White is for Witching

I did some illustration work on a book trailer! Did you know books had trailers? Turns out they do. This trailer is about a new book by Helen Oyeyemi being published by Picador books in the UK.
The job was commissioned by the excellent design shop HudsonBec, working with one of my very favorite designers, Alex Bec. Animation and compositing done by the multi-talented Julia Pott.

the trailer and book info is here:
http://www.whiteisforwitching.com/

baseballingo

This one needs some context, I think. William Safire writes a column in the New York Times magazine every week about language and how it is used in the world. Also every week, they find somebody to do an illustration using the title of his article. They asked me to do this week's, and I did it! "Baseballingo" refers to the use of baseball terms in things not related to baseball. It is timely because the baseball season is getting underway. I dedicate it to anybody who has been caught in San Francisco with a Dodgers hat on.

Thanks very much to Hilary Greenbaum for picking me out.


Also, I always want to be the kind of blog owner who just posts when he has things to post and makes no excuses for the amount of time in between, but I really should apologize. There has been a lot of work being done, but none of it can be shown for a while, so you'll have to take my word on it.

ALSO, I am a guest poster on itsnicethat.com this week. I have been doing some work with the guys who run it, and I never expected people I admire so much to be as nice as they are to me. They are very very nice.

www.itsnicethat.com

My pal Kevin Dart is putting together a book for his project about a spy girl named Yuki and he let me do a thing for it. Spy stories always make me think of old pulp books that have those chapter illustrations with a caption from the last page underneath, so thats what i went for. There was supposed to be another panel with whats inside the cave, but it came out TERRIBLE and i hate it, so this is the only one there is. Thanks Kevin!

More-aline

I put a bunch more stuff from the film up on my site. It turns out a lot of my archived files are on spools of burned cds, and those things are a pain to go through. i got a pretty big pile on there, though - i think most of the other files are stuff that was just for the shop or roughs of things that never got made (not to suggest all these sketches were made either). The film had a pretty good opening weekend! Yeah!

http://burstofbeaden.com/coraline.html

Coraline

Coraline comes out on friday! I worked on doing illustrations and designs for sets and props for a little under two years up at Laika in Portland.

I will put more of my work on it up on the website after it comes out, but please go see the film. Here is the trailer:

in preperation for that Coraline panel thing, i've been going through old Laika folders. I found this from a day when my mind was wandering a little. I'm thinking of making it into a greeting card. For when you are feeling envious of somebody...

more about that Coraline stuff when it gets closer to the film opening up next week.

Iceberg

When i was home for christmas, my brother Will and me made an iceberg. It's sort of based on the iceberg in the royal bank commercial (see earlier post), but making it into a three dimensional thing turned out to be really fun. It has a front door and a back door. The cutting was not my job. Will is an architect by trade, you see, and he's a pro with that sort of thing. Mostly it was me saying 'lower. no, higher. even higher.' and him saying 'it can't go higher.' Other brother Justin turned out to have a knack for making sculpey penguins. There is a huge strip of pictures below. Our zest for photo documentation is due in part to two of us getting new cameras and the slightly blurred photos are due to us getting to know the auto-focus on our lenses.