Ben Catmull

Another sample from my current project.

2011-05-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest image I just finished and a reminder that I still have plenty of prints for sale.

Stumptown Comics Fest

2011-04-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

This Saturday and Sunday (April 16-17) I will be at Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, Oregon. I'll be selling letterpress prints, Monster Parade, and Paper Theater. You can find me sitting at a table with Zack Soto and Kazimir Strzepek.

Fantasy Postcards

2011-01-19T17:22:00.000-08:00

Here are some images from an old book I found full of postcards "from the late Belle Epoque through The Great War". It was printed around 1975 and is written by and from the collection of William Ouellette. ISBN 0-385-11230-0

Original Art for Sale

2010-12-15T14:57:00.000-08:00

The following three pieces of original art that didn't sell at The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival Fest are now for sale on my etsy store.

Another reading this Saturday

2010-12-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

I'll be reading again from Monster Parade this Saturday December 11 at Comic Relief in Berkeley at an event organized by Francois Vigneault

The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

2010-11-30T15:32:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be at the The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this Saturday Dec 4th. As usual I'll be selling Monster Parade and the old Paper Theater plus I'll have the original pen and ink drawings for my letter press prints and some original art. I haven't seen a map of the table layout but I think I'm next to or in between Julia Wertz, Lisa Hanawalt, and Pigeon Press. Special thanks go out to Sarah Glidden who won't make it back to Brooklyn in time and is letting me use her table.

Prints for sale on Etsy

2010-10-28T14:53:00.000-07:00

I just set up an Etsy shop to sell the letter press prints. It's my first time selling stuff over the internet so I hope it goes smoothly.

New Letterpress Prints

2010-10-12T15:30:00.000-07:00

I have just completed a series of letterpress prints. I will be selling them at the Alternative Press Expo this weekend (Oct 16-17) in San Francisco. In the near future I will start selling them on the internet, probably through Etsy.

I wanted to make prints that were unique to the paper medium. The effect of letterpress is that the image is pressed deep into the paper, creating a deboss effect. I created images that were separated into to colors. The first color is a faded sepia brown. For the second "color" no color was actually used. Only a physical imprint was made in the paper. This effect can't be accurately reproduced digitally or with common offset printing. With this particular kind of letterpress, each piece of paper must be hand cranked through the machine one at a time for each color. I did three images with a limited run of 200 each on 100% cotton Hahnemühle paper. The image size is bout 7.3 x 9.5 inches. The paper size is 10 x 13. They were printed by the fine folks at Volta Press in Oakland.

BIRD

MOTH

SNAIL

More from my current project

2010-08-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

I figured I should put up a reminder that I'm still alive and drawing

Comics Reading May 27th

2010-05-26T16:56:00.000-07:00

I'll be reading a portion on Monster Parade out loud with pictures projected on the wall tomorrow

Japanese Ghosts and Demons

2010-05-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

The Japanese bookstore chain, Kinokuniya, has a branch I go to in San Francisco. There they have a section labeled "Ghosts and Demons". It is my favorite section of any bookstore anywhere. I've pillaged it multiple times and amassed a big pile of mind bogglingly bizarre and beautiful art. It was hard to pick out just a few pictures to share here. Just about every page of all those books are filled with images like these.

Monster Parade 2 progress

2010-03-03T15:14:00.000-08:00

You know those crazy people who make large miniature scale models with toothpicks? They spend a ridiculous amount of time and effort gluing together one toothpick after another. And in the end they have little to show for it except impressing a few weirdo friends and maybe getting a local news puff piece. That's what being a comic artist feels like to me right now.
Anyways, I still have a few thousand little lines to ink and shapes to color but here is a another peek at my progress on Monster Parade #2. Click to enlarge.

Croatian Pirates?

2010-02-17T14:34:00.000-08:00

Apparently my comics are being reprinted in Croatia without my permission. It looks like some sort of literary magazine called Libra Libera. Here's a link filtered through google language tools. Monster Parade didn't make any money here in the States, and that Croatian thing doesn't look like a big deal, so I guess it doesn't count as getting ripped off. Normally I would happy to get exposure in another country but these people didn't even have the courtesy to get my permission or even just let me know what they're doing. I find that annoying and disrespectful. So should this blog happen to catch the eyes of any Croatians or readers of Libra Libera, I just wanted to let you know that I don't approve of their reprinting my comics and that they print stolen material.

My Current Project

2010-02-12T00:43:00.000-08:00

Here's a peek at another project I'm working on.

New Miniature

2010-02-05T00:25:00.000-08:00

*cough cough ahem* Is this thing still on? I'm going to make a new effort to post regularly. I had been told it was best to keep people interested by posting everyday, which just made me run out of juice really quick. Now we'll see if I can do about once a week.

I just finished making this miniature stone hut. I did a simple box shape because I had meant it to be a quick experiment but it ended taking a long time. The stone looking part is balsa foam I carved and painted. The roof and door/window frames are balsa wood. The grass is stuff called Pot Toppers and is meant to go in the pot of your fake plant. The rest of the plants are real dried plants and moss. The bottom picture has a pencil for size reference.

Dear Dead Days

2009-04-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago while I was hanging out with Dylan Williams and Chris Cilla in the comics section of Powell's Books in Portland, they handed me this amazing book by cartoonist Charles Addams. Addams is most famous for creating the Adams Family and generally creating very morbid gag cartoons. But this book, Dear Dead Days, is a scrap book of bizarre imagery mostly from the 1800's and early 1900's that he apparently drew inspiration from. There are freaks, torture devices, cadavers, train wrecks, creepy Victorian architecture, children playing with dead thins, and so on. The book was published in 1959 and I didn't find any signs of reprints when I poked around on the internet. But copies of the original look fairly easy to come by.

Doodle

2009-04-02T16:29:00.001-07:00

Doodle

2009-03-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

Heroes and Villains art show

2009-03-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

Heroes and Villains art show

I will be part of a group show at Rock Paper Scissors Collective in Oakland. It's organized buy Teppei Ando and includes work by Arnell Ando, Teppei Ando, Graham Annable, David Ball, Mary Cook, Alika Cooper, Matt Hart, Matt Hewitt, Obi Kaufman, An Nguyen, Jonah Olson, Deth P. Sun, Mark Todd, and Derek Wood. I'll be showing 5 original pages from Monster Parade and that Whale Painting.

Friday April 3rd, 6-9 pm
2278 Telegraph ave., Oakland, CA 94612

The Shaw Brothers look

2009-03-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

Normally when we think of old Kung Fu movies from around the 70's we think of really low budget affairs with bad dubbing. This is partially because the biggest Hong Kong studio from that era, Shaw Brothers, did not until very recently believe in the home video market. One of the Shaw brothers, Run Run Shaw, is still alive at about the age of 102 which might be part of why they were so stubbornly old fashion. This resulted in Shaw movies being only available in worn out bootlegs. They finally came around several years ago and from about 2003 - 2006 they released about 500 digitally restored DVDs of from the Shaw Brothers catalog. These all came out in China with a region 3 encoding but luckily for us they all came with english subtitles and region free DVD players are easy to come by. Plus they are slowly leaking out in the US market via Image Entertainment and Dragon Dynasty.

During most of 2005 I had taken a temporary job with nonstop overtime in LA where I only had a few friends who lived far away. This year in my life of almost no social life coincided with my discovery of a (now defunct) website called Nicheflix, which was like a netflix specializing in foreign DVDs. So as a result I plowed through a ridiculous amount of Shaw brothers movies. It started with my interest in old school kung fu battles but it was also the Shaw Brothers look that made it addicting. Shaw Brothers seriously beefed up their studio when it was standard practice to shoot everything indoors and because of this they continued that old fashioned indoor studio look well into the early eighties. At times it looks like angry shirtless Chinese dudes beating each other to a bloody pulp on the set of The Wizard of Oz. I love the weird unearthly feeling of fake indoor sets, opera stages, and miniatures so combining this with pulpy bloody kung fu is like cinema crack to me.

Visually, one of my favorite Shaw movies is The Imperial Swordsman(1972). It has almost no story and the average quality of the fight choreography has to be made up for in quantities of spurting blood and dead bodies. But it is a beaut to look at. Lots of eerie fake indoor sets and miniatures and for some reason shot almost entirely in deep dark expressive noirish lighting. Here are some pics and a clip to show you what I'm talking about.
In the future I will occasionally post some more samples of some of my favorite looking Shaw movies

-click on the images for a larger picture-

Watch the high quality youtube clip here

The Wizard's Apprentice (1930)

2009-03-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Dylan for sending me the link

Doodle

2009-03-23T10:38:00.001-07:00

And now a word from our sponsor ...

2009-03-21T21:41:00.000-07:00

Don't forget to shop at The Bad Apple

Orchid

2009-03-20T12:17:00.000-07:00

Here's an unused image for the Orchid anthology that I edited with Dylan Williams a few years back. I think it was an idea for a sticker.

Doodle

2009-03-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

Photoshopping with Friends

2009-03-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

A few years ago Jeff Levine hosted a message board for a lot of my cartoonist friends. On one thread we started out trading Photoshop tips and it evolved into us making horrible pictures of each other. These were my contributions

Dan Zettwoch

Mario Bava, Dylan Williams, Dan Zettwoch

(Note: Originally those black boxes weren't there. You're welcome)

Doodle

2009-03-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

Another Bad Apple commercial

2009-03-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

I have spent hundreds of seconds making another commercial for The Bad Apple store using cutting edge technology

Leftover Town Footage

2009-03-11T23:09:00.000-07:00

Here is more leftover footage from the Still Working Video.

Leftover Town Fooatge from Ben Catmull on Vimeo.

327 year old book

2009-03-08T18:06:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago Dylan Williams' grandfather died. He had been a medieval literature scholar and left behind a lot of interesting old books. Dylan was allowed to go through the collection and pick out anything that interested him before the rest was donated to a library. Among the books he picked out were 2 copies of the book pictured here. Dylan kept one copy and was generous enough to give me the other. As far as we can tell, this book really is from 1682. Dylan's grandfather even left magazine clippings in the back of my copy describing the book and it's value and rarity. I think Dylan's copy is in better condition and mine seems to have been the the one for writing notes in. I did a quick search on the internet and didn't find any sign of reprints. The pictures below tell the rest of the story. There is an illustration on every left-hand page so I've posted some of my favorites. Click the images to go to it's page and then click the "All Sizes" button for a larger version.

The Bad Apple commercial

2009-03-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

My friend Dylan Williams runs a store with the help of Tim Goodyear called The Bad Apple. I have just poured my heart and soul into making an advertisement for them using some hoopty internet thingy

Doodle

2009-03-04T11:55:00.000-08:00

The Mother Tree

2009-03-03T11:15:00.000-08:00

Here's another Shintoho horror movie for you. The Mother Tree aka Kaidan Chibusa Enoki. A Samurai lusts after a woman and murders her artist husband, wet nurse, and family servant in order to try to force her to be with him. But the ghosts of his victims come back to drive him mad. The ghosts also show the woman a tree leaking milk or something that her baby can suckle since she can't breast feed him herself. I particularly like the part where the dying bleeding husband falls into a creek full of snakes. I'm not sure if that gave his ghost extra haunting power but aside from ghost cat ladies, I've noticed another theme of ghosts rising from ponds.

Doodle

2009-03-02T14:33:00.001-08:00

Chris Ware paper miniatures

2009-03-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I did a search on my computer for anything containing ".jpg" and I stumbled across a bunch of interesting old photos I'd nearly forgotten about. Here's one from around '01 or '02 when I had actually taken the time to build some of Chris Ware's paper miniatures. I used my computer and printer to copy the cut-outs so no comics were harmed in the making of these. The stove and phonograph were novelty pencil sharpeners and the shelf was found at a knick-knack store in chinatown. I've forgotten where the coffee cup came from. The paper models have long since withered and fallen apart.

Doodle

2009-02-27T12:03:00.000-08:00

Doodle

2009-02-25T11:21:00.001-08:00

Leftover Footage

2009-02-23T22:13:00.000-08:00

I have a lot of unused footage from the Still Working video. I liked the way a lot of the miniature stuff came out so I figured a would regularly post chunks of raw unedited footage of the miniature stuff here just for fun. Here's all of the mini graveyard footage.

*note* It seems to play better if you let it fully load first

Leftover graveyard footage. from Ben Catmull on Vimeo.

Doodle

2009-02-23T14:33:00.000-08:00

Monster Parade #2

2009-02-22T14:17:00.000-08:00

Here's another peek. I know the two pictures I've shown so far look very sweet and cozy, but don't worry. There will be monsters and the story will end in horror and misery.

Doodle

2009-02-21T14:43:00.001-08:00

The Poopening

2009-02-21T14:34:00.000-08:00

Here's a silly exercise I did for a film class. It was hastily shot over the period of 2 evenings with two patient friends who have no real interest in acting. Nothing was really planned out. I just shot from some goofy ideas in my head.

Doodle

2009-02-20T12:08:00.001-08:00

Doodle

2009-02-19T10:49:00.001-08:00

The Ghost Cat of Otama Pond

2009-02-18T16:13:00.000-08:00

I love me some old horror movies. Especially hidden gems. Back in the fifties there was a Japanese movie studio called Shintoho. It was known for trashier genre movies including horror. The most well know movie to come from Shintoho was Jigoku. Around 2001 a bunch of Shintoho movies came out on DVD in Greece that luckily came with english subtitles and weren't region encoded. I've managed to get all the horror ones and a couple others. Here's The Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (aka Kaibyo Otama Ga ike)

From watching a lot of old Japanese horror movies I've gathered that the vengeful cat ghost must be an old traditional Japanese ghost story. There are a lot of movies where a person dies a wrongful death and their cat happens to be around to drink their blood, and they then come back as a cat/human ghost to take vengeance. The vengeful cat ghost is almost a genre unto itself.

Doodle

2009-02-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

Whale Painting

2009-02-17T11:40:00.000-08:00

A few years back I thought about making some paintings to sell. So I did this painting and then I didn't want to sell it. It's partially inspired by a dream I had many years ago about being near the docks and seeing a frothing hoard of whales pass by. I painted this in '04 and then last year I saw something almost identical to my dream in Miyazaki's latest movie Ponyo. That kinda blew my mind. Anyways, I was never really sure what to do with the painting. Recently Sean McArdle convinced me to let him use the art on his upcoming album. If I ever do decide to sell it , Renee French was the first person to express interest in buying it so I figure she has dibs.

On a related note, recently I've been leaning back toward the idea of making paintings to sell. Look for art for sale here eventually

Doodle

2009-02-17T10:12:00.000-08:00

The Sign of the Cross

2009-02-16T14:32:00.000-08:00

This is some good pre-code Hollywood craziness. Cecil B. DeMille directs this movie about Christians being oppressed by the wicked and decadent Emperor Nero (played by Charles Laughton -!!!-). It's Roman debauchery at it's finest in the Coliseum.

Doodle

2009-02-16T10:20:00.000-08:00

Still Working music video

2009-02-15T17:11:00.000-08:00

"Still Working" music- Sean McArdle video- Ben Catmull from Ben Catmull on Vimeo.

I made a music video for my old friend Sean McArdle. Aside from the one weekend Sean came up for the live action stuff we shot together, I did it all myself with no real plan other than to stick to the general theme and use it as a chance to try out experiments in cinematography and miniatures. The miniatures with the round windows were unpainted birdhouses I bought at an arts and rafts store. I painted them, sawed out the bottoms, and lined the insides of the windows with tracing paper so they could be lit from the inside. The square office looking buildings were bamboo utensil holders I bought at Target. They were also repainted, lined with tracing paper, and turned upside down. The tall barn looking thing with the pillars was something I made from scratch with balsa wood, superglue, woodstain, and paint. All the "composite" shots were actually done in camera. I put my iPod inside the window of some of the miniatures while it played back movies on it's screen. The shots where the background looks fake behind Sean or the tall barn is actually my 32" LCD tv playing back footage from my hd cam. The whole thing was shot on Super 8mm. The raw footage was then digitized in HD and edited in Finalcut.

Here are some Sean Mcardle links
http://seanmcardle.com/
www.myspace.com/seanmcardle

Here's the youtube of the video if your computer doesn't like vimeo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_PRXgi30Z4&fmt=18

Monster Parade #2

2009-02-15T17:09:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, I really am working on Monster Parade #2. Here's a little work in progress to prove it

2009-02-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

Here's my new blog. Don't worry, I won't be posting about the boring minutiae of my daily life. I'll save that for phone calls with my family. On this blog I will be posting doodles, works in progress, paintings, photos, films etc and I will be rambling about art and movies I enjoy.

Testing

2009-02-15T15:42:00.000-08:00

First post. Image test.