This American Life

Listening to This American Life is one of my favorite things to do, and something I definitely don't do often enough. So to catch up on all the old episodes that I've missed I'm doing a set of paintings based around some of them.

The first one I picked is The Parrot and the Potbellied Pig . It aired in July of '06, and is hour of different stories about a parrot or a potbellied pig, or both. The story I drew from reported by journalists Alex Lane and Eric Holm. It's about a rare parrot that is stolen from the Central Park Zoo and ends in a police raid.

  

 One of the best parts of the story for me was when these guys talk about how they were telling this story at the bar the night before someone suggested a different ending where, after the police raid they charge one detective with taking care of the bird and so he goes over and says,

You wanna go?

Yeah.

Let's go.

Which, if you listen to the radio show, is the second time this conversation is had.

I really like the idea of the detective taking the parrot, but then I also tried drawing what supposedly actually happened in the original story. 

More of the Alphabet

A is for accordion, O is for owl, H is for hyena, and F is for Fiddler Crab.

This project is an excuse to do quick drawings of things that are interesting that I've probably never drawn before.

Rats waking up Hamweenie

This is one of my favorite paintings from Hamweenie so far. He's fallen asleep on the trash barge. The rats are trying to wake him because they've arrived at Coney Island.

Wooing Pigeons

Preceding this in the story, Hamweenie has fallen asleep in the territory of some very serious pigeons. To get back in their good graces Hamweenie woos them with his spectacular card trick.

Hamweenie on a trashbarge in the sewer

These are from the sketches below of Hamweenie in the sewer. I'm on the fence about these pages, sometimes I think they need to be reworked and redone, and sometimes I am okay with them. That probably means they'll get a redo.

 The purpose of Hamweenie's journey is to get to Coney Island so that he may attend magician auditions. This is the original sketch for when the rats are helping Hamweenie get there by way of underground sewer tunnels.

the beginning of my alphabet book

For fun I'm making an alphabet book. These are the first two drawings, V is for Vampire, B is for Belltower.

Hamweenie

 

This is the sketch and then the final painting for the first page of my book The Adventure's of the Amazing Hamweenie. There are two or three other versions that didn't make the cut.

Hamweenie at Coney Island

This is a sketch from towards the end where Hamweenie has made it to Coney Island only to be captured almost immediately.

For a minute, I wanted to explore all my options, so I tried doing Hamweenie in acrylic. I was wrong, I definitely prefer watercolors for this one. And I skipped doing an under-painting, which I think leaves the whole thing feeling really cold.

Werewolf loves cyclops

This is a diarama I made for one of the Bicycle Film Festival gallery shows. The Werewolf and Cyclops are fleeing from the burning city. They are all stop motion armatures that I plan on putting to use someday soon.

Children capturing wolf

This is the second of three in the series of children eating wolves. It shows them in the act of capturing the wolf. 

Vampire

These are the first sketches I did for this project" All sins cast long shadows".

I settled on this one, the final drawing is below in pen and ink.

Not all seamonsters are bad

This was just for fun, I've been drawing a lot of sea monsters lately. I drew this after I read " The Kraken" by Tennyson. And although I feel like this poem deserves a more serious drawing this is what I got from it. The Kraken is woken up from the ocean floor after like a millennium of sleeping , and when he gets to the surface he dies. So I made an alternate ending of a lumbering gentle kraken, that wakes up and when he comes out of the water he happens upon a boat of  sailors who tend to him. 

vampire stop motion test

I took a stop motion class last summer and this is one of the tests I did with it.