as an afterthought to the previous post, i wanted to highlight a couple details from Gino’s office that might get a little overlooked in the book.

chinese takeout box. i figure he is working some crazy hours trying to keep the barge out of trouble and the garbage buried quickly before he looses anymore money on this great idea of his that has turned into an international debacle.

a few of the other items on his desk. notice that the envelope even has a thin plastic film in the address window.

what better way to show a little stress than a broken pencil. carved from a toothpick.

the radio/CB device he uses to talk to Captain Duffy

even though Gino doesnt seem to be the brightest fella, i still wanted to give him some aesthetic credit with this awesome chair.

Gino Stroffolino is a key character in the book and is the mastermind of the barge scheme of making money by shipping the garbage to be sold and buried somewhere else. In fact he is a fictional character that takes the place of a few of the men behind the scheme. Jonah Winter, the writer of the book, told me he made him up because he didnt want to end up making somebody(s) mad that might just have the ability to make a call and have Jonah’s kneecaps shattered. after a few bad sketches i stumbled across this one that seemed to fit Gino’s personality.

and here are a few shots of Gino from the book:

i was delighted with the greenish, fluorescent lighting for his office. hopefully the viewer will here the ceiling lights buzzing the way old fluorescent lights do so annoyingly.

getting right down to it the tugboat was one of the most intimidating things i have had to build recently. it was going to have to look good from all angles and viewpoints because it was going to be the other half of the main character. most of what i build it only meant to be seen from one viewpoint for a single illustration, so for the tugboat i needed to build it in the round and with an even finish on all of its surfaces. once i had the schematic drawings down and i was ready to build i was determined to build the boat out of only materials i had on hand in the studio, found objects and random bits of stuff that i seem to continuously attract. being that the book is about controlling the garbage you create i decided that if the tugboat was built out of junk that i would be doing my part to live up to the moral of the book.

here are a few close up shots of some details of the stuff that the tug is built with.

old furniture caster and pulley that stands in as a rope handling system that ties to the barge

showing the engine housing with old rubber tubes for the exhaust and i thought that yellow fuse looked good there

the railing is from a found wire screen and the edging under the railing is from used windshield wiper blades, the lifesavers are made from old rubber washers

salt encrusted windows

a view of  the gauges inside the windows (one of those details never seen in the book)

an old Leviton light switch

here are the steps in the front of the ship. the bumpers on the tug are rubber tires kept from discarded toys, and they are hanging on old leather belts which were used to construct the sides of the ship.

the cables and ropes are made with old wiring i found while remolding my house a few years back.

as a bit of a side note: i was given a box of  junk that was found by my uncle Jim while cleaning out the garage of his father, my grandfather who was known as Rusty. the 15lb box of  bits of machinery, misc hardware that is always left over from projects and broken things that my grandfather was sure would come in handy someday sat in my garage for awhile because i wasnt sure how to sort all the pieces and parts. the day i started to build the tugboat i hauled the box up to the studio hoping to find some pieces that would ‘fit’ on the tug. once i started to really look at what was in there, it was clear as day to me that all of the stuff did, in fact, come in handy. here’s to you grandpa!

if there are any fans of the Science channel there is an episode of Science Of The Movies (episode title ‘Secrets of South Park’) that will run on thursday Dec 3rd. the episode will have a segment on the Chiodo Bros who i was fortunate enough to work with on a project called Innards. i worked along side Brian Krueger and Stephen Chiodo and all the wonderful folks at the Chiodo facility. its my understanding that the main character from Innards named Chunk will be part of the segment on stop-motion animation and the science behind the technology of both old and cutting edge techniques.

The *CHIODO BROS.* segment is slated to air on:

*Thursday, December 3rd at 10PM ET/PT.
*
Because airdates frequently change, please be sure to check your local listings and/or the Science Channel website to confirm the airdate:
_http://sciencechannel.com/scienceofthemovies

_****You’ll need to search by the title of this episode, which is “Secrets of South Park.”*

here is a shot of Chunk on the set of innards

and here is a very early talk test i did with Chunk and his sidekick Miller.

cheers
chris

the next thing i needed to tackle was how to pull off an expressive Captain who goes from exuberant to angry to down right beaten up by countless rejections not to mention that it is just him and the garbage out on the open ocean. so i leaned on the old stop-motion animation technique of replacement animation. i created five heads that could be interchanged on one master body. i was able to categorize the captain’s many expressions into just five facial poses(expressions). first there is the neutral face which has a gentle smile/ smirk , second there is the open mouth exuberance, third is the jaw dropped expression of ‘oh no! it the mexican navy!’ forth is the teeth gritting scowl where he is about to blow his top and fifth is the face of a man that is beaten down and gasping for the last breath of fresh air. **(the ‘neutral’ face is not included in the following photo)

capt duffy's many faces

one little problem that arose in the midst of making the multiple heads was that his captain’s hat would need to fit each head and look good from any angle. after finding the right blue leather and about 3 hours of trial and error i got this little gem.

duffy's captain hat

another small detail throughout the book is the captain’s constantly changing t-shirt, my favorite being the one with Mr. Yuck from the green poison control phone number sticker that we had on the center of our rotary phone dial in my childhood home.

Mr. YUCK t-shirt cameo

after the colorstudies were finished i  needed to start to figure how all of this was going to get built and how i was going to build things that worked well for each image but didnt end up being more work than they needed to be.

it was overwhelming to try to see it all at once, so i took advantage of all the prep work i had done and found that it allowed me to have most everything scratched out on paper so my mind could start to focus on individual aspects without getting bogged down everything all at once. i started with the ocean i knew it was going to be the foundation of the scenery, it needed to work for several different scenes. to me that meant that it needed to be easy to work with. in the past i have used actual water for scenes with water. but i learned that even though water has a look all its own it sometimes looks too real for the worlds i create, besides it can get really hard to control too. once i almost flooded the studio when a garden hose spraying water on set got out of hand… i have also used saran wrap in the past and although it had some properties i enjoyed, it still looked like saran wrap. i have seen folks use mirrors or glass with elements added on the surface to mimic ocean foam and ripples but that didnt seem like the right application either.

so in keeping with the theme of garbage  i pulled out some discarded, large, clear plastic bags that my large art boards get put into at the art store. they had a substance to them that saran wrap didnt have and the light played on the surface and gave a feeling of a heavy ocean. now i was getting somewhere. the next material i found was the plastic bags that the local dry cleaners use. they were a little lighter than the art bags and they had a blue tint.

now i felt like i was onto something. here are the first ocean tests that set up the foundation of the Garbage Barge’s world.

the following image was shot with a paper cutouts of the colorstudies of the tug and barge.

last september i was one of a handfull of artists commissioned to create a desktop image for the new Windows 7 software. being that Windows 7 launched this week, i am finally able to make a post about it.

if you watch the following video at about 2:24 you’ll see my image on the touch screen demo.

the objective as far as i can remember was to create an image that conveyed adventure, delight, lightheartedness, and something fun to look at, and it needed to be able to appeal to a wide audience…

with his homemade cloud suit and a pair of feathers he takes a leap of faith at the center fountain where all wishes are made.

so for any rednose fans out there, you’ll be happy to find a little ‘freebie’ in your next Windows upgrade. i just hope ‘the launch’ goes over well…

here are the approved sketch and colorstudy. it honestly was a blast to work on and even the rejected sketches ended up being created for my own work later on. thanks to everyone at 72&Sunny for the adventure.

some details

after the landfill research, i dove into trying to figure out the color scheme for the book. keeping in mind that the story spans an entire summer and travels to several places, i wanted the color to help convey various times of day , attitudes, conflicts and most importantly to use color to show how the garbage gets worse and wears more heavily on the captain over time.

here is the colorstudy sheet with each spread being about 1.5″ tall. i like to keep all of them on the same page so i can see how the color flows thru the book as a whole as opposed to just working on each individual spread. i used watercolors and the small scale to help me work quickly and to hopefully not to overthink the color.

here are a few details of the colorstudy. with scribbles and notes in the margins. looking back at this i see that it was merely a starting point for the colors that as i worked on the finals, evolved into more complex color schemes but this initial study was constantly referred back to and use as the primary direction for the whole book.

in trying to decide how i would create this mass of garbage that hulks upon this infamous barge i arranged a tour of the landfill back home where i grew up. (where my father now works) i wanted to see what trash looked like once it had been through the ringer a few times.

notice the serene farmland on the horizon. this is about 7miles from where i was born and raised.

the garbage is sort of whited out. they spray a layer of heavy concrete like powder on the new garbage at the end of everyday. it keeps stuff from blowing away and helps to compact it. from what i understand they used to use a thin layer of soil for this step. for me this white stuff took alot of the color that i was looking for out of the garbage.

yes, that is a semi trailer on a contraption called a tipper. its the easiest and quickest way to unload a trailer full of trash. a new trailer comes in about every 30 minutes.  you have to see it to believe it.

this is a compactor. i didnt get to see it running but it was quite a machine just to look at. beautiful in its own right.

i did get to see and  feel this dozer running. because we were standing on a mountain of garbage the earth literally shook and quivered when the dozer passed by. the trash that was caked in and on this machine is what i was looking for.

i think everybody should take the time to tour your local landfill. it really make you think about how WE ALL live.

this year i have been honored to have the chance to illustrate a majority of the covers for Angie’s list magazine.

the new october issue which addresses with what to do when an elderly parent has passed away or moved and you have to deal with the life time of stuff that they have accumulated.

here are the roughs the art director Tanja Pohl and i deliberated over.

and with the last minute aide of a great working headline ”

They’re dead
You’re buried

How to get out from under the clutter

this is the sketch that came up

a sequence of about 100 shots during the process of setting up the clutter, setting up the lighting, adjusting the lighting and getting the image ‘just right’

the final…