THE DAILY MONSTER

ESCAPE FROM ILLUSTRATION ISLAND etc.

Good morning. How are you? I hope you're not too put out by the end of Daylight Savings Time. I just wanted to post a few new things for you, chief among them the link to an interview I did with Thomas James for his excellent podcast Escape From Illustration Island.

 

My bit starts just shy of 10 minutes in (if you want to cheat and skip ahead). We're also giving away a signed copy of The Graphic Eye. You can get all the details about that right here.

In other news, I'm gearing up for the CTN Animation Expo in Burbank from Nov. 20th to the 22nd. If you're in the L.A. area, come check it out. From the looks of it, it'll be a chance to hobnob with some pretty spectacular people. I'm excited to see who I'll meet.

Lastly, I wanted to show you two drawings by Brandon Bass made in my Monster workshop at the AIGA Make/Think conference in Memphis a few weeks back. I just think they're very cool. You can see more drawings on Flickr.

More things are in the works. Always.

For now, I hope you remember that 344 LOVES YOU

DAILY MONSTER 205

Good morning. Thank you for visiting the Daily Monsters the week, when they were actually daily again. I had fun doing clips for you at the old fast and furious pace, and I really loved the stories you posted. Check out yesterday's haul by clicking here.

And now, without further delay, please enjoy this small, yet grand finale:


I just committed to the next Daily Monster project yesterday afternoon. It'll be something fun in a different format, and most definitely a collector's item. (No, not a toy. :^) Stay tuned for more after the AIGA Conference in Memphis.
But there'll be other things between now and then, I'm sure.

For now, I hope you'll have an excellent weekend.
And of course I hope you realize that 344 LOVES YOU

DAILY MONSTER 204

Good morning. After a day of non-stop tech frustration -- some self-inflicted, some genuinely not my fault -- it's a pleasure to bring another Daily Monster to life for you. Especially when I can look forward to more great stories like the ones you came up with for yesterday's creature. Please check it out.

And now, without further ado, please say Hello to Daily Monster 204:



OK. Back to work I go. This night ain't over yet.
But you better believe that 344 LOVES YOU

DAILY MONSTER 203

Good morning. I hope you're having as much fun with this week of Daily Monsters as I am. Yesterday brought more great stories and comments.
Please take a look.

Today's Daily Monster salutes this year's winners of the AIGA Medal, Pablo Ferro, to whom I owe a large royalty check for my own hand-lettering, Carin Goldberg, and Doyald Young, who I'm honored to call a friend.

I've donated the original drawing to AIGA for the silent auction at the awards gala in New York on September 17th. Unfortunately, they don't accept remote offers, but if you're lucky enough to be in attendance, I hope you'll put in a bid. All proceeds benefit the AIGA Design Archives and the Worldstudio AIGA Scholarships.

And just to see how many times I can put the letters AIGA into one post, did I mention that I'll be speaking at the AIGA Conference in Memphis this October? It's true!

But we're getting off point.
Monster. Daily. Mini-series. Day 3. Enjoy!


I can't wait to read your stories and theories
about this well-dressed creature. In the meantime,
you're safe to assume that 344 LOVES YOU

DAILY MONSTER 201

Good Morning. Just for laughs, I decided to post a new Daily Monster every day this week. It's been so long, and I've had fun filming a few of them over the past few days, so I want to share them with you. If you feel like posting a little story for them, I'd enjoy that. But if you just want to take a look and say Hello, that would make me happy, too. For now, please meet Daily Monster 201:


In case you were wondering: 344 LOVES YOU

RHONDA MONSTER 01

Good evening. At my friend Jed's suggestion, I'm fiddling about with the just released Beta of Rhonda, a new 3D drawing program. Right now the only tool is the pen -- one color, one line weight. You can't select any of the lines you've drawn and move them individually. You can't distort, you can't erase. All you can do is command Z. And even that is alt-Z for some reason. When you start the application it takes over your entire screen. There is no Finder menu at the top of the screen. There is no dock. If you want to access any of your other stuff, you have to quit the app. It's all very odd.

But then it's also weirdly fun.
Kind of like finger-painting in 3D.
Check out my first three-dimensional Daily Monster:











I'm not saying I'll make one of these every day, but I'll keep playing, and may post a few of these in the coming weeks. If anybody else is playing with the beta, let me know. Maybe we can exchange notes.

Also, if you know a good Mac software for recording what's on your screen, then I don't have to aim my digital camera at the screen like a caveman with a digital camera.

For now, I hope you'll have a good weekend. If you're at the Topanga Film Festival tomorrow, come say Hello. And as always, please remember
that 344 LOVES YOU

MONSTERS INFILTRATE BELGIUM

Good afternoon. The solstice-adjacent sun still mercifully high in the California sky at 7PM, and I thought I'd show you the latest Monster expansion. I just received a sheaf of photos from Belgian friend of the Monsters Luc Debaisieux at JWT Group Belgium (J Walter Thompson) in Brussels. Luc runs a program that turns the agency's historic building -- the 1908 Maison Delune on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt -- into a gallery for a young artist for one year at a time. This year it's the Monsters' turn.

You may recognize a lot of these Monsters from the Open Source Monsters series, and from the Send A Monster Facebook app, but the biggest of the pieces contains a new Monster I brought out especially for the Maison. I'll add that at the end. For now, my great thanks to Luc for his endless energy in making this happen, and to his JWT colleague art director Sebastien Verliefde, whom you may remember from his stellar additions to the Open Source Monsters. You can see some of them in the bottom row, center frame. And here.

More Monsters are on the way, but even now
I hope you'll get the idea that 344 LOVES YOU

THE TOPANGA MONSTER

Good morning. How are you? I thought I'd put the important thing up front for once and launch right into a brand new Monster. Karen Linderman of the Topanga Film Festival invited me to make a new Monster advertising the event, and I sprung into action. Or rather, I came up with an idea, and then asked friend of the Monsters Simone Giuliani to spring into action, which he did by writing and excellent, suspenseful 45 second music cue that became my guide for the animation part.

I'm teaching myself animation as I go along on the Monsters -- you can see the very first one on Monster 10 -- and because of it most of the Monsters tend to move at a rather stately pace. They also tend to inhabit smallish spaces. There's no real reason for this beyond an odd mental barrier towards changing the size relationship of creature to sheet of paper. Well, no more of that! This time around I thought I'd try for a fast Monster in a big space. Just to see if I could.

Simone's excellent music really spurred me on to push the speed and the mood, so that the animation could keep up with the music. I hope you enjoyed the result. (If you have a reasonably fast computer, check it out full screen. It's quite nice that way. :^)

More Monsters are brewing.
Please stay tuned.

344 LOVES YOU

MONSTER SPORTING NEWS

Good evening. So... uhm... did I mention that the Monsters are now supporting a team in the North Hollywood Kickball League? Well, it's true! They're called the Monster Cartel® and I don't have to understand the ins and outs of kickball to know that they're badass. Check it out:









If you're in the L.A. area and want to support them, here is the 411,
courtesy of team member and art instigator David Osorio:

All games are played at the
Valley Plaza Rec Center
12240 Archwood St., North Hollywood, 91606
on Tuesday nights.

Game 3 vs. NoHo Hoodlums -- 7:30pm (June 23rd)

Game 4 vs. Where My Pitches At? -- 8:30pm (June 30th)

Game 5 vs. Greg Priestley Avengers -- 7:30pm (July 7th)

Game 6 vs. I'd Hit That -- 8:30pm (July 14th)

Game 7 vs. Drunk Again and Looking to Score -- 7:30pm (July 21st)

Game 8 vs. Wet Hot American Kickball -- 7:30pm (July 28th)

Playoffs TBD --

Rock'em, sock'em, Monsters!
You know that 344 LOVES YOU

MONSTER MAIL CALL

Good afternoon. How are you? After a few weeks of June Gloom the sun has finally found the 344 porch again, so I thought I'd take a little break from fiddling with the latest Monster to show you some cool surprises that have come in the mail recently.

First off, I received a package from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

"Oh," I thought. "Have my people finally tracked me down?" But no. As it turns out, a teacher at Perkiomen Valley High School, Mr. Thomas Komp, gave his Graphic Design I class an assignment to make Monsters, and they went hog-wild. What did they send me? Well, after they were done making Monsters they had them bound into a book. 47 drawings, collages, and computer-manipulated images -- one from each student -- are shown side by side with letters from each of the students... to me. So that took me a minute to absorb. Top all that off with a cool DVD that documents their labors set to music, and that's a good day of mail.



If you're on Facebook you can see the video here.

What a mind-blowing effort! Thank you very, very much to the students of Perkiomen Valley High Graphic Design I for the beautiful and amazing gift, and to Mr. Komp both for guiding the effort and for teaching a graphic design class in high school in the first place. I know of one other, Scott Schaller's Cabrillo High School Design Lab, and I'm so jealous! I wish we'd had that back at good old Gymnasium Ernestinum back when I was there.

Side note: It's Per-ki-omen. In my head I kept pronouncing it Peri-komen. Which is silly. Everybody knows that science has yet to find a way to recreate Perry Como as a chemical element.

All the Pennsylvania glory found me a week or two ago. It's taken me some time to A. recover from the shock, and B. take pictures of the book and DVD. Now today, a big box arrived from Sara Gallup right here in Los Angeles. Sara saw the Monsters in the L.A. Weekly, got the book for her birthday from her significant other, and started making Monsters in her 3D class at Los Angeles City College. Here's what she told me: "I made matte and gloss acrylic medium transfers using photocopies of the monster images within your book. I took these transfers and hand-sewed them to various fabrics (some with feathers for added effect), stuffing them with cotton. They began to resemble small stuffed animals, maybe toys. I then constructed a home for these creatures using an old palette. Finally came the sale sign, also done using acrylic transfer." How totally crafty! How totally excellent!

Of course, I was delighted when Sara offered to send me one of the stuffed Monsters, and shocked today, when the whole gang arrived at my door, complete with its mini corral. (I'm glad that she kept a few of her favorites, though.)
Check it out:



Now the excellent plush Monsters by Jennifer Bennett Gubicza
finally have some friends to keep them company.

But wait, there's more! She also sent me a high relief collage made from Gendy Alimurung's articles on the Monsters and on Amy Winfrey's Making Fiends in the L.A. Weekly. Highly, highly excellent, don't you think? No wonder she got an A on both assignments. Thank you so much, Sara! I'll give them all a good home.



To sum up: I get the best mail, because the Monsters have the best friends.
It's no wonder that 344 LOVES YOU