Wendy was a true friend to animation and all involved with it. She was President of Asifa Pacific NW, a writer for various animation journals & industry trade publications, and a respected teacher. I knew her when she was involved with AWN from 1996 to 1999. She had a real passion for contemporary and classic animation - and her enthusiastic spirit will be missed.
Her husband, Porter Hall, is updating her website in tribute to her life. There will be a memorial service on the West Coast on Saturday at 3pm at the Seabold United Methodist Church, 6894 NE Seabold Road off of the 305 on Bainbridge Island WA. On the east coast, a memorial service for Wendy will be held at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Medfield, MA on Saturday, December 3 at 3pm. Directions to the church can be found here.
The combined credits of the three new bloggers below include DEXTER'S LAB, POWERPUFF GIRLS, FOSTER'S HOME FOR IMAGINARY FRIENDS and SAMURAI JACK. So you know to expect good stuff from these guys:
Don Shank (who also has a couple terrific paintings in the upcoming BLAST #9)
And here's a nice directory of animation artist blogs, courtesy of Smook. It's not by any means comprehensive, but it's the largest collection of animation blog links I've seen so far.
LA folks are in for a major treat this weekend.
Saturday, November 19, is the opening of "3 Trees Make a Forest," a three-man art show featuring new works by Enrico Casarosa, Ronnie del Carmen and Tadahiro Uesugi. I'm constantly amazed at how much quality work Enrico and Ronnie are able to produce and how dedicated they are to their various artistic endeavors -- FRAGMENTS, Sketchcrawl, MIA, PAPER BISCUIT, fine art shows -- and all this while holding down dayjobs at Pixar as story artists...truly commendable.
The show is at Gallery Nucleus (30 West Main St., Alhambra) and the opening night reception is from 7-11pm. All three artists will be in attendance -- Casarosa and del Carmen will be coming down from the Bay Area and the amazing Tadahiro Uesugi is flying in from Tokyo. The show received a major write-up in today's LA TIMES and it's a good read.
VOICE: AIGA JOURNAL OF DESIGN has an interview with MISCHIEVOUS ART OF JIM FLORA author Irwin Chusid about all of the personal artwork that Jim Flora produced over the years, which includes hundreds of paintings, watercolors, drawings and woodcuts. Chusid says there is the possibility of more books dedicated to Flora's art. The article also includes ten never-before-seen examples of Flora's personal art, including the above piece.
Alexey Kobelev has launched a great new blog, The Russian Insider, which aims to document both classic and contemporary Russian animation. Currently he's posting lots of great development art from PRINCE VLADIMIR, a nearly-completed Russian animated feature that should be pretty impressive if they're able to maintain the quality of the concept art.
(via Hans Bacher)
TREE+ME is an amusing, oddly styled Flash short by an artist named VanBeater. Afterwards, take a look at all the crazy illustrations on VanBeater's site. Good stuff.
OK, haven't done this in a while...
Yoshi Tamura worked at Disney Paris and was the supervising animator of the Helga Sinclair character in Disney's ATLANTIS. He has some beautiful drawings on his blog.
Steve Lambe is a Chicago-based artist who is currently designing on HI HI PUFFY AMI YUMI. He kindly sent me a copy of his new color sketchbook, SAMICHES 2, which is available for sale on his blog.
Dean Roberts is a London-based artist who has done boards on THE CORPSE BRIDE and animated on SPACE JAM, among many other things.
Ovi Nedelcu has been listed on our sidebar for a while now, but I've never given him a proper mention. He's currently working in Portland on the Laika feature CORALINE and writes and draws his own comic series PIGTALE.
Saxton Moore does it all: designs, animates, directs. He's done a lot of work out of Atlanta for studios like Primal Screen and Turner Studios. And just because I know I'll never have a better reason to post this, below is a caricature of Saxton (right) and myself (center) drawn by the supertalented John Mahoney. It's from about four years ago, when all three of us happened to be working on an indie animation project.
BLAST features over 40 works by the likes of Tim Biskup, Joe Chiodo and Amanda Visell (her work above and at right). The BLAST FROM THE PAST show is themed around the mid-20th Century views of futurism and space travel. The two art shows run from November 19th through January 2nd.
I happen to think Comic Book Guy is the funniest Simpsons character - ever - partly because I know a few comic book dealers like him - and possibly because I posess some of his more appealing traits myself. The book is loaded with humor based on comic book, sci-fi, animation, movie & TV history minutiae. The more you know pop culture (and comic book dealers), the funnier this tome is. 96 pages, in color - Kudos to Bill Morrision and his team of seven writers (and over 20 artists) for making me laugh out loud on every page.