Luis Royo's Dead Moon

Artist rep Alan Lynch stopped by the office the other and showed me an early copy of Luis Royo's new book, Dead Moon. This is a thick and beautifully printed book, written and illustrated by Royo. He took a substantial amount of time putting this together and it shows. It's a stunning collection of paintings -- large scale epic works, loose intimate portraits, and everything in between. Check out this fifteen minute video for a preview of the art and interview with the artist/writer.

The edition I saw was in Spanish but an English language edition will be available soon. If you're at San Diego ComicCon, Royo will be signing copies at the Heavy Metal booth.

Spectrum 17 poster, very punny.

Arnie Fenner just sent me a look at Paolo Rivera's Spectrum 17 Call for Entries poster. Be sure to click to see the enlarged, and very funny, version.

I think The Drop Shadow is my favorite....or is it Darth Mahl?

Deadline is January 23rd, 2010...plenty of time to create (or in my case: ask other people to create) a few more masterpieces.

Animation: "Through My Thick Glasses" and "Thoughts of a Falling Glass Man"

This week on Tor.com animations....

Through My Thick Glasses: One of the best short films I've seen—poignant, surprising, with an amazing fantastical sense of design. It's the story of an older man telling his granddaughter about his experiences during World War II. (12.30 minutes)

Thoughts of a Falling Glass Man: Harmony disrupted...and rebuilt. (3.10 minutes.)

November 4th and July 4th

Michael Komarck and Dragonships

Don't mind me...just showing off the very show-offable Michael Komarck jacket for Secret of the Dragon, sequel to Bones of the Dragon

Animation: Beatles Rock Band and Sea Orchestra

This week, crass commercialism wrapped up in awesomeness.

Beatles Rock Band: I watched this commercial for the Beatles Rock Band twelve times in a row. Every scene is drawn so beautifully, and the progression through time is handled so well...and it gets plenty trippy enough to call it sf/f.

Sea Orchestra: United Airlines has a number of amazing commercials, this one by the people that brought us one of my favorite surreal shorts, “The Tale of How.”

More of Long Island's Exotic Wildlife

Animation: Oceansize, Scoop Volante, Next, and Sonnet 138

We have two weeks to catch up with...

Oceansize and Scoop Volante:

Oceansize: When oil fights back. This is a very cool SF adventure story. The setting steals the show. I never thought I’d love the look of an oil rig so much.

Scoop Volante: Photographing aliens. Pure slapstick fun.

And, a Shakespearean couplet with: Next and Sonnet 138.

Next: Shakespeare performs all of Shakespeare in 5.14 minutes.

Sonnet 138: As it says, with lovely imagery by Dave McKean. (1.20 )

As always, you can check out the full list on our Saturday Morning Cartoons Index page.

Illustration Master Class Days 6 and day 7's goodbyes.

DAY 6 (PHOTOS HERE)

Last full day. Packed day.

We had three business lectures:

Shelly Bond from DC/Vertigo talked about working in comics, using James Jean and the Fables series as the example. She described what it's like to be a comic editor and talked about how an artist can market themselves to a comic company. The main lesson: drawing, drawing, drawing! My favorite line, "The important thing to know about black and white is, color wont save it."

David Saylor from Scholastic did a presentation on children's picture books, showing a number of examples -- the most exciting for me was a Jon J Muth Christmas book coming this fall. It's drop-dead gorgeous, but then isn't J always drop-dead gorgeous.

Both Shelly and David took time in the afternoon to walk around the studios, look at portfolios, and collect samples.

I gave my formal lecture of the week in the evening. I was, to tell the truth, very nervous about the whole thing (everyone's presentations were so good...a few were even tear-inducing) but I think I did alright. I spoke about my daily work concerns, how I find artists, what I look for in portfolios, my usual website rant, and ran through a project from thumbnail to book cover. The hour and a half flew by.

A quick dinner break. (Shout-out to Amherst's Fresh Side.) And then back to the studios. Back to painting. Back to critiquing. And even a bit of relaxing and talking and feeling sad that it would all be over tomorrow.

At 12;30 in the morning Charles Vess announced that he'd give his History of Fantasy Illustration 1850-2009 lecture. I think that epitomized everything I love about IMC. People were either shutting down, knowing the class was essentially over, or panicked to finish up as much as they could. Either way, everyone was tired. But given the opportunity to learn something new, we jumped at it and spent an hour in the middle of the night ooh-ing and ahh-ing over great and largely unfamiliar art.

I've seen Charles give this lecture before and each time it's been different -- which means I will have see it again at ComicCon this year.

DAY 7
(PHOTOS HERE)

Clean up. Closing remarks, with a few (and a few more) tears. And then we opened the studios as a gallery. A number of IMC alumni, other artists, and art directors drove in from surprisingly far away. Viewers were able to see the paintings created in class and flip through portfolios. Throughout the day everyone started signing each other's sketchbook...hours and hours of sketchbook signing. No one really wanted to leave.

IMC is the brain child of Rebecca Guay. If I sounded overly gushy all week it's because, through her remarkable and generous heart, Rebecca has created something truly special. I know all of the instructors came away supercharged and inspired. I feel confident that all of the students did as well. We are all indebted to her and her assistant, Sara. And being the greedy folk that we are, we're already excited about next year. IMC3, baby!

Greg Manchess painting at Illustration Master Class

Four minutes of bad, low resolution shaky cam! Okay, so this isn't great, it was mostly meant to see if I could figure out Youtube. Tonight I'll try to quick wrap-up of the last two IMC days. (For thems not sick of hearing about it.)

UPDATE: Not to turn this into a commercial but as Chuck in the comments points out, you can get much better video, from beginning of a painting to the end, with the Massive Black downloads, part one and part two.

Illustration Master Class Day 5

[IMC 09 DAY 5 PHOTOS]

OK, I'll admit it, Friday was a complete blur. Luckily I have notes...sorta.

Jon Foster came by for the afternoon lecture. Jon works without as much planning as many of the faculty members do. He talked about hating the process of painting because he kept thinking the painting had to come out "right." He credits Rick Berry with having helped him enjoy the pure process of laying paint down. Playing with pigment. You can always wipe the board down and start over. He talked about learning his chops by working very hard on lower-end black and white work, earning his way up. Jon also talked a lot about doing paintings for yourself -- even small experiments -- to keep your excitement up and new ideas coming.

Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell did the evening lecture. It's clear some students have been timid to place pigment on their canvases. Boris and Julie used a collaborative painting they recently completely as an example and talked through the entire process, piece by piece. Boris freely admitted that, "even after 50 years I'm still scared of a white board -- So get used to it, it doesn't go away." A great and detailed look into building a picture, and a inside into collaborative working.

Beyond that, Thursday's "oh my god we're half way done" giddiness gave way to Friday's "oh shit I better get moving" focus. It was (at least for me) a day were there was little extra energy outside of the task at hand.