Our Holiday Tribute to Rankin/Bass

If you’re old enough to have watched all those great Rankin/Bass stop motion holiday specials when you were a kid — or young enough that your parents force you to watch them because “that’s what Christmas was like when I was your age!” — then you might enjoy our holiday card for this year. It’s an illustration of some of the worst creeps and goons Rankin/Bass ever animated.

Creeps like Professor Hinkle, for example. The failed magician who ended up stalking a small child through a frozen wasteland only to lock her in a greenhouse while her magical snowman friend melted into lukewarm water. Nice guy, right? And a wonderful thing for children to watch. It really helped prepare us for the real world. Never trust a magician.

And, of course, you have the Miser Brothers, Snow and Heat. These two petulant monsters argued constantly to get their way and threw tantrums when they didn’t. A great example of now NOT to solve conflicts. These Rankin/Bass specials really were valuable on so many levels.

And that’s why we decided to honor those fantastic holiday specials with a collage of their villains. We did it in watercolor — no colored pencils or inks for linework or details — and tried to capture that holiday magic that Rankin/Bass imbued all of their stop motion specials with. Well…maybe not Little Drummer Boy. That one always put me to sleep.

If you’d like to see us put this holiday illustration together, you can watch the video below. And since it’s just a couple weeks until the end of the year — Happy Holidays! We hope you have a wonderful holiday and best wishes for 2024!

Easter Bunny with Watercolor Pencils

I suppose most of us will be sheltering in place this Sunday, and that means things will be a little different for folks that celebrate Easter. Probably won’t be much different for me because locking myself in my studio like a hermit is my jam. However, for anyone who was hoping to see Peter Cottontail hopping down the bunny trail, here’s a six-minute video of me drawing an Easter Bunny with watercolor pencils. Have a safe weekend.

Process: How To Ruin Christmas in Two Easy Steps

Hope you all had a great holiday! Here’s how I ruined my friend’s Christmas.

I got my friend the Kong: Skull Island Blu-Ray. For some, this alone would’ve been enough to ruin a holiday, but he actually likes the movie and so it was an appropriate gift.

To accompany the disc, I did an ink sketch of the giant gorilla. I used Pitt Artist Pens and Sakura PIGMA brush pens. The paper is that cheesy, yellow craft paper that they gave you in grade school when they didn’t want to waste the good paper. I like it for some projects because it gives the finished art an aged, vintage look and feel.

The images look dim and yellow because the lighting in my studio at night is dim and yellow. If my friend knew what kind of jeopardy I was putting my eyesight in just for his Christmas present, he’d probably appreciate this gift a lot more.

So that’s the finished sketch. It doesn’t look half bad. And you might be thinking, “Well that’s a nice drawing! I’m sure that only made Christmas better!” Slow down. Let me tip you off to my “How-To-Ruin-Christmas” process. Like I said, it’s just two easy steps:

Step One: Use the drawing to wrap the gift on which it is based. This achieves the effect of removing all surprise and wonder from a wrapped gift. As soon as your friend sees the package, he’ll know exactly what his gift is (extra points if you give it to him a few days early, so he’ll just sit and stew about knowing what his gift is, but not be able to open it until Christmas morning).

Step Two: You might think, “Yeah, you blew the surprise. But at least your friend got a nice drawing!” Not necessarily the case. Because, when you use the drawing as wrapping paper, not only do you end up bending and folding the artwork, but the liberal use of scotch tape makes it virtually impossible to remove the wrapping from the gift without tearing the artwork into pieces. So they don’t really even get the drawing…unless they never unwrap the gift. It’s genius, really.

Anyway, that’s how you do it. Two simple steps and everybody’s angry with you on Christmas morning. Yeah, everybody, because I did it to my other friend who wanted the Wonder Woman movie too.

UPDATE: Top marks for effort, but despite meticulous care, the Kong sketch was torn during the opening process as predicted.

Hope you all have a nice new year! -v

I’m drawing Haunted Mansion Ghosts for Inktober 2016

Every October people all over the world people celebrate “Inktober” by getting out their ink pens, brushes, and markers and attempting to do a new, ink drawing every day of the month.

Sometimes it’s random subject matter, sometimes people try to follow a theme. This year, I picked “The Haunted Mansion” as my theme and I’m trying to draw a different Disney ghost every day. Not sure if I’ll get one done every single day, but if you want to follow along (and see other Inktober drawings that other illustrators and cartoonists are doing) check out the #Inktober2016 hashtag on Twitter and Instagram.

As I make my way through Inktober, I’ll try to keep updating this post. Each happy haunt is done the same way: pencil sketch light-boxed onto Bristol board, then inked with Sakura brush pens and Pitt artist pens. Oh! And I’m trying to draw the ghosts in the order you encounter them in the Haunted Mansion. I’ll also try to caption them with the names they’ve been given, if any (though, there seem to be conflicting views on what certain ghosts are named, depending on what source you go to). Click to embiggen. Happy Halloween! -v

Alexander Nitrokoff

Daisy De La Cruz / Sally Slater

Quicksand Trio / The Hobbs’

Abigale Pateclever / Constance Hatchaway

The Sea Captain / Capt. Culpepper Clyne

Medusa

The Hanging Man

Vampire

Jack the Ripper

Madame Leota

Birthday Ghost

Birthday Guest

Ballroom Dancers

Passenger in Hearse

The Organist

The Duelists

The Bride

The Caretaker

Pop-Up Ghosts

Skeleton Hound

Mummy

Hard-of=Hearing Ghost

Lady Opera Singer

Opera Singer Guy

The Executioner

The Headless Knight

Gus (Hitchhiking Ghohst)

Ezra (Hitchhiking Ghost)

Phineas (Hitchhiking Ghost)

The Hatbox Ghost

Little Leota

To all of you: Thanks, and a question…

Cocker Spaniel card for the game Agility, coming in 2016.

A big thank you to all the people following this blog, and a quick question for those of you who started pouring in during the last month or so:

Did you see a post or a link somewhere that led you here? Was the Happy Holidays comic reposted in a particularly well-traveled corner of the internet? Just wondering because the influx of new visitors and followers jumped way up in the last month, so I’m trying to figure out why. If you have any ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments section. It’ll help me out.

Aside from that, New Years is coming up. Hope yours is great! See you soon. -v

Happy Holidays 2015

Happy Holidays, everybody! I made a one-page comic for my holiday card for this year — using MangaStudio and Photoshop — and I’m gonna break down my process below.Yeah, I’m defending Scrooge. Somebody has to. The man changed! He embraced Christmas, raised Bob Cratchit’s salary and saved Tiny Tim’s life! But his name gets dragged through the mud. Hopefully, this comic will change all that. : )

Okay now,  I wanted to do all of the inking and lettering in MangaStudio. So I scanned in my pencils, typed in some text (to make sure it’d fit), then dropped in temporary panel placeholders (the yellow boxes) so I’d know where to drag MS’s Frame Cutting tool. It’s the first time I’ve really used that tool, and I used the placeholders as a guide.It took some fiddling around with the settings before I was happy with the width of the vertical/horizontal panel breaks and the black line around them, but eventually I got it the way I wanted it. After that, I inked in the characters and background (mostly with the standard G-Pen).I also forced myself to use the word balloon tool to hold the text. Meh…it seems a lot easier in Adobe Illustrator, but I gotta learn this so that’s what I did. I tried all three tools to see which worked best for me:The Balloon Pen was too freeform for my shaky hand and I couldn’t draw a smooth enough ellipse.

The Ellipse Balloon tool draws a nice, smooth shape, but tweaking all the vertices to get the shape you want gets a little hairy.

In the end, I went with the Curve Balloon tool. Fewer points to tweak and it got me closer than the other two tools to the shape I wanted. I don’t think I’m even close to getting the hang of the balloon tail tool, but I got lucky and what I ended up with looks okay. Maybe I’ll improve with time.

The coloring stage is where MangaStudio and I parted company. Photoshop just feels so much better than MS for color. So I exported the inks, opened them in Photoshop and started laying in the flats.

I wanted a natural media look to the colors, so after the flats were done, I grabbed a custom watercolor brush and layered in some highlights, shadows and texture. Hard-edged lines on the modeling would’ve worked fine, I just wanted something softer.

I did use a hard-edged brush to paint in the holiday graphics on the shopping bag and wrapping paper.

I dropped in a grungy texture overlay to give the page an organic feel, then, finally, dotted in the snowflakes. I used an irregular brush to give the flakes a sense of randomness. I didn’t want them to look like perfect little polka-dots.And that’s it. Thanks to everyone who follows the blog or stops by when I post something. I hope you all have a great holiday. See you in the new year! -v