LAIRD VLAMING GOES TO COLLEGE!

That's right!  To Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.  So what better way to commemorate that milestone than by posting a monster painting he did when he was seven years old!  The colors are great but I always loved the teeth. 

 

Congratulations, Laird!



OXY ACETYLINE BOVINE (AKA WELDING COW)

I doodled this in a notebook a decade ago but coincidentally came across it just when Laird started taking a welding workshop.  That inspired me to to color it with Corel painter, I guess.

ANOTHER ROBOT -- IN LIVING COLOR!

I let my son Trevor color this robot sketch any way he wanted.  Funny how a kid doesn't automatically go for traditional "robot colors" -- like chrome or gun-metal grey.  Maybe 'cause they're not robots...

A COUPLE OF DUDE(LE)S

The guy on the above left is of interest in that he is facing RIGHT.  See, as a right-hander, almost everyone I draw faces LEFT -- like the fisherman above, on the right.  Confused...?

 

DEPRESSION KIDS

Three stages of a 12 O'clock somewhere llustration.

Allergic to Hard Labor

Years ago, when I thought I was gonna be an animator, I did this simple sneeze sequence and filled it in with colored pencil, in a sort of Bill Plympton style.  After drawing and coloring a mere ten panels, I realized how labor intensive animation really is... and stuck to writing.

POST EMMY NOMS - SCHNAUZ SCORES WITH BREAKING BAD...WALKING DEAD'S POST MORTEM

A shout-out and a hearty congratulations to my friend TOM SCHNAUZ and his best drama Emmy award nomination for one of the scripts he wrote on BREAKING BAD.  Tom and I were both writers at REAPER back in the day, where in fact the above doodle emanated.  As THE WALKING DEAD had zero Emmy noms, the undead cast members may wanna look for work at The Work Bench....

Holy Cat n' Mouse! Colbert Versus Ratman!!

A couple of panels from the RATMAN comic my son and I did.  Master criminal Dr. Leopold (based not at all  loosely on the likeness and the ego of Stephen Colbert) tells all to the clueless man-rodent.

HAPPY BIRTHDA

Yesterday was the 4th of July, but rather than posting some star-spangled national birthday commemoration, I offer this rough I did for an invite to my kid's October birthday party last year.  Ultimately we went a different direction for the party theme, but I liked the picture.  

NEW GIG: HANNIBAL

Very exciting news -- I'll be starting on the tv series HANNIBAL next week!  The show just wrapped its first (fantastic) season and episodes can be found on NBC.com.  Images from the series can be found there or anywhere online -- so instead I pasted the below drawing -- drawn on a page of my homework back in high school.

Who knew I'd land a job this ancient doodle would fit so perfectly?

DOODLE #368

This one rendered at a moment's downtime whilst doing caricatures at Waverly School's 2013 prom...

DOG v CAT -- GAME OF THRONES SEASON 3 FINALE

Ball Point Alien Dude

Rendered with an old-fashioned Bic, once upon a time...

FRINGE MEETS SNOOPY AT THE WHITE TULIP CLUB

 

There is a method to the above madness.  Working at FRINGE, I was explaining -- via drawings on my office white board-- to David Wilcox how much Charles Schulz' iconic Snoopy character changed from the sixties to the seventies.  Those two represenations are center and left-of-center.  He said that a TRULY 70's Snoopy would have chest chair and platform shoes -- and David added those.  We agreed that Charlie Brown should be serving up lines of cocaine and that was added.  From that point, over the last couple of months of FRINGE season two, the disco grew around them, including an intro in the upper left hand corner with Lucy and Schroeder and the "morning after" panel at the bottom right.

 

For FRINGE fans, already drawn on the board, before the Snoopy's were added, were two concept drawings I'd done for the WHITE TULIP episode -- one of the electrical mesh woven into Peter Weller's forearms and one of the metal discs that he inserted into his flesh to enable him to skip through time.  Respectively, the FRINGE sketches are on the left (the forearm became attached to Linus) and on the right... labeled, WHAM-O.

 

When the series relocated offices from West Hollywood to Santa Monica, the board -- with the drawing intact -- was moved as well, and rehung.

Dog v Cat -- IRON MAN 3 REVIEW

OH, YOU Ts...

I recently received a comment to the blog saying how a couple of my illios would make excellent T-shirts.  To that I say any enterprising young silkscreener out there should go for it -- just plug the blog if you do.  Coincidentally, scrounging deep in my files, I came across these two designs, expressly drawn to be on T-shirts...

WEIRD SCIENCE COFFEE, ANYONE?

In every half hour comedy, characters need an all-important community hang-out so that not everything takes place at home or school.  So too was the case with WEIRD SCIENCE.  Tom Spezialy and Al;an Cross, who adapted the movie into a TV series, created such a place in Java Man!  A play on the prehistoric proto-human remains found in, yes, Java crossed with the nickname for coffee resulted in this logo I came up for the place.  This design was used in the show on everything from mugs to aprons to bowling shirts. 

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Billboard...

Back in college, wanting to live a little dangerously, a friend of mine and I "embellished" billboards with spray paint.  Our first target was the enormous visage of a local political candidate.  Nothing smacking of anarchy -- we crossed his eyes, put a bow tie on him and a word balloon reading, "howdy".   The next one, pictured above, was our masterpiece.  Another street level board, we stared at it until the picture hidden within slowly appeared -- and was then rendered in paint.  This one turned out so well, it's kinda hard to tell what was there before.  Originally, the lady in the surf was screaming with delight, standing beside her equally glee-filled male counterpart.  We covered him up and replaced the guy with the classic JAWS shark's head.  Suddenly the woman was screaming for a different reason.

In half-Banksey fashion, I won't divulge the name of my partner in proto-tagging (in the event she runs for public office some day) but this is what's weird -- after we did the embellishment I returned a few days later to snap a picture -- and it was gone.  Bummer.  Jump ahead five or six years, I was recounting the whole tale to a former frat brother and he said, "I worked at the drugstore right around the corner of that!  It was so funny, I took a picture of it!"  Hence, the photo above. 

Note:  For drama's sake, I re-embellished the picture to restore the teeth and the shark's pink maw.

X-FILES - THE PREHISTORY

I didn't make this up -- these guys are in the opening sequence of the X FILES feature film that came out in the late nineties.  All I did was name them -- and offered the tagline: "Join these intrepid prehistoric alien hunters as they track down amazing new life forms... and kill 'em."

IT'S ALL ABOUT HOW OTHERS PERCEIVE YOU

HOW I SNUCK INTO R-RATED MOVIES

When I was a kid, I managed to see THE GODFATHER, THE FRENCH CONNECTION,  THE EXORCIST and ROSEMARY'S BABY -- all rated R, snd all thanks to MAD Magazine and the brilliant talents of Mort Drucker, Dick DeBartolo and others.  There, by way of eight meticulously drawn pages, I "saw" films restricted to audience members under the age of seventeen (without a legal guardian.) 

Whoa, you say -- I just read a MAD movie spoof and it was a lame-o pale comparison to the movie it was mocking, but that's because things have changed.  Hugely.  Back in the seventies and eighties, MAD movie satires not only presented plot-point by plot-point recountings of the film's story but the panels so perfectly reflected the screen images -- from the actors to the locations to the angles -- that it was like seeing the world's best story board panels.  Satires were eight pages not four, and there was one in every issue -- not every third issue.  What's more, back in those days, the magazine satirized films that appealed to an adult audience (see above list.) -- then again, that was the film-going crowd... there was no teen market to speak of.

Oh, and the above panel is classic Mort Drucker, taken from the 2001: A Space Odyssey satire, or as the magazine affectionately called it: 201: (Minutes) of Space Idiocy.  My good friend Craig McNamara forwarded an article from FILM COMMENT on this very subject:

http://filmcomment.com/article/mad-magazine-movie-parodies

NORMAN REEDUS -- NOT DEAD!

This blogsite has more than a couple pictures of zombies among the posts but despite that, I have to admit I do not watch THE WALKING DEAD.  That doesn't mean I am unaware of the phenomenon it's become or how one of the characters played by Norman Reedus has risen to the top and that the actor has become a really big star.  I drew this of NR during the shooting of the 13 GRAVES pilot.

REASON TO QUIT SMOKING #37

Back when I read ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, well, weekly, it invariably had a cigarette ad on the back of the magazine.  And this one just asked for a redux.  For the life of me, I can't imagine what the ad guys were thinking, having studly Bruce Campbell -esque guy blow a PAPER party favor into the girl's face -- with a LIT CIGARETTE IN HER LIPS.  The only doctoring I did was to add the flames... and making the guy's mouth screaming in agony.  

SPRING IS IN THE AIR

 

WALT KELLY: The Greatest Cartoonist Ever?

There are greats and then there are great greats and Walt Kelly, creator of the comic character POGO still, in my opinion, rules.    On top of the exquisite artwork, the strips were incredibly witty and satirical and to think Kelly's stuff used to run in big ol' Sunday color strips every week.

 

The above is a book I've kept since childhood (note the one dollar cover price...)

LONG TIME TENANTS OF THE FIELD MUSEUM

 

 

 

Speaking at Columbia College's wonderful TV department last week, I took time out to visit Chicago's Field Museum.  Normally on such an occasion, I like to draw pictures of the exotic patrons and museum-goers but there were subjects at the museum that held a pose, no matter how long you took to draw them.  In fact, some haven't moved in, like, a hundred years.  The three pictured here, Sue the T-Rex, the skeletal architecture of Gorilla Gorilla and a nameless wild boar, were a few of my favorites.

Before you could text for help...

 

An editorial illustration I did for the University of Southern California's paper, The Daily Trojan.  I can't recall what the accompanying article was exactly, as most students -- even when I went there for one year -- tried like crazy to get in.

LIFE LESSON #37 (or "be cool, stay in school")

College-bound youth of the world, consider yourselves warned --
if you want to maintain a decent GPA, pay attention and take legible notes in class. 
The accompanying jumble of writing and drawings (but mostly drawings)
are actual notes from one of my University of Minnesota notebooks.
Amazingly enough, somehow or other, I did manage to graduate.
 

WATCH OUT, IT'S MOVING...

I strung together a bunch of panels from 12 O'Clock Somewhere and cut them to a cool cover of Funeral for a Marionette by my brother Jonathan's jazz quartet The Aurora Club.  True-blue visitors to this site will recognize a few of the panels, but there are lots more (like the one above) in store. 

Boy, oh boy, Boy Boy

One of the doodles I did while working on 13 GRAVES. Boy Boy did not appear in the pilot. Colored with my ever-trusty Corel Painter 11.