Thursday, December 18, 2008

Little Nasties

These nasty little beasties were created for a commercial a while back for Amalgamated Pest Control.

I don't have the actual ad here, but I do have a short video that was done for their annual conference. I designed them in Photoshop and then modelled and textured the critters in Maya. Grant Harding rigged and animated (as well as helped with some of the modelling, I think) all of them with the exception of the first two clips. I animated the rat in the first two.

I really think you can tell. Grant is a professional character animator and his skill can be easily seen in the subtleties he gets in the last two rat animations. I've never claimed to be a 'character animator', although it is something that continues to entice and challenge me.

I must say I am particularly fond of the rat....










Amalgamated Pest Control from Pete Mullins on Vimeo.

Lone Wolf and Cowboy

Just a couple of sketches in this post. A bear that sorta ended up becoming a wolf.

...and I'm a sucker for the show 'Deadwood'. Al Swearengen for mayor I say! There's something about the image of a cowboy standing in the mud and the rain. Anyway a bit of Deadwood inspired nonsense from me...

Sunday, December 14, 2008

More Bettie.....

Hugh Fleming and I started working on a comic featuring Bettie Page with some other well known and not-so-well known hollywood characters.

That's supposed to be Darren McGavin in the hat (fond memories of the 'Nightstalker') and with the chimp piloting the plane is Don Knotts (the 'Ghost and Mr.Chicken'). Anne Francis (Forbidden Planet) appears later on as the quintessential jungle queen.

We never finished it. Maybe one day.....

....It was good fun....

Bettie Page dies aged 85, December 11

I had no idea my previous post would turn put to be something of an obituary. It was the beautiful Bettie that introduced me to the world of the pin-up. I don't think anyone who has illustrated her has failed to fall in love with her all-at-once innocent and yet alluring image. I think she will be remembered in the same iconographic way was Marilyn Monroe or James Dean.

Ironically enough, the man pretty much responsible for the resurgence of interest in this 50s pin-up queen, Dave Stevens, had passed away earlier this year at the age of 52. I had heard that they were in contact with each and that there was a mutual respect between the two. The world this year has lost both the icon and the artist. They will be missed.

This article on Bettie's passing from the UK Telegraph:

Bettie Page, the Fifties centrefold who died on Thursday at the age of 85, made a career out of reducing men to rubble. But with her all-American physique, Cleopatran tresses, and blithe insouciance about being immortalised in states of undress, she also had an extraordinary effect on her own sex. The "Miss Pin-up Girl of the World", who rose to fame after she posed in 1955 in Hugh Hefner's newly launched Playboy magazine and became one most photographed women of the last century, she achieved that rare feat of being an object of masculine lust no less admired by women.

Her role in the sexual revolution may have been in a minor key compared with the advent of feminism or the contraceptive pill. However, her jaunty up-and-at-'em approach to matters erotic sanctioned the idea that sex was a normal – or, at times, divertingly abnormal – part of the female repertoire.

There was something genuinely radical about her embodiment of a certain joie de vivre. Page herself once observed that: "Young women say I helped them come out of their shells." By her own acknowledgment, she was the girl next door who got the girl next door thinking.

Celebrated modern-day burlesque artist Dita Von Teese, whose own brand of voluptuosity is straight from the school of Page, today told the Telegraph: "With the passing of Bettie, we have lost yet another great 20th century icon. She dared to be different all those decades ago, combining an erotic fetishism and pin-up playfulness with a little wink of the eye. She certainly inspired me, and will be remembered by the world as a daring beauty and style icon for ever."

Page's biography may not offer much by way of liberation, encompassing, as it did, parental abuse, an inability to profit from her own image, and a descent into mental illness. However, her iconography enjoyed a life beyond such squalor.

Images of Page will continue to hold a resonance, whether pouncing in leopard-skin, flashing her magnificent bosom, or, yes, even gagged and bound. Sex, as Page's many incarnations taught Middle America, is curious, complicated and, above all, fun – not least when untrammelled by dogma.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Tradies, Renos and Plumbers' Cracks

After our recent experiences with bathroom renovations I thought about a new annual event to add to the Australian calendar. It's called 'The National Strangle a Crap Tradie Day'. We draw up a list of the really crap tradies out there. You know, the rude, racist, sexist, incompetent, nasty, smelly and/or pathologically lying ones.

Then we randomly select a few from the list and ritually strangle them.

Every year on the same day.

That'll keep the little buggers on their toes.

Pin-Ups

My poor neglected blog. Been busy. Work has been nuts. And the home front....well, you can always check out my Darling Wife's blog for the latest there.
Been a while since I posted any 'pin-up' stuff. I really can't remember what possessed me to draw Kirstie Alley...there had to be a reason...

....ahhh, then there's Bettie Page. These two paintings were done with real brushes and paints. You know, like in the 'good old days'. The American flag painting was published by Ray Zone of 3D Zone Comics fame.
The funny thing about the flag one is that it turned up in an Italian art book on Bettie Page a year or so later without my knowledge or any form of payment. I remember friends at the time thinking it strange that I wasn't all that upset. I thought it was kinda cute, so I bought the book.


No idea what's going with this one. When working in the black arts of 3D animation you spend a lot of time 'rendering' i.e. waiting for the software to do something. So rather than annoy my fellow workers or smoke crack cocaine...I do this. Weird.