Whiteboard Monkeys: Part I

As it says in my bio, I am a former teacher.  I spent two years teaching art at an elementary school in Tarzana, Ca.  It was an amazing experience that really helped me learn to appreciate art again after working 5 years in the animation business .

As you can see from the previous posts in the blog, I have a monkey character that I like to draw when nothing else is inspiring me.  I made a habit of drawing a quick sketch of the monkey on my classroom whiteboard every week (that’s right, there are no more blackboards.)   The kids loved it, and I was always trying to keep the monkey topical.  Sometimes the monkey would be doing something I had done recently, or maybe it was a character from an upcoming movie.  Either way, I recently found some pictures I had taken of some of the sketches.  I thought I’d share them just for fun.  Some of them are quite crude, but you can see the slow evolution of the character over two years.  I’ll break it up into a few posts.  Enjoy.

Making Lemonade: Part V

The final design for my “Making Lemonade” series.  You can find the full story behind the designs here.

This design started out as a bit of a caricature of my friend Mike, who is the drummer for the Australian band Kistone.  Unfortunately it looked too familiar to Jimbo from “The Simpsons.”  So I made him a blonde and drew a little inspiration from the “party kid” from Australia that was prominantly featured on “The Soup” last year.

Making Lemonade: Part IV

Number 4

Making Lemonade: Part III

Character three out of five.  Thanks for all the feedback I’ve been getting, it’s always welcome!

Making Lemonade: Part II

As promised here is the second of five of the characters.

Making Lemonade: Part I

I was recently contacted by a record company in LA who asked me to help them create a series of animated web shorts to promote a “Kidz Bop” style album they were planning on releasing.  They had no real ideas of what they wanted so I was excited at the opportunity to take the project in my own direction.

I offered to do some designs “on spec” to give them an idea of the direction I would take it in. So, I went to work over a weekend a created a series of characters that I would make up the main cast.  My concept was a rock music take on “Peanuts”, with each character representing a different style of rock music.

The sad thing is that I never heard from the record company again. They haven’t returned my calls or emails and never even saw the characters I created. Which is too bad because I think the idea had some potential, and I’m pretty proud of the work I did.

So, in order to make lemonade out of these lemons, I thought I’d take up a few blog posts showing off the characters.  Here is the first of five characters.

The Amazing One

Find more info at www.randi.org

Something New

Here’s a screengrab from something new I’m working on.  I’ll be posting a lot more on this as it progresses.  Enjoy.