Q Pop Grand Opening

This coming Saturday, January 29th from 7-11pm will be the Q-Pop grand opening.

Check out the Q Pop blog for more info.

Please come out and check out the shop and the work in the mini-gallery.  There are so many amazing artists that will have pieces in the show.  I'm honored to have a piece hanging, but man... there are some heavy hitters that will be along side of me.  I'm helping to make them look real good :)

 The theme for the show is "What is Q?".  Here's a sample from my entry.

Here's the address for people that know about Google.


Q Pop
128 Astronaut E S Onizuka St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Come on out and say hi!

yours truly,
Phil

Twenty Ten

This year has been insane... on all fronts.  It's been a personal roller coaster of crazy life stuff.  But I'm not going to bore you with all of the details.

This might be my last post of the year, so I thought I'd hit this one up as a bit of a trifecta.

...


First off; I've been lucky enough to have been Lead Character designer for Adventure Time on Cartoon Network.  Our first season finished airing earlier in the year and I couldn't be more ecstatic about it's reception.... I also can't believe that I'll be wrapping design on season 2 this week.

One of the coolest aspects of being part of Adventure Time has been working on the episode title cards.  The cartoon title card has been one of my favorite traditions in animation and dates back to the earliest of cartoons.  On Adventure Time we decided to try something a little different by trying to visually package each episode with something a bit more pulpy than the actual content of the show.  It was definitely a struggle at times, but I think overall they turned out incredibly well.  We didn't have much time worked into our day to day to handle the workload that these title cards demanded, but everyone involved really gave their all to make them as great as possible.

Many of them started as thumbnails or concepts by Pen or Pat and just as many were riffed off of exististing pulp art.

I was responsible for laying out 25 of the 26 title cards.  Santino laid one out as well, and did a BG for another.  They were then handed off to art director Nick Jennings and painted by Paul Linsley and returned for a final polish pass by Nick.

Here are some of my favorite contributions.  This was a really fun illustration challenge for me and I had to really try to dive into some type design.....  which I still need a lot of practice doing.

This was one of my final layouts for Season 1.  This is clearly an homage to Frazetta's "Death Dealer" and was drawn just shortly after his passing.  I had a blast with this one.  Frazetta's work is boundless with inspiration.

Pen did an awesome thumbnail for this... and I had fun trying my "romantic comedy" type.

The final card for this turned out awesome.  My "bed bath and beyond" type was removed... haha

I was really happy with this one.  I think Tom Herpich helped me get the final composition nailed.

This one creeps me out all sorts of creep.

Here's a link to the Frederator Flickr page with all of the final cards...  boom.

...

Secondly!

It's been a dream come true; I'm teaching Character Design at CalArts!  I had my last official class of 1st semester this past Thursday.  It was an awesome semester.  I've learned so much about what's important to me as a Designer and I'm constantly amazed and inspired by my students.  I have a long way to go to tighten up my curriculum, but I think everyone has responded really well first semester.  

I would never be there teaching if it hadn't been for some awesome encouragement and well timed recommendations by two uber talented students, Kristen Campbell and MJ "Double Vision" Sandhee (..... go see a doctor dude).

...

Lastly...

I'm slowly in the process of overhauling www.rynda.com.  Along side of that, I've opened a web store. 

My plan is to add something every month starting in January.  To be totally honest, the idea of me trying to sell what I do for me, to people like you, is both completely ridiculous and terrifying.  I'm excited to see how it goes.

So yeah.

Thanks for reading.  And thanks for sticking with me through ever more infrequent blog posts.

ps...

It's your turn Evan Spiridellis.

APE 2010

I'll be heading up to APE this weekend. Stop by my table and see me pretend to be totally cool with trying to sell my own art! Ill be at table #703 with the great LFW in the flesh. Ask him about Crocodile Dundee... I'm sure he'll love that.  We're also right next to Andy Ristaino, he'll have books, prints, shirts. He'll be slinging some awesome.

Luke will have his killer graphic novel, "Bikini Cowboy". It's spectacular, but copies are limited. So act fast.

I'll have a bunch of prints, along with the release on my 3rd Comic Book Paaarty installment.

Come say hi!

-p

Cat on my keyboard

hugs,
p

It's been too long....

I can't believe so much time has past since my last post. I'll get back on it, promise.

I have a ton to talk about on here, but first things first.

This weekend I'll be at the San Diego Comic Convention. I'll have a copies of my new mini comic with me. If you see me, I'll happily give you / trade you one.

I'm pretty proud of this one.

Aaalllsssooooo, I haven't forgotten about the people that wanted my first mini. If you commented last year and asked for one, I'll be sure to send you last year's and this year's for free!

I have some exciting stuff on the horizon and I'll be setting up a web store soon, so you guys can foolishly buy my crap.. haha.

Any way, here's the cover.


cya soon,
p

enough

happy new february

I'll get to some real posting soon. Here's a midnight snack.

i've got a headache and I hope i'm not getting sick

3 Prong Attack

1st off... and this is unfortunately pretty late notice.. I'm going to have some pieces in a group show tomorrow night at the Buck Wild Gallery in Venice CA. The opening is from 7:30 to 11:00. Come on out if you can. The address is 12804 Venice Blvd.

2nd.... As a lot of you know, a pilot that I had the pleasure of doing some designs for is now up on youtube. It's catching on like a California wildfire and I wanted to make sure to post it here on my blog. Congrats to creator, director, friend Pete Browngardt for this killer cartoon.



3rd... Tom Herpich and I designed a shit ton of Marauders for an upcoming Adventure Time episode called "Boom Boom Mountain". They've all been posted on the AT flickr account and blog. But I thought I'd include some of my contributions to the cast of Marauders we designed... I think this is all of them...

Holding me over

I don't know about you guys, but I miss me some Sylvain Chomet. Last I heard, his new film, "The Illusionist", is supposed to be released this year. I'm not sure it's still on track for that. There are a few promo stills on the web that you can see if you do some digging.

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but never got to writing the blog post around it. So here's Chomet's short "The Old Lady and the Pigeons" without any of my rambling to go alongside of it. Oh, and it should be noted that Nicolas de Crecy had a big hand in the final look of the short.

La vieille dame et les pigeons
Uploaded by XLanig. - Independent web videos.

and a commercial Chomet directed...


Chomet!!!! Chooommmeeettttt!!!!!

thinking out loud

S'been a while.

24 Hour Toons

I designed today's banner for 24 Hour Toons. I'm going to try to contribute something.... but it may be more like a 3 hour toon. We'llll seeeeee.....

Bud Luckey turns 75!

I just learned on Cartoon Brew that it's Bud Luckey's birthday. Birthdays are cool, and I hope that he has a great one. But what I learned via that post was that Bud Luckey animated and co-wrote the Donny Budd shorts for Sesame Street! These were some of my favorites as a kid and I had pretty much completely forgotten about them. And it all makes sense now. I really enjoyed Pixar's "Boundin" but I could never put a finger on why it felt so familiar to me. But now I know! There is a certain youthfulness and energy in Boundin' that brings me back to some of my favorite shorts from Sesame Street.

Well... here are some of Donny Budd shorts. The drawings are so great in these cartoons. They blow my fan art out of the water.





Happy Birthday Bud! and thanks,
Phil

Back from Comic Con

Amanda and I are back from our whirlwind/totally under-planned trip to SDCC. I handed out just about all of my mini comics (50 of them!). I'm going to print up a second batch and send them out to whoever would like one. I'll post when they are printed up.

We had a good time and saw some old friends and made some new ones. Thanks to Natasha and her Arizona cartoonist crew for letting us crash at their hotel. Also thanks to Andy for giving us a place to call home on the convention floor. Thanks to Shane Glines for the ridiculously nice compliment. A huge thanks to Bob Boyle for giving us his spare train pass. And thanks to everyone that laughed at my mini comic.

Comic Coooonnnn!!!

Looks like Mandy and I will be heading down for the con tomorrow. If you see me, ask me for a copy of my mini comic, "Comic Book Paaarty". It's hot of the xerox machine.

If I have any left over I'll try to make them available on the blog.

Also....

Blogger comment moderation always does me wrong. I just accidentally deleted a bunch of newish comments.

Thanks for the kind words, David Gemmill, Dan Krall, Mr. Magoo, and some other people that I can't recall. Sorry about that.

Lunchtime Black and White - Stream

Lunchtime Black and White - Back

The Drawing Club

Here are some of my drawings from "The Drawing Club" last week. I have mixed emotions about drawing from life in this manner, but it could be just my stubbornness. I enjoy the concept of a more relaxed life drawing environment and it allows people to have more fun and experiment more. Buuuttttt... I seem to struggle with having fun at these drawing sessions. I need to relax a little more and just go with the flow. I need to separate the super intense life drawing that I did in Jim McMullan and Stephen Gaffney's classes, and think of this as more of a drawing playground. Don't get me wrong, I'm having fun, but I guess I feel like I should be having even MORE fun. I just don't enjoy it quite as much as those super intense drawing sessions. Even still, I'll keep showing up to The Drawing Club if I can and I appreciate that Bob Kato organizes this night for us artists in Los Angeles.





..and.... John Musker was sitting next to me, I had to make sure my inner geek remained my inner geek.

WATCH CHOWDER

New epsidoes of Chowder kick off tonight on CN at 8pm. Tune in... keep my friends employed... watch Chowder.

oh and... credit for the illusion image needs to go to Akiyoshi KITAOKA
found via the Optical Illusions and Pictures Blog.

woo!

***note** That's my propulsion system; Amanda is just coming along for the ride.