Daily Zoo T-Shirts at Comic-Con!

For those of you who are in San Diego this week and have spilled coffee or ketchup on your shirt and are in need of a new one, why not head over to the Design Studio Press booth (#1701) at Comic-Con and pick up a hot-off-the-press Daily Zoo t-shirt? I hope to expand this into a line of many designs, but for starters we just have Day 302 - Eye to Eye available. There are a variety of styles and colors to choose from for infants through adults, but the quantities at the booth are limited, so don't delay!

Comic-Con 2010

Just a quick note to let you know that I'll be available to sign books at the Design Studio Press booth at Comic-Con in San Diego on Saturday, July 24, from 3-4pm. Please stop by and say hi!

San Diego Comic-Con International
Book signing
Saturday, July 24, 2010
3-4pm
San Diego, CA

Orange County Children's Book Festival

Please consider joining me at the Orange County Children's Book Festival this fall! Though this is the Festival's 7th year, I'll be exhibiting there for the first time. I'm also going to be doing a drawing demo with the kids (exact time TBA). I will post more details when I know them.

Hope to see you there!

Orange County Children's Book Festival
Sunday, October 3, 2010
9:30am - 4:30pm
Orange Coast College
Costa Mesa, CA

Profile Page at CTN-X

My profile page just went up at CTN-X 2010, the Animation Expo this November in Burbank, CA where I'll have a booth as an exhibitor. It's got a brief bio & summary of The Daily Zoo project if you're interested. I mentioned the Expo in a previous post, but it's worth mentioning again. I had a great time last year with wonderful opportunities to hear from some exceptionally-talented artists such as Mike Mignola, Peter de Seve, and a great panel of character designers (Dejas, Deamer, Vignali, Siepermann, etc.) that left me (and probably many others in the audience) with the impulse to drop to our knees and shout, "We're not worthy!" I highly recommend the experience for anyone interested in the field of animation.

The early bird pricing for registration has expired, but you can still get a 10% discount off passes by using this code: CHADX10

Hope to see you there!

Sketch Club 6/25

Here are a couple of pieces from last Friday's Sketch Club. I tried out some watercolor on very toothy hand-made paper. While I'm not crazy happy with the results, it was still a fun experiment and I hope to play around with it again in the near future.

The Nabbit Frog

I was recently asked to design a new "spokesphibian" for a company called Nabbit. It's a neat, FREE service that allows you to "Nabb" a song's title and artist while you're listening to the radio. You can do this by a variety of means: texting, mobile web browser, and even a free iPhone app.

Anyway, here is what we came up with. He is hot off the press with the digital paint drying just about two weeks ago. That is quite a difference from working on a movie - usually a year or more passes from my work and the final product being released.

The Daily Zoo at Bethesda Hospital, MN

For anyone in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota, I just wanted to let you know that an exhibit of Daily Zoo prints from the first two books is on display at Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul, where I did a drawing workshop with some of the brain trauma patients and a book signing this past April. The show went up at the beginning of June and will come down at the end of July. Initially there were 60 images on display, but some have been sold and taken down already. The exhibit is in The Cafeteria Gallery, so if you're in the area why not stop over for a bite and some art? (I can attest that the food is pretty good there.)



While preparing the images for exhibit, I found myself continuing to tinker with some of them (the curse of the artist I guess - a piece is never truly "finished"). Here are a few examples of some of the tweaked pieces. They differ from the versions that appear in the books mainly by the replacement of the tan paper backgrounds with the new colored versions seen here. Incidentally, the Content Kitty print (shown at bottom) has been a popular one at some recent charity auctions and has done well in raising funds for some great causes such as the National Bone Marrow Registry, Alcott Center for Mental Health Services, and the Minnesota Angel Foundation (helping children who have parents facing cancer). Fundraising auctions are a common event for many charities, so to all of you artists out there please consider donating a bit of your time and talent to help out a cause that is important to you.