Pickled Mickey

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Today I am busy working on my "sculpture" for the Senior Management presentation. It seems to be going well..... I am baking it in the oven as I type this. I thought that I would take a break and share this fun website:

www.everybodyneeds2drawmickeyonce.com

I found this site through my buddy Eric Wiese's blog. Eric had posted a Mickey on his blog, which he had drawn for this website. I thought that I would join in on the fun. There are some pretty cool interpretations of Mickey posted there.

Trip to Japan countdown: 4 days

Jack

ADDY Award Winner!

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The images above, illustrated by yours truly, are just a few of the POS elements from the surf project I worked on at the end of 2005. This was the first project I got when I came back to Integer from my short working stint at another advertising agency. The images are a combination of photography, vector art and photoshop. These were created for a regional program for the electronic point of sale (ePOS) our company creates and provides for our client. This campaign just won a Silver ADDY Award! This winning entry will be forwarded on to the national ADDY Award competition.

The AAF: American Advertising Federation accepts entries for the ADDY awards once a year. The ADDY awards are unique among all advertising creative competitions. It is the only competition that includes three rigorous levels of judging:

Entries are first judged at a local level through competitions organized by more than 200 ad clubs affiliated with the AAF.

Local winners then advance to 14 regional competitions.

Finally, regional winners advance to the national/international finals.

It is nice to see all of our hard work pay off.

I want to say congratulations to my team.

Trip to Japan countdown: 7 days

Jack

Clown of Clay

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It has been 12 days since my last update........... I have not been able to find the time to post here with content I can be proud of. I have been thinking of just posting an image every other day and let the art speak for itself....... just an idea.

Trip to Japan countdown: 14 days

Work has been busy as usual. I have been working very hard on some illustrations for an internal project for my company. Once these things get printed I will post the images.

I have been avoiding working on another internal project for my company. Our senior management proposed that each person that works at the company will be allowed a 12 inch x 12 inch wooden square to draw on and express their own individuality. These will then be hung on an inner wall that goes throughout the inside of the building. They approached five employees to finish their "square" and do a presentation to the senior management team. I am one of the lucky five. I have not figured out why I was chosen as one of those five........

I decided that I would create a sculpture or I guess in this case I would be creating a "relief". I have been having a hard time getting motivated to work on the project because I know how much work lies ahead of me to get this piece to the level I feel it needs to be at. I have told myself that I will be devoting this next whole weekend to completing this project. If the weather stays like it is (cold and snowy), I don't think that I will have any problem getting this finished.

Since this post has been about sculpture, I thought I would share an image of a sculpture that I completed a couple of months ago. For some reason I really enjoy drawing and sculpting clowns. I am not sure why....... I have never had any weird episodes with a clown.

Enjoy,

Jack

Pickled Betty Boop

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Trip to Japan countdown: 26 days

It seems like it is taking forever for the days to go by............

Work this week has been busy, but not too overwhelming. I worked on an illustration of a basketball player for for one of my clients. I think that the illustration turned out really well. The only problem was that the client seemed to think that the BB player looked a little too ethnic......... So, I had to change some facial features and illustrate some hair on his head. This wasn't a problem for me to do.... but was it really necessary? Is that adjustment really going to sell more of my clients product? For me to be able to do these types of changes I have to always remind myself that the client is always right.

I have also been keeping myself busy at work with an internal illustration project. This has been really fun for me to do. It is letting me illustrate in my comic book style once again. It has been over 6 years since I really have drawn in this style. I haven't really had any problems with remembering how to do it, I have just had problems with my speed. I can remember I could knock out a full page illustration in about a day. (pencil, ink and color) Now it is taking me almost three days to do the same type of illustration. I should have started these in my "Pickled" style and I would be able to get them done a lot faster.

The illustration above is of the classic animated character Betty Boop. She appeared in the Talkartoon and Betty Boop series of films produced by Max Fleischer and released by Paramount Pictures. With her overt sexuality, Betty was a hit with theater-goers, and despite having been toned down in the 1930s, she remains popular today for this portrayal of sexuality. Her her first appearance was on August 9, 1930 in the animated cartoon Dizzy Dishes, that was the sixth installment in Fleischer's Talkartoon series. Betty was designed by Grim Natwick. Grim was an animator that worked at Walt Disney's and Ub Iwerks' studios. Grim is credited with being the one responsible for creating the character, which he modeled after Helen Kane, a famous singer and actress at Paramount Pictures, the studio that distributed Fleischer's cartoons.

I think that this is one of my favorite Pickled Drawings.

Enjoy,

Jack

Happy New Year!

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I have been back at work for a total of 2 days now and thankfully it has been very uneventful. The hardest thing I have had to do besides getting to work on time is changing a legal line on an illustration that I did of Winnie the Pooh for P&G. I had a lot of back and forth between legal and art director and account service to figure out if a period needed to be added to the end of the mandatory line. Disney legal sent it to us without the period, copyediting wanted to add the period......... I had no source to make the corrections. It is amazing how a simple thing like a punctuation mark can be made extremely difficult.

I have 29 days before I leave for Japan. I am getting more and more excited everyday. My friends Ryan Philbrick and Rie Speer just got back from their visit to Japan and gave me some ideas of things that I should try and do to document this trip. I hope that I can keep up with all of the things we are going to do while we are in Japan. Since this will be my Mothers first trip to Japan, I want to be able to document this well for her so she can have a really fun and lasting memory of her "adventure to Japan".

The illustration above is another one that I did for Wizard Magazine back in 1999. I felt that it would be appropriate to post since today has started out to be a rather blah day for me. If I remember correctly, this was when Wolverines claws had turned to bone and there was rumor that he was going to get back the adamantium that covered them. One of the ways Wizard proposed is that he would do this was by eating "adamantium burritos". I look back at this stuff and I am amazed that I really liked drawing this fanboy type illustration.

I hope everyone has a Happy New Year!

Jack