A little holiday revelry!
Lily Feliciano at The Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood runs a website called Sketch Theater.
They celebrate the process of sketching! Can you believe that?! So awesome! They invite professional artists and film them from above as they draw. Then they speed up the footage and add some cool music making a performance video out of sketching!
Lily just posted my Postal Elf sketch and I thought I’d share it with the Man vs. Art minions for Christmas! Because you guys rock and deserve nothing but kick ass stuff!
Great Christmas tune by The Ramones perfectly complements the sketch I made of an elf going completely postal.
Also here is a little animation test I did of a girl dancing. I used ToonBoom and a Wacom Tablet. Which turned out to be easier than I thought. It is myfirst rough pass, but I think it works pretty well. Now I just need to clean it up and color it!
So sit back with your tequila and bourbon eggnog and enjoy!
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Plus The 2009 Man vs. Art Christmas card and more!
But first Geo Brawn IV
In today’s podcast I present you guys with part two of my chat with my friend and esteemed colleague Los Angeles Indy Comic Creator Geo Brawn IV. We get down to brass tacks about Geo’s technique and approach!I learned for example he uses Tuxedo Black Acme Bic markers. A pretty common pen you can pick up at any office supply store for your drawing needs.
Keep it simple with BIC!
BIC Mark-It Permanent Markers, Ultra-Fine Point, Tuxedo Black.
Ideal for small spaces and detailed crafts. Textured rubber grip is engineered for comfort and control. Marks on glass, metal, CD’s, coated paper, photos, plastics. Long cap-off life. Vivid, quick-drying ink resists water.
- Holy Crap what a wonderful pen! Too bad it’s gone!
I was a Victim of Circumstance!
It’s a good idea to use a common type of drawing implement. I unfortunately got hooked big time on these wonderful disposable fountain pens from Pentel way back when I was at Film Roman in 2003. These are AWESOME! They give you a consistent Crisp thin line that you can make thicker by applying the slightest pressure.
When I was wrapping my short Hero Heights at Nickelodeon in the summer of 2006 I discovered the pen had been discontinued! The Horror! I couldn’t find them anywhere anymore.
One day I walked into a local Mom ‘n’ Pop Art Supply store near my home in Downey California and asked the guy if he had any of those pens. He opened a drawer and there were like about FIFTY of them! I was happier than a poet on pay day! I bought them all and have been using them since. I’m down to my last dozen or so and need to ween myself off of them like real soon!
So let that be a lesson. Be careful of what tool you choose for drawing. You don’t want to wake up one day and find out they stopped making them.
Anyway……
How about taking a gander at a couple of Olivia’s beauties!
- Sweeeet!
Hellooooo nurse!
The famous Pin Up artist Olivia, who’s wonderful illustrations of beautiful women have been gracing the pages of Playboy and Heavy Metal for years! Well, as it turns out, she is a big influence on Geo. I can see why! I mean wow! Just look at how stunning her pieces are! Wonderfully executed works of art that really capture the beauty of women that we all love so much!
Ahooogah!
Big Guys of the world UNITE!
Geo and I share many things in common. Besides the whole artist writer thing we are both also big intimidating looking dudes with deep voices. We look like fugitives from a Wookie convention. We get crap from people all the time. The cool thing is when we get tired of it we just squash the little runts. Most guys like us are bouncers, cops and hired muscle not artists! So we throw people off everywhere we go. I like that.
Geo by Raul
Remember in the last podcast, we found out people mistake Geo for being Samoan! That’s a group of folks famous for their size and ferocity!
So the next time you a see a huge goon. Be careful. He might draw your picture.
Sheila called.
If you check out the podcast you’ll hear me taking some calls from the audience. We had a great call from Sheila from West Hollywood. She runs a “petite” girl’s boutique on Melrose called “The Girly Cue.”
Man what a crazy broad!
What’s on Raul’s desk?
I thought I would share with you guys what I’m currently working on.
First up is a character design for a show I created called Cuddles King of Congo Island.
Meet Dr. Gideon G. Granola.
The Old New Age Guy
Dr. Gideon G. Granola
He’s the eccentric , some say senile, gazillionaire philanthropist, extreme environmentalist, militant vegan, pacifist, wildlife expert, Dr. G. Gideon Granola.
A relic of the sixties now pushing seventy. His family owns the famous Granola Discount Freight Company and with the profits from said company Dr. Granola funds his crazy expeditions.
And why not? He is after all the world’s top authority in Eco- Biology and officially holds the title ” World’s Oldest Tree Hugger.” If you want proof there is a picture of him at the Smithsonian hugging General Sherman, the world’s oldest and most gigantic Sequoia Redwood, when it was only a sapling! He is into all things hippie and new age and has a strange but very Zen way of looking at stuff. Meditation is a big part of his life, and he does it often, both on purpose and otherwise. He goes in and out of “Zen” like trances and after a long, sometimes uncomfortable pause says…….. “What?”
He is mellow for the most part but gets really really excited about nature! I mean really excited. He loves nature and everything about it! Even the stuff that could kill you. All the bugs, plants, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are all equal in his mind. On the other hand if sees someone harming nature it becomes personal.
His eagerness and spirit have not diminished in his old age. Dr. Granola likes being in the field where he can make things happen, and where his flatulence is less noticeable.
He is forgetful and a little flaky. Did I mention his gold medal in “funny old man Tai Chi?” Its true!
World's oldest tree hugger.
When he announced he would be leading an expedition to find the fabled “Congo Island” everyone laughed and called it folly. But he knew better! Now that he’s found it, he plans to study and catalog as much of the island’s wonders as he can. Secretly Dr. Granola is searching for “The Fountain of Youth” Yes that one! He has reason to believe the fountain is on Congo Island and he’s going to find it.
From Fartsy to Artsy. A fine art commission.
This is the charcoal value study for a portrait I have been commissioned to paint. I just finished the drawing last night and am priming my canvas right now.
value study for a portrait commission
Sketching as a performance?! No really I swear!
And here you will find something really really cool that I got involved with Lily Feliciano at The Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood runs a Sketch Theater.com. A celebration of the process of sketching! Sketch Theater invites professional artists and films them from above as they draw. Then they speed up the footage and add some cool music making a performance video out of sketching!
Recently I went in to be filmed and Lily just put up my first video!
Check it out!
And now a moment of reflection for the Holidays.
Las posadas by Raul Aguirre Jr.
Each year I make a Christmas card for my wife and I to send out to our friends and family. Here is this year’s card for you Man Vs. Art minions to enjoy. It depicts the Mexican Christmas tradition called Las Posadas or “the inns”
Las Posadas is a yearly neighborhood tradition for Catholic Mexicans that symbolizes the hardship Mary and Joseph endured before finally finding a place to stay where Jesus could be born. From December 16th to the 24th each family in a neighborhood sets up a nativity scene and acting as innkeepers will schedule a night for the Posada to be held at their home. The neighborhood kids portray pilgrims (peregrinos), who seek lodging by going house to house singing a traditional song.
All the pilgrims carry small lit candles in their hands, and two kids carry small statues of Joseph leading a donkey, on which Mary is riding. At each house the resident sings a refusal for lodging until the weary travelers reach the designated site for the party, where Mary and Joseph are finally recognized and allowed to enter.
Once the “innkeepers” let them in, the group of guests come into the home and kneel around the Nativity scene to pray the rosary.Then it’s time for a good old fashioned Christmas hoe down Mexico Style! Children will break open piñatas by striking these colorful paper-maché (traditionally terracotta) objects with sticks while blindfolded to obtain candy hidden inside, and there will be a feast of tamales, buñuelos, and atolé!
Isn’t tradition awesome!
We here at ManVsArt.com would like to wish every single one of you and your loved ones a joyous holiday season and thank you from the bottom of our hears for making Man Vs. Art your choice for art related shenanigans and fun!
Raul and Che.
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Ok folks!
Big Show!! Lots to share.
First up, I am proud to present part one of my two part chat with local Indy Comic Creator, Illustrator, and Samoan Impersonator Geo Brawn IV.
Geo_Brawn_IV being suave.
Here is the initiation ceremony where Geo and Luis Escobar were sworn into the Cartoonistas!
Geo had his hand on a hardcover of Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Luis used volume two of the essential Spider-man!
Inside info about Geo’s Epic Vampire tale The Untold Chronicles!
For thousands of years the stories have remained untold… until now. We’re talking serious stuff, with a heavy duty hook.
Bloody hot!
The image above scares the living s*** out of me in a good way!
You gotta check it out!
Godzilla!
Dorky Kong!
King Kong Vs. Godzilla! Oh yeah it's on Kong!
A promo piece for the movie from 1962!
Kong Designed by homeless guys. Still more fun than Peter Jackson's WTF version.
In the Bottom Pic of Kong, what’s going on with the raised leg? Two Knees? Gotta dig the cheese factor people!
It’s what separates us from the monkeys! That and the flinging poo thing!
PLUS!!!
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Elvira
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Bruce Lee!
The horror Hostess with the Mostest!
Bruce Lee the man, the myth
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Eli Wallach. Greatest Mexican Actor who is not Mexican! Ever.
Tuco Benedito Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez
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Shogun Warriors!
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Tom Hatten!
In Los Angeles during the 70′s and 80′s Tom Hatten hosted a cartoon show called Popeye and Friends, where he showed old toons and drew pictures of the characters!!! He also hosted “The Family Film Festival” which showcased classic films with guys like the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and even Jerry Lewis! Good Times!!!
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A guy named Ariel!
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Cosby!
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Australian d***k wrestling!
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Alan Moore!
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Childhood memories and trauma!
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- That’s right! I got stretch monster as a kid! I was once little! I swear!
A little holiday fun and memories.
Music and sound effects up the waz! Almost an hour of fun and insanity all for the price of, well….FREE! You can’t beat that!
You’ve heard the podcast!!! You Can’t unhear it!
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Dark Art. Art that is Dark. Angst. Pain. Nightmares composed of hideous things doing hideous things to other hideous things. It’s everywhere. It dominates our culture.
H.R Giger loves the dong!
C'mon people. Admit it.....This sucks!
Oh poor Royo. I feel your pain and agony. Let me help you with that sack of money while you climb into your Ferrari.
I am sick of it.
I’ll tell you what, I think it’s all a big scam and frankly I think it sucks. There was always a dark corner for pasty faced weirdos to draw and paint a guy hanging from the nuts with fish hooks over a pit of demons. A few dorks with no personality who read into the Sandman a bit too much had their little corner in the art world staked up. Guess what? Now these guys have taken over and the worst part is everyone is buying into it. All of a sudden heroes couldn’t wear brightly colored costumes when fighting the minions of darkness. Now the heroes are indistinguishable from the minions they fight. You see it in movies, comics, video games and TV.
Everything is dark and angst ridden.
Why EVERYTHING?!! Since when did it become uncool to be a good guy? In the latest Superman movie he’s a dead beat dad stalker!!!! That’s not the big blue boy scout I recall! If you ask me the world needs more good guys, both in reality as well as fiction. Back in the early part of this century America and it’s allies fought the darkest emo douche bag of them all. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi monsters. They were bad. Evil. Even their friggin’ uniforms looked evil man! Well our grand parents and great grandparents had a real clear cut view in their minds about Good Vs. Evil. And what it meant to be one or the other. Why? Because their culture taught them that the guys in black are evil. There is a clear distinction between the two. Look at the literature and pop culture of the time. Flash Gordon, Tarzan, need I go on? If today’s soft, deluded and self centered knuckleheads were transported to WWII the Nazis would have won. Go ahead send in the hate mail. You know I’m right.
Today pop culture teaches that there is no good. Every hero is just one traumatic experience away from being a psychopath. In order to defeat evil, good needs to be bad. It’s deconstructionism, it’s edgy, it’s LAZY WRITING. ” Batman beats the derelict senseless in order to get the location of the Joker’s Lair.” Is so much easier to write than perhaps “Batman relies on detective skills to track down the Joker” The writer would actually have to come up with an intricate plot that could possibly be interesting. Nah, I’d rather read 22 pages of Batman pimp slapping a crackhead….again.
Every good guy has to act and look evil or at least be dark.
Look at the costumes of super heroes in movies today. The only brightness is the gleam from the smile on the studio execs when they cash their paychecks. Everyone is dressed like the Matrix. It’s retarded.
Why was this made?
Wolverine looks tame! His hair is combed WTF?!!! What is this? The black leather fetish convention?
On the other hand….
Look at this Steranko X-men cover. Brilliant and powerful. These guys look like good guys and the book looks fun. Look everyone COLOR!!!
Steranko Rules Period.
You gotta love the skull eyeballs. Pure friggin’ Steranko my friends!
Or look at this exquisite George Perez mega cover! Now those are super heroes! Nothing dark and fruity about this! These are the colors I want to see in film adaptations. Why is this not possible? Is Hollywood blind as well as stupid? With HDTV and all that other hi tech crap this stuff should be pouring out of the screen and assaulting our senses! Nope. Black leather and muted colors please.
George Perez Rules! I mean look at this!
There are so many other avenues of the human condition yet to be explored by art. Why have we collectively stopped at angst? It’s self serving self indulgent crap. Let’s grow up and see that there is a bigger world out there than vampires dressed in designer outfits. I dare you!
I got to thinking about a video I made and posted on youtube yesterday. And I feel like a knucklehead for not sharing it here. Today I have remedied that.
This is my telling of the legend of La Llorona the Mexican Legend of the wailing woman. I want to share it with you guys here!
I tell the story of La Llorona Man Vs. Art Style while I paint a picture of her.
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La LLorona. Doomed to wander near bodies of water lamenting her drowned children.
La Llorona,
The wailing woman is an ancient legend of my people. It is a cautionary tale handed down thru the ages mostly by spoken word and meant to scare kids to behave and discourage young ladies from promiscuity. It is a story of love, devotion, betrayal and murder. You ‘ll be hard pressed to find a more sordid tale of tragedy and woe than that of this woman known as La Malinche, and later as La Llorona.
I first heard it from my great grandmother Mariquita Aguayo the summer of my seventh year and yet it still chills me to this very day.
La Malinche was the noble first-born child of the lord of Paynalaher on the Mexican Gulf Coast Coatzacoalcos, then a “frontier” region between the Aztec Empire to the north and to the south the Maya states of the Yucatán Peninsula. She spoke both Mayan and Aztec very well and knew the customs and and superstitions of them too. Tragically as do most kingdoms that lie between two great nations her people had suffered greatly under the obsidian blade of both super powers for as long as she could remember. In her twenties her father died and her mother remarried and bore a son. Now an inconvenient stepchild, the girl was sold to Maya slave-traders.
In 1519 she was given to the Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés who immediately took a liking to this highly intelligent and victimized young girl. A girl who later played an active, powerful, and decisive role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. She was instrumental to the destruction of The Aztecs and Mayans. La Malinche acted as interpreter, adviser, and intermediary for Hernán Cortés. She was also a mistress to Cortés and gave birth to his first son, who is considered one of the first Mestizos (people of mixed European and indigenous American ancestry).
Following the native traditions of the nobility she became totally devoted to her man Cortés and basically sold out the Indians to the Spaniards.
She explained Aztec and Mayan superstitions and beliefs to Cortés who used the information to gain the upper hand on the natives. Without her help Cortés and his gold greedy mercenaries would have been crushed. Instead Cortés the Conquistador was revered as a god!
She bore him more children only to be abandoned so that Cortes could marry a Spanish lady. Here we can see in the legend La Llorona’s loss is a metaphor for the Spanish rape of Mexico and the demise of indigenous culture.
Now this where it gets weird. Apparently she went mad and somehow thought she could win the affections of Cortés if the children were out of the way. So she did the unthinkable. She drowned the children and then in a total freak out of remorse she killed herself.
Tut tut! We all know she was not going to get off that easy, was she now? For having betrayed her children as well as the Mexican people, the Gods punished and damned the hysterical woman to wander, searching for her children along rivers and lakes at night for all eternity. In some cases, according to the tale, she will kidnap wandering children.
In Mexico today, La Malinche remains iconically potent. She is understood in various and often conflicting aspects, as the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim, or simply as symbolic mother of La Raza or aka the new Mexican people. She is often known by the pejorative term “La Chingada” (“the violated one”).
