from participating artists to help pay for the
materials (as well as some treats and surprises) The museums full admission is required for anyone who is not participating.

“Paper Monster/character creation”
Come Cut, Fold and customize characters of paper and… maybe even with other materials. We will have plenty of blank, pre-printed shapes to use and will have some coloring tools too, but feel free to bring your own materials if you like and even your own customization projects.

“Share and Tell”
Bring your current projects, copies of your comics and art prints and share with us and even visiting guests to the museum.

“More monsters and open projects”
Come and just sit with us and draw and create all sorts of monsters and creatures or even just work on your own projects.

(While It’s not “required” to participate in any of these particular activities, we’ll have them on hand if you wish too.)

“Open Projects”
As always “Open Projects” is working on whatever project you brough with you, want to try or are currently working on.
Please feel free to discuss your projects with the group! We love hearing about what people are working on and will gladly give feedback!

To stay in touch you can:
On Twitter Follow:
@inkDrinkDraw or @NoCashComics & @AtomicBearPress

Read the inkDrinkDraw
Blog at inkDrinkDraw.weebly.com

Hope to see you there!

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Aug
28
2011

Motion Comic Magic / re-creating the ‘Western River Expedition’ ride

by Brian

A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation

One thing that is exciting to me is how modern animation techniques to re-purpose images of all sorts can be used to recreate and explain the past, present and future. I just saw an example that, while simple is a good.

At the D23 Expo (official Disney Fan Club) last weekend in Anaheim Tony Baxter presented a simulation of a theme park attraction that was meant to be built at Walt Disney World (WDW) in Florida when the parked opened instead of the classic E-Ticket attraction…Pirates of the Caribbean. The ride would be a musical trip through a stylized old-west called The Western River Expedition that would feature many Audio Animatronic figures and a big flume drop at the end. The problem is that guest coming to WDW wanted to know where the Pirate ride that they had heard about was. So the new western themed ride idea was scrapped for a clone of the Disneyland pirate ride. Many Disney theme park fans are still hoping that someday the ride might become a reality in some form, but that is not so likely.

To see examples of the concept art and read about the history, visit HERE.

But thanks to Disney having a huge archive of concept art and rare footage that can put it together in a simple form with some background music and presented it as a visual discription of how the ride might have been. Below is a video of that presentation which features art by one of my favorites Marc Davis and with live narration by Imagineers Tony Baxter and Josh Shipley.

Below is the description from the youtube.com video…

On Sunday, August 21, Walt Disney Imagineers Tony Baxter and Josh Shipley lead a fascinating presentation of rare footage from 1950s and 1960s-era Disneyland for D23 Expo attendees. As part of the presentation, Tony and Josh took guests aboard a complete ride-through of the never-built Western River Expedition attraction, designed for the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida. Though never built, numerous conceptual renderings as well as a complete model of the attraction were built and have been preserved by Walt Disney Imagineering. This video is a ride-through of the attraction as guests would have experienced it, recreated with concept art and photos of the attraction model. Live commentary is provided by Tony Baxter and Josh Shipley.

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Aug
24
2011

InkDrinkDraw August re-cap – Face drawing challengs

by Brian

The other night we had the second InkDrinkDraw event in San Francisco. The events are the brain child of George Webber (No Cash Comics) and myself and are monthly artist events that encourage creativity and comradery.

To find out more, visit the InkDrinkDraw page!

For this month’s meeting our theme was drawing faces. As artist it can be easy to end up drawing similar characters over and over again. These exercises were designed for us to work outside our comfort zone and try new things.

We started with a warm-up exercises where we drew a page of shapes and then passed them around and had others make them into faces/heads.

Here is the sheet that I got back after everyone had drawn on it:

Then we did a handout that George found through Deviant-Art called 25 expressions which is a popular meem. DOWNLOAD IT HERE There are other versions of the sheet on-line, but with facial expressions in more Manga (Japaneses Comics) vibe.

Here is an old west prospector characters that I drew based on the head-shape sketch by Jeff Plotkin.

Next we changed gears and did an exercises of evolving/devolving a character based on a photo. This was something I saw in How to draw comic book heroes and villains by Christopher Hart , but the samples were actually drawn by the late great comic artist Gray Morrow. See more of Gray’s work HERE.

My first attempt was using a photo of classic actor ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle which I sketched on my paper and then worked to modify it till there was still a hint of the character, but maybe not obvious unless someone was looking for similarity. I like the result, even though the drawings are kind of rough and lopsided.

Here are a few more I did…

Last I did a few more drawings based on the Shape Heads that were drawn on my sheet at the start.

These ones below were drawn riding BART home from the city.

Want to give the exercises a try? Here is what we did.

1) Shape-Heads: Each artist participating drew some basic shapes on a sheet of paper. Hearts, stars, rectangles, squares, circles, ovals, wedges, etc. Pass around the sheets of paper and have different artists make the shapes into faces. For ours artist did more then one per sheet sometimes and the artist who drew the shapes also added a few as needed.

2) 25 Facial Expressions: Next we picked a Shape-Head from (1) or had someone else pick one for us. We then filled in a pre-printed handout that was labeled with all the expressions to draw. It’s OK to draw hands and bodies in the shot too. DOWNLOAD HANDOUT HERE.

3) Face Evolution/Devolution: Take a sheet of paper and some photo reference and draw on the Left side one of the faces, trying to capture a decent likeness of the person. Moving to the Right take the head you just drew as reference and modify it into a new character by changing some details. Then draw one or more heads just using the second drawing you did and trying to make it into something new.

4) Take your Shape-Heads and try to draw them again with a body, different expression, etc.

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Aug
13
2011

2011/8/22 SF Artist meet-up: InkDrinkDraw Mon August 22, 2011

by Brian

My buddy George Webber (No Cash Comics) and I are planning another InkDrinkDraw artist get together for Monday August 22, 2011 at the Church St. Cafe, starting at 6:30pm. This is a chance for Bay Area/San Francisco artist who are interesting in Cartooning, Comics, Illustration, Animation and similar art forms to meet up, hang out, network, work and create. The last meet-up two months ago at Hooters San Francisco was a blast, and this location is easier to get too as well.

The cafe is an old favorite being a former location for the Cartoonist Conspiracy SF to meet and is lively and fun.

Below is the press release from the official blog:

LOCATION UPDATE !

Hello Everyone,

From George Webber / NoCashComics & Brian Kolm of AtomicBearPress !

OK, so here’s the FINAL inkDrinkDraw Meet-up UPDATE !!!

SF Pizzeria could not accommodate our meeting this time around, SO .. New Location ….

LOCATION:
Church St Cafe (260 Church St – between 15th St & Market St – San Francisco, CA94114 (Neighborhood: Castro)

http://www.yelp.com/biz/church-street-cafe-san-francisco

DATE:
August 22nd

TIME:
6:30 to Whenever (10 / 10:30 most likely)

HERE’S WHAT WILL BE HAPPENING:
Being an artist can be a solitary job, so we want to find a way to meet more like minded artists who are interested in Comics, Animation, Illustration, Video Games and more! After all what’s better than to meet, talk and network with people who “get” what you do as a creative!

(While It’s not “required” to participate in any of these particular activities, we’ll have them on hand if you wish too.)

“Meet & Greet with a Nosh”
Come on by and hang out with other artists, talk shop, share what your working on and have some food and drinks too !
The Church St Cafe has nice sandwiches, cookies & coffee, but you might want to have dinner before hand and have desert at Church St Cafe as they don’t have big dinner type meals.

“Working with Faces”
It seems that one of the major challenges with many artists is being able to draw a unique cast of characters without drawing the same character over and over again with just minor differences, so we came up with a few different challenges having to do with drawing faces.

There is NO simple smiley face drawings in these challenges (try one or all of them):
1. “25 Character Expressions” challenge.
2. “Book of Faces” challenge.
3. “iPhone Face Off” challenge for those with nerves of steel.

ALSO feel free to bring some photos of faces that you would like to share with the group as we work to increase our mental database.

“Working with Copic Markers Demos”
George Webber be geared up to do his Copic Demo for anyone that wants to learn about these markers and he’ll have some extra markers on hand for people to try them out a little.

“Open Projects”
As always “Open Projects” is working on whatever project you brought with you, want to try or are currently working on.
Please feel free to discuss your projects with the group! We love hearing about what people are working on and will gladly give feedback!

To stay in touch you can:
On Twitter Follow @inkDrinkDraw or @NoCashComics & @AtomicBearPress
Read the inkDrinkDraw Blog at inkDrinkDraw.weebly.com for updates.

Make sure we have your email so we can keep you up dated !
P.S. please let me know if you got this email, it’s a new list and need to make sure it’s working.

thanks
gWebber & Brian Kolm

inkDrinkDraw Meet-Ups & Events

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Aug
09
2011

SDCC 2011 part 3: Art Collection additions + Archie Family Fun Day

by Brian

When I was at the San Diego Comic-Con 2011 (July 20-23) I got a few sketches to add to my collection that were drawn in a cool blank picture book I got at Artist and Craftsman Supply. Some I got from the booth of certain artists and some I bought during the Cartoon Art Museum Sketch-A-Thon. All are very cool.

The art is by Chris Giarrusso, creator of the all-ages comics G-Man. The comic is really fun and a good read.

- www.chrisgcomics.com/

The art is by Dan Goodsell creator of Mr. Toast. I got the sketch when I bought a small book of the Mr. Toast characters as superheros. (BUY IT HERE)

- www.theimaginaryworld.com

The art is by Chris Houghton the artist on a great new all-ages comic series about Reed Gunther and his best friend and steed Sterling the Bear. I got the first three issues of the comic and have read and re-read and keep enjoying them.

- reedgunther.com/

The art is by T.Cypress who is the creator of Rodd Racer, a new graphic novel. I love Toby’s style which I feel inspired by with my own work with brush and ink. This drawing is marker, dry brush, splattered ink, and charcoal. It was really great to watch him create it.

- www.tobycypress.daportfolio.com

The art is by Scott Shaw who is just super-dupper-awesome. He has done everything from storyboards and animation to comic books. See more of her work on this post on the Sketch-A-Thon.

- www.shawcartoons.com/

The art is by Jamaica Dyer who is a talented bay area artist. See more of her work on this post on the Sketch-A-Thon.

- www.jamaicad.com/

The art is by Travis Hanson the creator of the web-comic “the Bean” which you can buy from his website or even better, help out with a current Kickstarter fundraiser. The comic is really a great read for all-ages.

- www.beanleafpress.com/

The art is by Kostas Kiriakakis is just amazing. I saw his first sketch during the Sketch-A-Thon and knew I wanted one. I had to quickly figure out what I wanted him to draw and so I had him draw Samurai from the Superfriends cartoon series. He has work in the new issue of the comic anthology Flight.

- wwww.kiriakakis.net

AND as a bonus, here is a cool drawing of Sabrina the Teen Witch last weekend at the Cartoon Art Museum’s Archie Family Fun Day. The exhibit that it celebrates is really good and here is a review.

The art is by Rich Koslowski who did free sketches to everyone who came to the event which was really really cool. He is a very versatile artist, so go check out his work at the URL below.

- www.richkoslowski.com

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Aug
04
2011

SDCC 2011 part 2B – CAM Sketch-A-Thon July 21 Wednesday

by Brian

So here is the second chunk of photos from the first day of the Cartoon Art Museum Sketch-a-Thon at the San Diego Comic-Con 2011. We were doing a fundraiser to help the museum by having artist rotate ever hour and create original art pieces for donation of $10 or more. As you can tell that most folks got their money’s worth.

To go back and see PART 1, FOLLOW THIS LINK.