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Fellow uke fanatic, Ernie Gilbert, and I boarded a ukulele-based concept for a potential Nickelodeon spot that takes the phrase, “My dog has fleas,” literally!

This is my initial concept art that inspired the idea for the spot, and if you know Ernie, you might notice a bit of a resemblance between the uke player above, and the irrepressible uke-playing/ singing/ acting/ character-designing, and now, theater-directing character that is Ernie Gilbert!

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This is a page from my life drawing sketchbook. Yesterday, at Nickelodeon we had our weekly luch-hour of uninstructed figure drawing. The model was a gentleman named John Tucker and he is an amazing model and actor. For this session he came dressed as a pirate, with a wonderfully detailed costume, great props, and soundtrack music, all of which served to transport the model and the sketchers to another world. We loved his work so much, that we invited him back for the next four weeks.

In his posing, he is such a convincing actor that we don’t feel like we’ll be drawing the same person each week, but whatever character inhabits his body.

I haven’t posted any new drawings in a while because I’ve been working in my spare time on redesigning this blog interface. What was called OldTimeBlogWare is now called “Tube” and it is accompanied by a new theme called “Transistor.”

In the sidebar is a widget that allows you to switch between the themes. Try it out.

There are still a couple of little glitches in my poorly-hacked sidebar widgets, but it’s getting there.

Edit: Well, I see that, although it looks fine in Firefox and Mozilla on the PC, and looks great in Safari on the Mac, the sidebar of my Transistor theme is a mess in Internet Explorer on the PC. I’ll just have to do more research later when I have time, to learn about the incompatibilities of IE.

Well, I just had to design my own WordPress theme for my blog.  I'm sorry if it takes a long time to load, because it's pretty graphics heavy, but I couldn't help myself.

It still needs fine tuning, which I'll continue to tinker with in my spare time.  I adapted the theme from an existing one called "Remember" by Becca Wei of Beccary.com, and built a couple of widgets by adapting scripts that I found on the web and wrapping them into the Theme Widgets plugin and the execPHP widget. You can find WordPress Widgets and widgetized themes HERE . 

Anyway, I hope you like it. 

 This is another proposed promo spot for the short shorts campaign that never happened:

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Here's another rough pencil for Nickelodeon Magazine.  This story was for the special 3D issue, so I penciled it in red and blue to give a bit of indication for the separation of foreground and background elements.  Also, I tried to push the dimensionality of the panels more and more throughout the story, in order to support the final payoff in the last panel. 

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I've just added a Gallery page to make it easier to organize my images. You can get to the gallery by either clicking on the image above, or by the menu at the top of this page.

Among the additions is a gallery of my Roche sketchbook that shows the process I go through when developing a project.  There are many variations of style of the character designs and some location and situational sketches.

I also posted a storyboard for a promo animatic that I did. The universe of that promo is slightly different than the direction it's been going lately.  At this point I think newscopters and gasoline trucks would be out of place in Roche's world. But, it's a cartoon, so I won't rule out anything that works until I've locked all the laws of Grogan's Alley in stone.