Also-

In addition to the comic from yesterday, there's a brief (and very flattering) interview with me up on the Vice site now: check it out.

Mensch

I've got a new six-page comic up on the Vice site today. It's called "Mensch". Check it out.

Tree Trunks

Here's some stuff from the episode-in-production "Tree Trunks". The sign monsters were, I believe, colored by Ron Russell, and the brain monster by Catherine Simmonds.

Dragon in Color

Here's one of the storyboard panels that the design is based on, too, so you can see the whole process. I got to push this one pretty far.

(colored (perfectly) by Nick Jennings)
(board panel (I think) by Sean Jimenez)

Perfect Timing

Just in time for Halloween, here's some candy zombies and a couple of regular old candy people from "Slumber Party Slaughter"- an episode of Adventure Time that's in the works. I did a ton of these guys (sorta hogged all the fun designs on this episode) and you can see most of 'em over on the show's production blog.

They were colored (quite nicely) by Sandra Calleros, Catherine Simmonds, and our art-director Nick Jennings. And to try to give credit where it's due (even though it's tough to untangle with this stuff) there's a lot of Adam Muto (one of the storyboarders for this episode- he probably deserves more credit than I do for this bunch) in a lot of these and the guy with the candy corn eyes is based very faithfully on a Somvilay Xayaphone drawing.

Adventure Time 6

Couple new designs (I wish I could post more, but I have to wait for them to be officially released via the show's production blog). A dragon (which is, I think, my finest design moment so far. Looks really good in color, too) and a naked wizard (you can see I had him wearing one of those weird porn star belly necklaces, but that got nixed.)

They're both from "Memories of Boom-Boom Mountain", same as the marauders from a couple posts back.

Some New Markers,

And a new sketchbook:

Adventure Time 5

Phil and I did a ton of airship-riding, rough-housing marauders a couple weeks ago for "Memories of Boom-Boom Mountain", an episode of Adventure Time that's in the works.

All of mine (I think... there were a lot) are below, and you can see some of Phil's over here, on the show's production blog or even more buried somewhere on the Flickr page.

Of Ice and Men

This one's a few months old. I'm pretty sure I haven't posted it yet. It was for The Common Review.

The Wave

A new one for ESPN magazine for an article about "the wave".

birthday drawing

James Baldwin

From a photo accompanying a New Yorker piece a few months back (with a little bit of Beyonce thrown in).

Adventure Time 4

Some more of my concept sketches posted on the Adventure Time blog:

Favorite Dress

sketchbook 02

Flipmode

Many of the people I paint have either extra facial features or whole extra heads, or both. I've done this as a way of trying (in a maybe too literal way?) to get the figures to express multidimensional emotions. For example, a face with one large smiling mouth and one smaller, less visible, frowning mouth can express hidden fears and reservations within a broader positive feeling.

The trick though, and what really interests me, is including extra features in a face without upsetting the sense of recognition and familiarity within the viewer that is generally evoked by an unmolested image of a human face.

The way I do this is by creating a hierarchy of features - subduing, scaling, or camouflaging duplicate features so that one face becomes dominant and immediately recognizable, while other features or faces are de-emphasized and incorporated and are appreciated only after closer inspection.

As an exercise, in this self portrait I tried to paint two faces, one upside-down and one right-side-up, with the upside-down face concealed as unobtrusively as possible (apart from the overly rosy cheeks) within the right-side-up.

Sketch

Male figure with beard, sweatsocks

Adventure Time 3

Here's a few more concept sketches from over on the Adventure Time Production Blog.

There's a couple of Marauders, some various little dudes, and a wildlife assortment.

Looking Forward (2)

Part two:

Adventure Time 2

Here's some of my rough character/creature sketches that just went up on the Frederator Studios Adventure Time Production blog. There's a few more drawings on their post, plus you can see a lot of Dan "Ghostshrimp" James' nice backgrounds over there. Check it out.

Looking Forward

I'm about to have a baby in a few weeks and It's got me thinking back on this comic I made, the only one left from my brief comic-making period that I hadn't posted yet. It's about nostalgia and how to channel it into something useful. This is part one:

Cartoon Dream

I had a dream last night that took the form of an animated cartoon show. It was basically like watching TV as I slept.

It was a funny show, in the Adult Swim vein. There was a super-villain type of character, an evil warlock or something, who had world domination schemes that the heroes would defeat. The joke about the guy was that in addition to being an evil villain, he also somehow simultaneously was an infant. But the only way this manifested was that occasionally, at the end of a sentence he would make an addendum to highlight his infant perspective. ANYWAYS, I know this is a lot of explanation for a little drawing, but it’s so rare that anything culled from a dream even sort of makes sense that I think it’s worth it.