A year of blogging every week almost

Screencaps from some of this year's blogs

"Never talk about what you'll do, only talk about what you did."

I read that quote at the beginning of this year. It's from an article about the psychology of new year's resolutions. The article claimed that people who state what they plan to accomplish rarely follow through, while people who succeed at their resolutions only talk about them after they've accomplished them. It made sense to me. My new year's resolution was to up my creative output, so I decided I'd start a blog as a place to "talk about what I did".

Now, I had a blog. What I didn't have, was motivation. Then I heard about The Iron Blogger SF. It's a website where local bloggers can sign up to blog once a week. If they miss a week, they owe 5 bucks. Miss 6 weeks and you're out. Motivation: check! I signed up, and I promised myself I'd only post blogs of substance. No blogging about what I ate for breakfast, the song I'm really into right now, or the sweet new pants I just bought.

I started blogging and loved it! It was fun to post a little project and talk about the concept or process. It started to get a bit challenging though, when my career took a bizarre left turn. I transitioned from modeling into hair simulations, then after Dreamworks shut down I moved out of film industry altogether and ended up in the tech industry as a generalist. Lots of learning, not a lot of time for new projects. A brutal crunch at work caused me to miss blogging for 5 weeks straight. That meant one more missed blog and I was out.

One cool thing about blogging was looking at the blog statistics. The most viewed blogs were about our weird family portraits, my wife's diet and the nightmare weekend I spent with a pool. The least popular were about my little Crabbot model and a Nanoloop song. 

So this is it! The last blog! I pulled it off! Now that it's done I can proudly say I accomplished my new years resolution of 2015! I'm super proud of my little motivation of a blog. If you've read any of my posts this year, thanks so much for being a part of it! I'm also crazy proud of the other bloggers who also managed an entire year of blogging once a week. You guys are incredibly inspirational!

Bags of worm poop

Here's a package design I did for my Dad over Christmas vacation. 

My Dad got into gardening in his early teens, while growing weed in the California wilderness. (Nothing motivates a hippie to learn gardening more than the promise of a healthy crop of buds) He got his life in order not long after that, but not before becoming an expert gardener. Now, decades later, he's honed his craft to the point that he grows delicious and comically large vegetables in the desert using nothing more than bark chips and worm castings he's carefully cultivated himself. (For the unfamiliar, worm castings are worm crap)

Serious, with bark chips in the desert!

His gardens are so successful that he started selling his worm castings online. I took a look at the presentation and nearly had an aesthetic heart attack!

Fistfuls of worm goop! BLUE COMIC SANS!!!

I figured I'd make him a package design for Christmas. I sat down with him and we talked about what he wanted in a design. He wanted to get across the idea that this was made by hand, with care. I figured an etching would get this idea across perfectly. Plus, I've been dying to do another one. For imagery, I suggested he try to avoid the idea that this was a form of manure and instead focus on the fact that this makes stuff grow like mad. "And please" I said,"No goofy worm mascot!" His idea was a hand holding dirt with a plant growing out of it. I liked it, so we checked to see if it'd been done before.

It had. A lot.

I kicked around the idea for a bit till I came up with a design that I felt got the idea across. Then I bucked down for a solid day of sketching and etching. By midnight my hand had cramped solid, but I'd finally made this.

I felt pretty good about it, or at least I was just happy to be done with it. Then it slowly dawned on me... when you stamp something, you flip it over... meaning the image is reversed... meaning you have to print text in reverse...

So I cut out the text and re-etched it all over again in reverse.

Done! Since it's a stamp he can stamp the design straight onto the bags. Hopefully this'll up the presentation. And hey, if you want a monster garden, I know a guy.

The Yogos pitch

I rarely ever draw in a professional capacity. I simply don't draw often enough to have the turnover and quality of a professional concept artist. Whenever I'm asked to do concepts I pass the request on to my longtime collaborator Don Flores. So, I felt pretty intimidated back in late 2008 when Laika's commercial department tapped me to do some concept art on a commercial spec pitch for something called Yogos. I was unfamiliar with the product, so they handed me a fistful of the hard, colorful candies. They were disgusting. They tasted like the leftover crust in an old strawberry yogurt container fished out of the trash, which is not surprising, because that's exactly what they were. Hardened yogurt balls.

I'd like a bag of old hardened yogurt balls please

The concept for the commercial was a cartoon of kids in space having a "Houston, we have a problem..." moment when they run out of Yogos. They wanted the drawings to look like they were done by kids, but not look cheap. My take on this was to make the drawings simple and use ink and watercolor washes for the backgrounds.

We didn't end up winning the bid and the product was discontinued shortly after that. Possibly because they didn't choose us for their marketing. Or possibly because they were selling bags of crusty yogurt balls.