The making of the Planters Mr. Peanut Holiday commercials

Making of Mr. Peanut and at the end Holiday Card, animation spot number 2. At 1:17 if you look in the back corner you can see me!

My Remarkable Holiday Party

The full commercial! More to come! I'm especially proud of the cricket and mice, the cricket is a lot of silicone work. Love these puppets!

Planters | Mr. Peanut Preview

Commercial I have been working on, the full commercial dropped at midnight, but is only available on facebook, view this teaser trailer instead!! I make the puppets...

In Michigan!

That mean's I have a camera cable and soon lot's of new artworks will flood this page! I wish i could post pictures of the commercial I was working on, I'm pretty proud of the puppet's! Soon...

Lisettes Birthday Shirt!

Happy fun felt animal shirt time..

Forgotten Camera cable=Sad face

The maps are to come, stuck on camera, no way to remove the images.. as well as some additional paintings, in the meantime here are a 3-d pickle, with watercolored layers. A 3-d eiffle tower, with layered newspaper images, then painted and high glossed. A small fishy painting, water colored mounted on acrylic, also high gloss. The bad part about my new found love for high gloss is my camera does not respond well to such shineyness, there for the pictures are blown out, and the detail wouldn't show up at all with out a flash, these were quick photos before the items were given away.. also a small snail scale photo.. and a birthday card i made for my dad of a bionic octopuss after he had heart surgery.

Huge updates...

SOoo it has been a very long while since i've updated this blog thing, so i'm going to do it in a few posts, one being birthday gifts I've made in the past few months, one of my map series of paintings, and one of 3-d paintings.

Portland and the big move.. The move was good I started work the morning after i arrived here, literally less then 8 hours after my plane landed, since then it has been non stop working and getting settled, with a short trip back to the michigan lands mixed in.

I'm working on a couple projects, I can not yet name, but they are pretty cool and I'm really enjoying all the work, and learning a lot of new skills, like mold making. Which i'm pretty pumped about.

Anyways, enjoy the new artwork, some of the photos are low quality, but the paintings are located back in michigan so updates to be had in october, also coming soon a crossword series.. !

Portland

Made the big move, after I'm settled I'll update this thing....

Sketches!

Goats...

A sneak peak.. here are some goat puppet's for a film for a former teacher, These are some making of shots, I'll post finished photo's soon!

Owl Painting!

My friend's Kristin and Curtis are getting married, and to celebrate their union I made them a watercolor painting! I didn't take any detailed pictures yet, but I have a couple from them opening it at the shower, which is awesome because you can see curtis's expression. This was was a 12" by 12" whater color painting on bristol board with acrylic highlights, layered ontop of textured canvas paper.

Brian's Paintings....

Brian's Loft houses about 5 or so paintings of mine, the first is a recent painting from his birthday in May, the other a painting he purchased at my show last year. Both i'd forgotten about, until I saw them today.

The Goat lost in the woods... Water color, on textured paper with acrylic. 8 by 11


Green Dream Squid, Watercolored bristol board on acrylic. 5 inches by 6 inches

Vampire Bats!

Sooo all my hard work at the bat house has paid off, I was able to name a vampire bat! I named her Veronica!!


Detroit Free Press Article


The bat zone received a colony of bats, 20+ Through different methods, and 3 butcher houses, they are able to maintain recycled blood for the bat's to drink, providing a rather educational and curious new addition to the bat zone. I'm so excited about them! The detroit free press wrote a great article, and it was on the front page

Batzone!

For a little over a year I have been working with bat's at the batzone, which is located behind the cranbrook institute of science.

OBC facebook page
OBC Official Page

Originally I was interested in working with the animals to learn more about my favorite creatures, but I ended up being able to repair their educational bat displays which have bounced around from museum to museum and suffered many cracks and shoty repairs. I was pretty pumped about fixing the displays! Anyways I wanted to share some of my repair photos as well as pictures of the actual animals. Another great thing about working with the animals i'm able to get really close for photos!

My mom's Squirrel Theme Birthday

For my Mom's birthday this year I decided to theme everything around squirrels, I bought her an adorable cement birdbath shaped like a tree with a squirrel drinking from it, Painted a squirrel on the wall mural in the upstairs hallway ( which I pencil sketched about ten years ago), and made a squirrel birthday card, a squirrel eating a sandwich.. because squirrel's love sandwiches! The Squirrel Wall painting is Acrylic, the card is watercolors...

Quick Blog!

Made this card for my friend Kristin for her birthday, going to change up the squid and make a fun print! Yay!

Incredible looking puppets...

My friend shared this with me, I have no idea who made these puppets, but they are incredible!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePelcaQOEaE&feature=player_embedded

Coraline!

Hoy! So I worked on the feature film "Coraline," I've never taken the time to blog about that experience or post pictures, Soooo here we go!

For the film I was a puppet fabricator, specifically casting and seaming silicone. I also coordinated hands about half way through the production and was responsible for how many hands were needed for which shots and when... .. this was a great experience and I worked with a lot of very talented artists.
For anyone who doesn't know much about stop motion puppetry, basically my job was to erase the seam that occurs after silicone, foam, or resin are cast in a 2 or 3 part mold.

Two part Bobinsky mold, with completed hand armature ready for casting.
The Coraline boot on the left is a freshly cast and unseamed, notice the boot on the right now seamed and painted.

Like the ninja of stop motion, the better my job is done, the less you know I'm there. The challenging part about this job is not only the ability to sit and hold silicone as it's drying (for a very long time), but also repairing the torn silicone/foam.. on set. This is when you then take your puppet first aid kit, go on set to fill in a tear the size of a pin head, while leaning over some lights, and not touching the puppet or moving any of the very important "Hot" items.
The most rewarding part of my job were the days when I was asked to problem-solve some tiny function of a puppet part. For example, in the scene where Coraline removes her boot and throws it at Wybie, I had the fun task of figuring out how to make a removable silicone boot that could hold its shape and then be thrown. It needed to be strong enough to be tied into the set, while being flexible enough to slide over the heel of the foot without tearing, then be able to bend for squash and stretch as it's gliding through the air.
There are many other things to talk about from this film, and I will try to post once a week some small experience from Laika. Here are some pictures until then!

My desk in the very beginning! It was not this clean for very long!

Here I'm seaming a Young Forcible Arm to be used for a close up shot.

My awesome work gear, I liked that my respirator matched my hair, and I miss the sweet purple gloves!

This is my partner in crime Sid! Notice she is working on an Adult Forcible hand, on her desk you can see many hands we were working on together, as well as my purple hand holder! ( sneaky Sid) Working with small batches of silicone (the same used to cast items), we used a series of techniques to apply it, masking the seam underneath. We used the same techniques to paint the nails and shading on the hands.

Newish Felt Snowman!

Random freelance...

Recently I worked for Bella Artistry (www.bellaartistry.com), Bejeweling superbowl Jersey's, for the players wives and children. What does that entail you ask? Why, Hand gluing thousand's of crystals Yay! Here are some finished images of the jersey's!
<3

Extra terrestrial Octopi...

Another painting from my life aquatic theme, this one is 9 by 12 ". Watercolor on Acrylic.