This is an oldie, but a goodie. Enjoy!

Rabbi Claus

Man it’s been quiet around here. 

Well, I’ve got a pretty good excuse – I swear. Other than being completely addicted to spending time with my one year old daughter and just being completely baffled at how quickly kids develop, I’ve been pretty all-consumed with getting through the rush phase of pre-production on Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. We’re still in the middle of it with about one solid month of pure insanity left for my design team, but I wanted to come up for air and say hi to anyone who still checks this blog occasionally. 

This particular Ice Age has just hit a major milestone in that our first official trailer has just been released on Apple’s website, and – Yay!!! – it is a classic Scrat trailer. I won’t spoil anything, but you can see it here… 

We still have months of work to go to get the film finished, but the movie’s coming along nicely and I’m really excited for it. I think audiences will have a lot of fun with this one. For me, the design process of a film is the most grueling (it’s kind of like drawing, algebra, sprinting, and chinese finger traps all mixed into one), and as that phase nears its end I hope to update the site more often and get back to my own personal artwork as well! Provided I have any energy left, that is.

Oh well, that’s enough run-on sentences for one night. Until next time!

- Mike

Sorry things have a little quiet around here lately. Got stranded in San Diego after Comic Con due to bad weather for an extra day, then moved to a new apartment with my family two days later. Meanwhile the pace on Ice Age 3 is picking up even more steam as we head into creative crunch time on the picture. To sum up, the last couple of weeks have been CRAZY.

Comic Con was a total blast. OOP 2 did really well, hung out with a bunch of my west coast pals as well as the bulk of the OOP 2 crew who came out to the Con. Very exciting. All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better time. Just a better traveling experience.

Then a week ago, the wonderful Sketchtravel documentary crew came from Paris to New York to interview some of us east coast contributors. I can’t wait to see just how large of a dweeb I made of myself. Ah, something to look forward to…

The Totoro Forest Project Auction is coming up in a few weeks. I just bought my plane ticket to San Fransisco and couldn’t be more excited. I really hope this raises some serious money, but if ticket sales to the auction are any indicator (they sold out in two and a half days!), I think it’ll do pretty well. It’s insane how much momentum is gathering behind this project. If you haven’t discovered the site yet, please go check it out now at http://www.totoroforestproject.org. Dice just launched a new blog for it as well.

Do yourself a favor and please check it out. The group of contributing artists is nothing short of staggering. If you can’t afford to bid on any of the art but want to help the cause, there’s information regarding donations on the site.

Hope to back soon with some new artwork! In the meantime, my contribution to the Totoro Project is the giant owl on the hillside below.

I’m going to be at San Diego Comic Con this weekend along with a LOT of the crew from Out of Picture 1 and 2. Come visit us at booth 1228 (right next to our friends from Flight Comic) where we’ll have plenty of copies of OOP 1 and 2 to sign and sell. The weather’s supposed to be amazing all week long in San Diego (sunny and 75!) which will be a nice break from the humid mid-90’s weather we’ve been having here in NYC. 

It’s going to be a blast, and I can’t wait…

I can’t believe it’s finally out… I delivered the book to our publisher at the end of last October – one week before my daughter was born – and it’s finally on store shelves.

I really think this volume is quite a leap for us as a group of artists. There’s a much stronger emphasis on story, and the diversity of artists (as well as the sheer number) is really amazing. The main thing that struck me about it as I finished laying the book out, was how consistently strong all the stories and artwork are, but also how unique each approach to storytelling and illustrating turned out to be.

Needless to say, I’m a little biased – I know and love everyone in this book, so I hope that if you happen to grab a copy that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting the book together. It’s a labor of love in all the best ways, and all the contributors put their hearts and souls into it.

This is a piece I’m working on for an auction that’s coming up this summer. I can’t say a whole lot about the auction right now (it’s for a pretty great cause), so I’ll just let the piece speak for itself. Some of the inspiration may be obvious, but it’s also reminiscent of my childhood home and neighborhood. Something I haven’t ever really incorporated into my personal work.

Check out some other pieces for the auction by some of my friends here and here…

We’re in the middle of production now on Ice Age 3, and over a month has sped by without me even noticing it! So, to make up for lost time, I thought I’d show a bit of the process on my story for OOP 2.

I did A LOT of thumbnails for this story to try to figure out the pacing, staging, action and page layouts. I always start out as loose and rough as possible, sometimes only blocking things out in inch-high thumbnails. This particular page went through quite a few subtle revisions, but I had pretty quickly established that I wanted to start the story with a shot of the destroyed mine’s exterior.

After getting the basic composition, I started doing more fleshed out tonals and began thinking more about the inset panels and page layout.

At this point I had already done a rough layout of my entire story. Each page went through several revisions until I got the pacing and page count right, and then did refined drawings over the layouts. Once I was happy with a page’s layout, I’d transfer the refined line drawing onto bristol board and do the final pencil drawing with a 2B .5mm mechanical pencil.

The last step was scanning the final drawing into Photoshop and adding simple color and pushing the value range until I achieved the look and feel I was aiming for. The last step was adding type and word balloons (which I decided to keep to a minimum).

These are a couple doodles that were inspired by trips to several of Paris’ comic shops.

This is one of those drawings where I really have no idea what was going through my mind. I had been looking at a lot of Carlos Nine at the time, but I don’t really know if anyone would know it by looking at this. Oh well.

This one is simply titled “Ghost Girl.”

These are some character studies of one of the characters in my story for Out of Picture 2. He’s based on the breakerboys that worked in coal mines back in the late 1800’s – early 1900’s before there were child labor laws in the U.S. This was an idea I started developing back in 1994 while still in school at Ringling, but never completely fleshed out the story.

I still haven’t, really. The story I’m telling in OOP 2 is just a small standalone episode that introduces some of the ideas of the larger narrative.

One of the reasons I haven’t been taking much freelance illustration work lately (other than having a fairly time intensive full-time job and trying to maintain some kind of quality of family life) is that I wanted to spend more time on personal projects.

I had such a fun experience working on Out of Picture 1 that I couldn’t wait to work on another story for the second book. OOP 1 was the first time I’d really sat down and tried to construct any kind of “complete” story, and even though it was short (10 pages), it was an incredibly difficult learning experience. I boarded it out quickly enough, but I must have re-laid out each spread a dozen times. I really wanted to push myself story-wise on this one, so I took a bigger chunk of pages (18 this time) and tried to come up with something.

The story I really wanted to do was too complicated to fit into a short format, so I came up with a sort of adjacent episode which tells a smaller story set in the world of the larger one. Anyone who went to school with me at Ringling might recognize some of the characters in this story (but not in these particular images) as it’s based on a concept I started to develop while still in school. It’s called Under Pressure: A Breakerboy Chronicle.

Here are a few panels…

I wound up using a very different technique this time around. Since I was doing a longer story, I thought I’d save time by doing more pencil work and keep a limited palette. Well, that worked partially… I kept a limited palette and did a ton more pencil work, but I swear it took just as long to get it done.

Live and learn, I guess. The story takes place mostly underground, so I will say that this technique did fit the mood a lot better than doing full-on paintings would have. Feels grittier, I think.

There are more previews of OOP 2 at our website here.