50 Ways Green Series

The Covers

For the past six months I've had the opportunity to illustrate and design a series of books, titled 50 Ways Greener Series by Kyle Cathie Publishing. The series is written by Siân Berry, the Green Party's candidate for London mayor. There are four books in the series- 50 Ways to... Be a Greener Shopper, Greener Travel, Save Water & Energy, and Make Your House & Garden Greener. All are full of incredibly useful information to save you money around the house and help save the environment along the way. It was a fun project for such a worthwhile subject matter.

The books are published now and out on shelves everywhere. Pick one (or four) up today!

Here's a few sample illustrations from throughout the series. See more in the Portfolio section on my site by clicking HERE!

Steaming Broccoli is HealthiestAvoid Traffic Congestion by Biking to Work

Give Someone a Ticket to an Event or a Dinner Gift Certificate

Best Way to Kill Slugs is with Beer

Trees not sure about the whole Carbon Neutral Thing

Website Redesign!

I've spent the last week or so updating my dusty, crusty, moldy, out-of-date website. I've given it a complete redesign and added a lot of new work. Sadly ol' MonsterSquid has been buried for now, but he may crawl his way out of his shallow grave in the distant future.

Check it out HERE!

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Imagine- Children's Literature Festival

Over the past two months I've been working with South Bank Centre in London designing, illustrating and animating characters (farting dogs and belching horses) for the Children's Literature Festival this week. It's been a lot of fun creating characters based on the Chinese calender and then pitting them together in a race towards the finish line.

The characters are based on a show at the festival called Animal Olympics by Francesca Beard. The entire event takes place from 14th- 22nd of February.

See a short of the animation and learn more about it here at IMAGINE.

See you there!

Poster design by Gaelle Lochner

This (Not So) Little Piggy...

One of many characters I've created for an upcoming London event.... more of his friends and details later....

WebbliWorld!

Extreme Makeover

The Waste Receptacle Edition

Happy Holidays! Sorry for the two month delay in posting on this crusty blog.

Here's some character designs and accompanying animation I worked on a few months back for a nicely designed kid's website called WebbliWorld. The site and all of its inhabitants were designed by the all-mighty Aardman Animation. (Wallace & Grommit, Chicken Run)

It was fun working with such a cool existing style and putting my own spin on some new characters. It was for a game titled- Wiji's Polar Peril- that teaches kids about global warming effects on the world and what they can do to help out. Zap that stinky trashcan and turn it it into a recycling bin!

Vile & Vicious Varmits

Here's a sneak peek for our next book, Vile & Vicious Varmits of the Northwoods. It's sort of a sequel to our last book- A Field Guide to Midwest Monsters. It's been over two years since the last one but we are hoping to get this one out for summer of 2008. It's been difficult collaborating with my good friend and immensely talented monster-maker, Jason Felix, over many time zones and the Atlantic Ocean. But it's the time of year for monsters and a good time to get the furry ball rolling once again.

I'll keep you up to date with any new Varmit news! This one will be bigger and better (in color!) than the last.

Here's a sample spread-

Going to the Chapel....

We're getting married August 28th in Florence! Here's the invite cover illustration.

See you when we get back in late in September!

Bonsters!

The Bonsters

Hey hey! Here's some little characters I designed a while for a kid's website. Pick your favorite one, dress 'em up and customize dance moves for him to cut some serious rug.

See them here. The site is going through Beta testing now, but you can sign up and play Dr. Frankenstein.

Frank meets Fred

"roar."

Some of my animation has a one-second, blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in the newest episode on Channel Frederator. It's actually inserted into the newest adventure of the Sparkle Friends- a hilarious cartoon straight outta New Zealand. It's put together by the talented guys at Mukpuddy Animation.

The Muks asked for Flash animators to submit anything they had laying around to put into an episode. So I dug up an old drawing I had of Frankenstein lurking around and quickly animated a black and white short of him being zapped. He now resides on the Sparkle Friend's boob tube while the kids are arguing about what channel to watch.

You can see just the Frank short HERE.

You can see the whole Channel Frederator episode HERE.

Thanks to the Mukpuddy gang- hopefully we can work further together in the future! Check out the rest of their stuff- it's totally rad/awesome.

Below is the original sketch and colored version of Frank.

Uncle Abominable

Uncle Abominable

"Hey dudes! Whaddap?
How about an ice cream cone?
I gots vanilla, n' chocolate n'... vanilla....
How 'bout one? Huh? They're nice n' cold.

What's that?
You're hiking Mount Everest right now?
N' yer freezing cold?
You can't feel yer toes n' yer boogers have turned to icicles?

Aww, sorry 'bout that... but how's about a Dilly Bar?"

The Corpse Corps!

Meet Rex Cadaver, Rip, Mortis, Wormrot and Rigor. Five undead mobsters otherwise know as the Corpse Corps! I designed these guys a year or so ago (you just can smell their moldy undies) but they've resurfaced over at ZombieDollar$- a great website run by Nik Holmes.

ZombieDollar$ offers "a final resting place for all those zombie pics creatives seem to have shambling around their folios". So drag your cadaver over there and check it out. Maybe you have a lonely zombie that needs a place to rest his bones?

Monstersquid Reel

Click the image below to view my
Animation & Design Reel-Animation & Design by Aaron Blecha
Music by Gnarls Barkley

All characters are copyrighted. Reel for demo purposes only.

Boogie Monster

Boog Aloo
Likes- back hair on girls, talcum powder
Dislikes- soggy cardboard, wearing sandals w/socks


Some previous versions of Boog

Eat Your Broccoli!

Chuck Brockly
Likes- cheering for his least favorite teams
Dislikes- armpits that smell of asparagus

Misc Monsters

Johan Abblebomb
Likes- wrasslin', canjun cooking & Swedish meatballs
Dislikes- shaving

It's spring cleaning time! I'm going through some old pages in my sketchbook and cleaning up some old monster sketches I did last year. They didn't quite make the cut for a couple of projects I was working on, but it's time for them to see the light of day. So over the next couple of days (most likely weeks) I'll chuck up a monster or two for your viewing pleasure.

Back in the Day Video is Out There!

We've completed the music video for Danish indie band, Figurines and it's worldwide! Friend Brad Mossman created and directed this fine piece of sad weirdness and I just moved things around a little. It was a great experience putting it together (in under three weeks) at the Animation Workshop in Viborg, DK. It aired on Danish national TV last night and will hopefully get into some festivals. I'll keep you posted on further developments. Until then, please enjoy it on a bevy of these fine online establishments-

Metacafe
YouTube
MySpace

UPDATE-
Back in the Day is featured on DRAWN!

Further info-
Back in the Day Production Blog

Squid Blob

Beware of the Squid Blob!

Hogzilla

Happy New Year everyone! This here's Hogzilla. I was inspired by a video I saw recently of a giant wild boar being killed in Georgia. It weighed 1100 pounds and had tusks nine inches long! Shame they had to kill it though, but I'm sure it will go good with some grits. Here's my interpretation of a fat Georgian pig...

Click HERE to watch the video to prove it.

Back in the Day

Alien Armpit Sniffers at Work

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the blog suckage and delay in posting anything brand spankin' new for awhile. I've just returned from two and a half weeks in Denmark working on a fun project. I was animating a music video for the Danish band called Figurines.

Brad Mossman, the video's director, is an old friend from San Francisco who now lives in northern Denmark. He is a wacked musician that does frantic theme songs for cartoons on Nickelodeon, Disney and Cartoon Network. All of the jingles for the cartoons and video games I helped create a few years back were also brain-stormed by him.

Brad drew the cover character for the Figurine's album, Skeleton. So everyone thought it was a good idea to have these his characters come to life for the video of "Back in the Day."

The video is partially funded by the Animation Workshop, in Viborg, Denmark. You can check out our progress, see where we were working, and laugh at our pale, sunlight deprived faces at the official Back in the Day Blog put together by Brad.

After a chill weekend in Copenhagen (visiting more old friends), I'm back in London. Although I'm working without Brad's tasty veggie cooking, I hope to have the remaining 10% percent of the animation done by Christmas. I'll let you all know when it's available for your viewing pleasure.

When Belly Button Lint goes Unchecked

Eye for an Eye

A few days ago, I received some monsters in the mail! Madcap Monsters is a limited print coloring book by the imaginative and inspirational Warren Leonhardt. He drew a bunch of classic monsters in odd situatiuons, printed it up and handed it out to all the lucky neighborhood ghoulies for the best holiday ever, Halloween. There were a few left-over copies (suckers!) so he wanted to trade with any of his blog readers.

I swapped my monster book, Midwest Monsters for this gem. I'd like to think Warren's monsters and mine high-fived (or sixed?) over the Atlantic somewhere.

I'm slowly making my way through coloring all the monsters. I want to do it appropriately, but I keep running out of blood...

Thanks Warren and send some O positive!