My Name is Barnabas Collins...

In honor of the Tim Burton's"Dark Shadows" the folks at Deviantart decided to hold a contest for the best portrait of Barnabas Collins, the vampire famously played by Jonathan Frid and now Johnny Depp. As fun as that might be, the real kicker was that the top ten entries were going to be judged by Tim Burton himself.

Here's my entry.

I've been a Tim Burton fan for a long time so there was no way I was going to pass this up. Unfortunately, I found out about the contest three days before it was over, so I had to work fast. My initial concept was a traditional three-quarters portrait of Barnabas in a stiff and elegant pose. To contrast this sophistication, I was going to paint blood splatters all over the painting, implying that Barnabas had killed someone and the victim's blood got all over his fancy portrait. How annoying!

As I was sketching this concept an idea came to me of Barnabas staring straight at the viewer while in the background there was a mixture of crazy '70s colors. I really enjoyed the pop-weirdness of the "Dark Shadows" trailer so I decided that was the way to go.

For reference I primarily used these two photos that Warner Brothers provided in the contest kit:

(these two images are copyright Warner Brothers 2012)

I tried to mix and match elements from both Barnabas in creating my own. And in case you're wondering, I started from scratch. There's no copying or tracing to create my final image.

Here's mine right after inking:

I've been playing a lot with line width recently and I think that really helped out the artwork, especially in differentiating the various layers of clothing.

Here's the final line art. I went in and fixed any areas that needed fixing and eliminated dirt. The biggest change was increasing the size of the cane. The initial version was far too small, so I had to go in and scale it up. I also fixed Barnabas's eyes. Minor stuff but it all adds up.

I also used the flip test and found out the illustration was skewed too far to the left. Using Free Transformation - Skew I was able to make it look perfect. Now, color!

Color turned out to be trickier than I expected. The only idea I had was "70s Colors!" But what did that look like? This wasn't it.

 

 Neither was this.

Nor this.

In a fit of desperation, I started looking at 70s movie posters on Google Image Search and find these:

 

Yes, that's right, "The Holy Mountain."

The colors on these two posters were fantastic! I straight up copied the colors directly into Photoshop and created this:

Almost there! I played around with hue and saturation and pumped up the colors even more:

And there you go! The finished piece.

Alas I didn't make it to the semi-finals (these talented folks did instead) but I had a great time doing it. I'm very proud of the final image and I think it might be the most technically polished thing I've done so far. That alone made the competition worth it.

See you in the theaters on May 11th!

Many, Many Monsters

Hey folks, sorry for not posting much. Life's been throwing a lot of stuff at me and the minute one thing ends, another begins. Thankfully it's all very exciting stuff that I hope I can talk about soon.

But I haven't been completely neglectful. For the past few months I've been running, Many, Many Monsters, a blog dedicated to publishing my monster art.

The whole thing is an opportunity to try out new techniques, play around with photoshop and plumb the depths of my mind. I try to get them done a fast as I can; I really want them to come straight from my subconscious without too much intellectualizing. Because of that I've posted some truly strange stuff that occasionally makes me ask, "Where the hell did that come from?"

Here are some miscellaneous favorites:

Nicola

Stompasaur

Scratch

Joe the Monster Bartender

The Debt Collector

If you like 'em, check out more at Many, Many Monsters. If you're hipper than I am, you can see them at my Tumblr.

The Happiest Place on Pandora!

Yep, there will now be an "Avatarland" at Walt Disney World's Animal Kingdom. As a Disney Theme Parks fan and James Cameron fan this news couldn't be any more perfect.

But even better than that have been the reactions across the Disney fan sites. Oh my God, they've been so much fun to read.

Bring on 2016.

"Super" Violence

SPOILERS APLENTY!

I was watching James Gunn’s Super the other day and I had a great time. I thought it was a very funny and very dark take on super heroes and super hero fans. One thing I noticed while reading reviews and reactions from people on the net was that they were very put off by the violence. Gunn's cavalcade of carnage really seemed to really disturb some people.

I found this interesting because all the violence in Super struck me as very over-the-top and silly. Whenever Rainn Wilson as the Crimson Bolt hit someone on the head with a wrench, the person didn’t just get a bump on the noggin, their skull cracked open. Characters don’t just get shot, they all get shot in the head so the maximum amount of blood can spurt out. At one point Wilson drops a cinderblock on a prostitute.

Now, that might not seem funny until you see the movie. The way that joke is set up it looks like a frame from a Looney Tunes cartoon, and with that in mind, it’s not hard to picture Bugs Bunny holding the cinderblock right over Elmer Fudd’s giant head.

So violence is very comic in the world of Super. James Gunn is a veteran of Troma, and that gleeful love of carnage is very evident throughout the movie. There’s a scene near the end where Ellen Page gets shot in the head, and rather than tastefully suggest the damage, Gunn decides to show all gore, which includes half of Page’s head blown away.

That shot always gets a reaction from people because cute little Ellen Page now has half a head. But while I thought it was sad that her character died (and her character is a highlight of the film), I also thought it was pretty funny. The violence in this situation struck me as so crazy and so excessive that the only reaction was to laugh.

As I mentioned before though, most people seemed to be really apalled by the shot. I suppose the easy answer is to say I’m jaded and sick or that the audiences were just a bunch of wimps. But I think the real reason for this disparity is the film's tone. People seemed to take the story a little more seriously than I did.

James Gunn mentioned on his Formspring account that he always saw the film as more sad than funny and that a lot of people agreed with this view. I can definitely see that interpretation as the film treats its characters very sincerely and Wilson’s craziness can read as real to a lot of people.

That’s not how I saw it though, as Super appeared to me a little more overtly comedic. Wilson is such a sad sack that he states early in the movie that he’s only had two happy memories in his entire life. Kevin Bacon gives his most William Fichtner-esque performance as a mob boss that has a thing for brown eggs. There are a number of sequences inside Wilson’s mind that are incredibly bizarre, including tentacles opening Wilson’s head and a dipping a corn dog into his brain. Ellen Page in particular epitomizes the film’s tone as she’s a super hero-wannabe that just wants to abuse people. She’s a psychopath that thinks she’s awesome. She’s violent, sad and funny.

For me, Super was an arch and darkly humorous satire of super heroism. Others saw it more as Taxi Driver-type character study of a sad individual in the grips of mental-depression (the film’s ending is definitely Taxi Driver homage). Neither view is necessarily correct, but it does explain the reaction to all the violence. I think the film’s a big joke so the violence to me is intentionally stylized and ridiculous. If you see the film as a drama and are deeply invested in the characters, then all the violence that the Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page dish out and take in will be deeply disturbing.

Tone is something of a nebulous concept as you can’t just type “darkly comic” or “depressing” into Final Draft Pro, but it is an important aspect of film that can change how the viewer interprets the film. If Gunn set out to make a sad film, am I wrong for seeing Super as comic?

Yes.

No, wait! I’m not, because you can’t control how everyone interprets your film. But that’s OK, because if you’ve made a good film, then it can be appreciated for reasons you didn’t necessarily intend. I mean, shit, you think anybody’s interpreting Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star?

So if you ever watch “Super” with me, don’t be freaked out when I laugh at Sean Gunn getting his legs broke by Ellen Page ramming into him with her car. I think it’s supposed to be funny!

Development Sketches

 

Here are some sketches I did for an unproduced short film. I had a lot of fun developing the relationship between the girl and her cat, and the short was going to be fairly experimental (I was watching a lot of David Lynch films at the time). Unfortunately my passion for the project ran out right around the storyboard stage, so the short remains unfinished.

For now anyway.

Skribble Lennon

This might be interesting for some of you. A few weeks ago I submitted a drawing to Deviantart's Skribble contest. The goal was to make a drawing using only this:

Tall order, huh? Back in high school, my art teacher used to give us scribbles and ask us to create finished drawings using the scribble as a base. Because of that I actually had some experience, so I thought the contest might be fun.

For whatever reason, when I saw the scribble, I saw this:

  

I've always been a fan of simplicity in drawing, and I thought the skribble would be a great jumping off place to create a caricature of John Lennon. So after drawing the caricature and inking it on paper, I scanned it into the computer, and it looked like this:

The missing lens and hair would be replaced by the scribble. One thing I noticed was that the drawing was skewed a bit to the left. After doing the flip test (where the drawing is flipped horizontally) I realized that the drawing was definitely flawed. For some reason I had never been concerned about skew in my artwork previously, but noticing it here really concerned me. I mean, I'm entering a contest, the drawing should look good.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to go back and redraw Lennon (I was about to leave for vacation), so I used Photoshop to unskew the drawing as best I could. As handy as that feature is, it's a bit like cheating, and I'd rather correct errors like that beforehand. I mean, Michelangelo didn't have Photoshop, did he?

Okay, so it looks pretty good. I've fixed the skew, erased some lines, and used the skribble to create both sides of Lennon's head. From here I simply colored the lines based on the colors used on the Imagine album.

I had to tweak the colors here and there, but all things considered I think it looks pretty good!

Alas, I didn't win the DeviantArt contest, but I'm glad I entered. I'm not sure I would have created this without a little nudge.

Oh, and I'd like to thank Brian Brittigan. He introduced me to the flip test awhile ago, and I've been kicking myself for not employing it earlier.

Updates!

Hey, folks. I'm still around and kicking. In case you haven't seen it yet, I have a new blog dedicated to my monster art, and you can find it at Many, Many, Monsters (there's a tumblr too). I'm having a lot of fun coming up with crazy creature designs, and I think you guys might enjoy it as well.

I've been having a great time writing for Suite101.com, and I have a bunch of new articles that I think you'll like. There's an article on Joe Johnston's adaptation of the Dave Stevens' comic, The Rocketeer, an article about Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant's hilarious new screenwriting book, Writing Movies For Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can Too!, and a review of the 80s teen classic, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

I've also got a bunch of secret projects in the works, so stay tuned, there's a lot more fun on the way.