Kwak - DVD Update

I'm receiving many emails , asking about the release of the first Kwak DVDs that was originally announced for Easter.
Disky, the publisher, decided to release them in the second half of the year, because they are planningf a bigger advertising campaign accompaning the release and there will be lots of other Kwak-related stuff,as well ( boardgames, etc) which I will tell you about, when the time has come.

Meanwhile and if you're living in Holland, you can watch Kwak on pay-TV for 0,99 € per episode on Tele2. I'm not exactly sure about how this works, but I'm sure you'll find out and tell me .
H.

Brother Bear some more faces

What you see here a a couple of more face studies, mainly for Kenai's brother Sitka.
The maindifference between the two is that Kenai is the young, impulsive one, whereas Sitka is the clearer, more serious type, who's preparing to become chief of the tribe, sooner or later.
But all this changed many times during the production, and with every change in story, the characters changed, too.











You will also see a lot of different styles here, thats because , what you see ,is stuff from almost two years of work, some characterstudies, some costume, etc....
anyway, enjoy H

Just wanna share with you, what my son (5) just drew....

Brother Bear - Kenai

Here are some early sketches for Kenai's face. I wanted to come up with something different from Pocahontas and stay away from Mulan as well, so I was looking at a lot of faces from the South-Sea for reference , even Korea and the Phillipines, Eskimo as well.
I wanted Kenai to be in the middle of his puberty , so I tried to give him a girlish attitude as well, long thin limps for example a alltogether puppyish feel.



This is almost the final design of his haircut, but it took me a long time to come up with it and keep it simple. I wated a lot of time and pencilmilage to come up with something fancy .





This is one of many costumestudies. I was looking for a way to anticipate the transformation into a bear in his costume, so I was going for a way of dressing, where he would just throw over some furs in the morning, that would also correspond with his impatient and impulsive character. I also liked the warpaint in this particular sketch. This sheet got into ther internet somehow and the buzz was, that Kenai was going to look a lot like Mowgli, but actually this was just one drawing of maybe a hundred.



In the early version of the skript , Kenais father, Chilkoot, would be the one who got killed instead of his brother,by Kenais fault of course, butthey finally realised that that was too close to Lionking , so eventually Chilkoot had to go and was replaced by Denaii.

And now for something completly different ....

Cookies anyone ?

...the guys and gals from the Filmakademie Ludwigsburg.
WRONGGGGGGGGGG. I've just been told , that this clip is not from Ludwigsburg, but from Studio Fiftyeight (click the link above ). Sorry, guys I just was under the wrong impression, I saw this clip for the first time at the FMX last year and somehow it must have gotten in the wrong mental drawer. Sorry ....

Here's what they're saying :

A: You can kiss my ass !

B: Yeah, you can kiss MY ass, too !

A: You can kiss my ...4 times my ass !!

B: Always two times more than you !

Big Ad

Carlton beer
Video sent by buzzmanisindahouse

Just another funny commercial to celebrate the fact that I found out, how to blog videos ...

Brother Bear 2

Of course , there had been many Disney ( and other cartoon ) - Bears already. I wanted to stay away from them as far as possible...





So I started my sketches based on this little toy, which I had picked up in a monastry outside moscow and which I always had loved for it's nice proportions. Now, I finally knew, why I had bought it...



And of course BART THE BEAR was a great inspiration, I watched and studied a lot of his movies and I was lucky to even find a documentary from National Geographic on him, what a great guy, rest in peace, Bart....





Look at the size of this guy, the head and the paw on the shoulder,the sheer "presence" of this wonderful creature, you easily forget this if your used to - and think in terms of- cartoon bears.I also visited the two kodiaks in the Hamburg zoo, and time and time again, my first thought was ;"M>y god, they are huge!" I wanted to capture this feeling by all means. But how do you draw "size" and "weight", without having a chance to give a relation on the same sheet , use an upshot camera-angle or just a part of the body ??? If you gotta show the whole body, even a whale looks like a herring.



I found the lower lip very helpful for this purpose, it always hangs down, makes a great tool for a follow thru , always looks kinda numb and there's spit and saliver dropping from it. It gives a great feel of size and weight to the drawing.





These above sketches were done with exactly this purpose. And after the bears went through the giftet hands of Rune Bennicke and all the other guys at Disney's , they looked really good...




.....more to come

Mayfly

Last year in june I rented a car and drove 5 hours straight to Holland to Herman van Veen's house, had a meeting and drove 5 hours back, it was ridiculously hot outside and the aircondition was working at it's limit all the time. All this resultet in an enormous lumbago, which sent me straight to bed for a couple of weeks.
When the pain was worst, Passion Pictures called, asking me to design a realistic mayfly, which was supposed to have "character" nontheless. You don't say "no" to Passion, do you?
I managed to sit in my chair for half an hour a day and came up with just a bunch of sketches,. I felt depressed and angry, I wasn't happy with what I had done, not at all, so I didn't even charge Passion for the sketches.
In the meantime its all forgotten, both- the lumbago and the mayfly, till I saw this commercial the other day. I don't know who eventually did it, but he /she did a good job, don't you think ?

Mayfly
Video sent by ovalballs