Friday, July 18, 2008

Jim Smith needs a cleanup artist

Jim Smith is just about the most talented artist I've worked with. His drawings leave me in awe. They are solid and funny at the same time.Jim is doing some dynamite design and layouts on the George Show and I want to give him some help. I don't want to waste his time cleaning up his own roughs when he could be doing more drawings. The more Jim drawings in the cartoons, the more fun they will be!
He has a very specific elusive style and I need an assistant who has a natural eye for solid manly drawings and good perspective.
There are a lot of subtleties in Jim's style and I want to capture those.
You have to be really careful when putting a clean line down on his drawings that it doesn't flatten them out. No mechanical straight lines or even curves. Solid and organic at the same time.
The best way for a young cartoonist to break into the business is to be able to clean up the work of a star. You absorb a lot of information by osmosis. ( although we wouldn't turn down someone with experience either.)

This is how all the old cartoon animators learned their craft and why the cartoons kept getting better and better over the years.

Now so much of the important creative work is sent overseas or done in flash, that we don't have much apprenticeship opportunity left.

I would ideally like to have an artist who lives in LA, but if you are really good and live elsewhere we can try the email thing.

Are you man enough to work for Jim? Better start pumping some iron.