So here’s my homage to James Kochalka. I was trying to make a modeling demo reel and I thought it would be fun to take a couple of typically flat designs and flesh them out into a 3-d world. Originally, I was going to pose and texture him out like a Pocoyo character because I love the designs in that show. That could have been fun, though, by the time I got to that point I was already pulling my hair out in frustration with the limitations and general ugliness of Maya so I scrapped it.
In any case, now that I’m at the end of my career as an animation student, I decided to share this with any other James Kochalka fans out there. You can check his work out at americanelf.com.
I made this for a friend a couple of years ago. It’s essentially a mix tape of music that I was really addicted to at the time. The idea behind the songs was that they all had to be the kind of songs I could listen to over and over and over (which I do quite a bit with songs I like). I also spent quite a bit of time sampling the intro and some interludes between songs. I might do another one sometime soon because it’s a really amazing retrospective look into who I was back then.
Anyway, I found myself listening to it the other day so I thought I would share it with you. It’s about 25 minutes long, consider it a podcast. You can download it here.
Last night I was looking through some old caricature drawings I had from last summer and I came across this one. I’m not sure if I’ve posted it anywhere before but it’s about the only drawing from last summer that I was able to get a picture of that I still like.It’s a drawing of my grandparents I did on a hot summer day in my parent’s back yard at a family get together. It was a good day.
I’m looking forward to getting back at doing caricatures. Despite what I said in my depressing as shit comic about it I really did quite enjoy it for the most part. You get to sit around drawing faces all day with your friends and you get so much better at drawing because you can’t choose to stop when it’s your job. I think that summer taught me more than any semester of art school ever could.
One of my biggest inspirations has always been music. I don’t think there’s any medium that can capture the sense of feeling and emotion quite like it. A perfect example of this is Wingnut Dishwasher’s Union (formerly known as Johnny hobo and the freight trains) which is essentially a one man acoustic punk rock band and is, to me, some of the best music I have ever heard.
The lyrics have ranged from depressingly apathetic to playful and positive songs about being a teenage drug addict to revolution. The thing that strikes me the most is the honesty and intelligence in them. I personally love the older songs when he was playing as Johnny Hobo and the Freight trains. These songs have such a feeling of hopelessness to them, still, there’s some optimism trying to break through. A good example is the chorus to the harmony parking lot song with goes “Here's to the rubble. A brick through every window, a casket buried six feet deep for everybody's heroes. Here's to our lives being meaningless and how beautiful it is because freedom doesn't have a purpose.”
The more recent albums have been much more positive which is a nice change of pace. A personal favorite is “Jesus does the dishes” which is partly about how cleaning up after yourself is one of the basic idea’s behind anarchism with lyrics like “If we can't live without dishwashers, how could we live without cops? And so you're asking me, who does the dishes after the revolution? Well, we do our own dishes now; we'll do our own dishes then.”
The other thing that draws me to this music is the intensity of it. I can’t think of another solo acoustic act with as much energy, emotion and passion in it. Every time I put it one I feel like I want to either get up and dance or learn how to play guitar and belt them out at the top of my lungs.
I don’t know. It might sound horrible to you. The recordings are generally pretty rough and the singing might be a bit too much for someone who’s not accustomed to at least a little punk. The truth is that this is the kind of music that reminds me what it’s like to be alive and how great that really is. After listening to any of the albums all I want to do is sit down and write comics. This music inspires me to want to be able to write and draw comics that have as much energy, passion and are as emotionally resonating to someone else as these songs have been to me.
In any case, check em out if you’re interested. you can find most of the music here.
