Elephant Factory In Progress

Here are some in progress figures for my elephant factory. I didn't end up using all of these for one reason or another. Originally I was going to put in as many figures as I could come up with, but sometimes less is more or something. I ended up with about a dozen.



Yikes!

Uh, this is my studio. I really need to clean it.



In the process of coloring this thing right now, so it'll be a few more days before i post the final image.

Spongebob Ozpants!

So here's the image that I did for Nickelodeon Magazine for its special issue celebrating Spongebob Squarepants' 10th anniversary. They commissioned different artists to do their own interpretations of the characters, and after seeing my "Road to Oz" picture, the art director, Chris Duffy, asked me to interpret the characters as The Wizard of Oz characters.

Never having worked with licensed characters before, my first interpretation was a little bit conservative, and I made too much of an effort to stay "on model":



Then, when I realized that when Chris said "do your own interpretation" he actually meant it, I did this version:



Chris was pleased, and the image will appear in the August issue, which is coming out sometime in late July. Chris is my favorite art director, not only because he was fun to work with, but because he's responsible for the amazing comics section of Nick Mag. He hires the best small press and alternative cartoonists in the business, people that you'd otherwise never suspect could do kid friendly material. This is what a good art director should be able to do: look beyond the obvious and have confidence that an artist can do work that isn't necessarily reflected in their portfolio, and allow them the freedom to do what they do best.

Unfortunately Nick Mag has ceased publication, which is a big loss to kid magazines in general. Nick mag was a welcome exception to the usual condescending kid magazine fare.The good news is that they'll be publishing through to December, so be sure to get the last remaining issues of the best kids magazine on the stands! And here's a link to the magazine's website:

Nick Mag

Coming Soon:

I'm currently at work on a very large and detailed image inspired by a short story by Haruki Murakami from his anthology, "The Elephant Vanishes". I'll be posting it in a couple of weeks. Murakami's story describes a factory where elephants are manufactured, so I decided to draw what I think an elephant factory would look like.

Show at the Avid Reader!

I'll be showing at The Avid Reader in Davis for the Davis Friday Art Walk from June 12th to early July. The opening will be On June 12th at 7:00. Beverages and snacks!

Update: The opening went really well, and Alzeda, the owner, was a great host. We had more turn out than previous local shows, and it was a pleasure to be there.

Comic book Making Class at the Pence!

I'm teaching a comic book making class called, How to Draw Words and Write pictures (named for the excellent book by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden) at The Pence Gallery in Davis! Wednesday Afternoons from 2:30 to 4:30 pm July 1st through August 5th for ages 10 to teen!

This is the copy on the flyer:

Whether it’s humor, manga, supeheroes or graphic novels, this class will help you make the kind of comics you want to make. It’s recommended that students have some drawing ability, but the class is designed for all skill levels. this is not a drawing class, but a class that will teach students the unique skills needed to make comics.

Students will learn: character design, storytelling, the “language” of comics, and how to tell their story clearly and concisely in the comics form. By the end of class, each student will have created their own photocopied mini-comic that they can trade, show at comic book conventions, or give away to family and friends.

Jed Alexander is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work has appeared in a variety of publications including:The Sacramento News and Review, LA Weekly, and Nickelodeon. His comics can be seen on the comic’s publisher Top Shelf’s website at www.topshelfcomix.com.

The class is $80 for members of the Pence Gallery, and $90 for non-
members. Classes will be held at the Pence gallery, at 212 D Street
in Davis. basic materials are provided, but a more detailed materials list can be attained at the gallery. Visit us at www.pencegallery.org.

Once again, here's the art for the flyer:



Followers!

Special thanks to my "Followers"! You too can become a "follower". I think. I'm not sure how that's done, though. Let me know. I just found out about the whole follower thing. I probably post about once a month. I'm working on something enormous right now, which I'll probably post some time in July.

New Color Kid's Strip

This is a comic I submitted to a kid's magazine. Unfortunately the magazine isn't accepting submissions at the moment. The magazine in question publishes some of the best comics for kids in the business, so it's pretty competitive.

Edit: The magazine in question was Nickelodeon magazine, for whom I did a recent illustration (August issue). Unfortunately Nickelodeon has been recently cancelled. It will be missed, as will the great work of Chris Duffy, the editor responsible for the deservedly celebrated comics section! I'll be posting the illustration I did for Nick Mag in late July when it should hit the stands.

At any rate, I'm looking for a home for this one, so if anyone knows or can suggest a kid's magazine that might be interested please let me know.





And here are some of the characters, inks and pencils.

Me, drawing like other people.

I had an illustration teacher once who was incredibly obsessive, and in one illustration he had painstakingly copied each character of a typewritten letter in pencil so that it would look identical to a typewritten letter. The only way you would know this is because he would tell you. Though it was an impressive undertaking, it seemed totally unnecessary. Much like the exercise below.



This illustration is for the flyer for a comic book making class I'm going to teach to kids. Rather than cutting and pasting images of different cartoon characters, or even copying the characters from books, I took pains to duplicate the style of each cartoonist represented, and drew the characters in my own poses. Most likely, aside from other cartoonists, no one will ever know this unless I tell them.

The only one that I copied outright was Charlie Brown, because Charlie Brown is only drawn in a handful of poses anyway, and he's a bitch to draw. One squiggle or dot out of place, and it doesn't quite look like Charlie Brown, and even as it is I think it's just a tiny bit off.

Batman is probably the one that is mostly in my style since I suck at spot blacks and the feathering you typically see in superhero comics. I tend to rely a lot on color and tones to flesh out my line.

So from left to right: Tintin and snowy, Calvin and Hobbes, Astroboy, and just below him, Asterix, Naruto, the main character from something called "Fruit's Basket", Batman, and up front, Alice from a great strip called Cul-de-sac, and of course Charlie Brown.

I am told that Naruto and Fruit's Basket are the most popular manga right now, and the whole point of this flyer is to attract kids, so that's what I was going for. I don't know much about these characters, except that Naruto's costume is ridiculously elaborate. It looks like he's wearing a kind of 80s sweatshirt with some sort of pseudo victorian collar, and god knows what that thing is on his shoulder. I also couldn't bare to draw these characters in the dead characterless line that most manga are drawn in, so these guys were drawn with a brush. Otherwise I attempted to maintain the line style of the original characters.

Art Opening at Barista Brew on May 8th!

I'll be having a show at Barista Brew on May 8th for the Davis Art Walk. They have really great food, and from what I hear, some of the best coffee in Davis. I just had a pesto chicken wrap with sun-dried tomato spread that was awesome! And the prices are really really reasonable. My wrap was only $4.50 and was one the best sandwiches I've had in town.

I'll be showing a few originals and selling prints, and the show will be up till the 31st. Things should start around 6:00 pm.




More info about Barista Brew:

Here.

And more info about the Davis Art Walk:

Here.

James and the Giant Peach

So here's my giant James and the Giant Peach picture. I've always been a fan of the book by Roald Dahl, and love the imagery. My favorite illustrations are the ones done by Lane Smith, who also did the designs for the stop motion movie, one of the best book to movie adaptations I've seen. Lane Smith was the third official artist to take a crack at it, and though I like Quentin Blake, I was never satisfied with his images for the story, and the original illustrations weren't quite there, so I guess the third times the charm.

So my objective was to stay as true to the book as possible. This is the scene just before my favorite image in the book, when they tie the seagulls to the stem and the peach is lifted up into the air.

In my new illustration style my aim is to leave nothing to the imagination, and to cram as much as possible in there, so I have the sharks, the seagulls, all the main characters from the book with relatively accurate insect anatomy, and James. I gave James a couple of patches on his shirt because he was much abused by Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, and my guess is that he didn't have the best clothes.

The descriptions of the characters in the book are sparse, which leaves a lot of leeway for interpretation, but I stayed pretty literal. James was the biggest bitch to nail. I drew James I don't know how many times. I"m still struggling with my kid drawings, but received much good advice from Mark Martin and Angelique Benicio.

So this one's all about the peach, so I gave the peach the most room in the composition.

So click on this one for the bigger version:



And a detail:



And last, the ridiculously huge version:



As before, I drew and inked each element of the picture separately. First the background with the water, the peach and the sharks, then each character and seagull. Here a few of those figures:





I drew a lot more seagulls than I ended up using though. If I had used all of them you wouldn't be able to see the ocean, so I kept it to a few.

Once again I made watercolor textures and scanned them in, then cloned them into the drawing as needed.



I very seldom use anything but the clone tool for color to give it more of a wet media look, adding only a few highlights here and there with the regular brushes. As a final touch, I printed out some of the seagulls in light blue, painted each individually and scanned them.

I'm most proud of the water in this one. Water is a very weird thing to draw with a clean contour line, since it doesn't really have any hard edges. You're sort of making it all up, coming up with your own vocabulary to describe this moving substance. Drawing things like sea foam and waves with lines is a real challenge.

So that's it. This one also took about three weeks to draw. On to the next one!