dantat.com

Summer heat

I hate this heat. Our air conditioner is on non stop and on top of all that my wife and I caught our billionth cold from our son (I'm not exaggerating it literaly IS his billionth cold) In any case, I'm still working like a madman trying to please four different art directors at once but once these next few weeks pass it's hopefully going to be smooth sailing afterwards, at least for a while.....
It doesn't help that I'm currently addicted to Bioshock on my XBox...

Seriously, it's game of the year. I haven't played a game with a story this intriguing in a long long time. Though, it's also probably one of the most graphically violent games I've seen in a while. I only play it during the day because it's so darn creepy and I'm a wuss.
I've been doing some studies on shapes of characters. I just finished up another picture book manuscript and drew up some little characters.....

I really don't have time to work on my own stuff right now but, hey, what's the point of being a writer/illustrator if you don't have time to flex your writer half?

On a sad note, I want to offer my condolences to Grace Lin and her family. Her husband Robert died after a very very long bout against cancer. Grace is an inspration to a lot of us for starting the Robert's Snow charity with the Dana Farber Institute and this is just more of a reason that you should all take an opportnity to go check out the snowflakes for 2007 and if so, buy a wonderful snowflake painted by a children's book illustrator.

What's up?

Hey everybody,

My nose has been to the grindstone lately just working away on various projects which is why there has been a lack of postings. I HAVE been doing some quick doodles but have been posting them up on Doodlevision.

In other news, "The Secret Life of Walter Kitty" was just accepted into the "2007 Original Art Show" over at the Society of Illustrators in New York. This features the best of the best for the year in picture book art and to be quite honest I wasn't sure if this book had the mustard to make the cut. Regardless, I made it in, I'm very happy, so much so that I'm actually going to be making a trip out to the "Big Apple" in October to see the show and show the ol' portfolio around to publishers and art directors. I have yet to make travel arrangements but you can bet it will hover around the opening night of October 17th, so if you're an art director or editor and want to hang out, feel free to drop me a line if you'd like to meet. I'll be making more promo sketchboks to give away so i'f you're a good little camper you may end up with one.

Drawings

Thought I'd share a few...

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I was doing character designs for fun and I ended up with a movie poster for an old John Wayne movie.

Ninja Show Tomorrow Night

Ninja Show Saturday night at Nucleus Gallery. I'll see you there.

Illustration Friday: "EMERGENCY"

Here comes the boy wonder to save the day during an emergency.

I was just itching to draw a superhero for the longest time and I figured I'd incorporate a kid of some kind since I do children's books and all.

Disney orders up 13 more episodes of "The Replacements"

I've been away from the show for quite a while with all the children's book work on my plate but it's always nice to be back to stop by and say HI.

I was suprised to discover that our show was picked up for an extra 13 episodes on top of the other 18 which brings us up to a total of 58 episodes! Woo Hoo!
We're switching up the show a bit and we 'guarantee' it's going to be even better than the first season. We have a slightly larger budget, with a larger staff (first season was seriously understaffed and fell behind schedule) The look has been tweaked slightly and each episode is now one whole 22 min episode instead of two 11s. Everyone is packing up to move to the third floor because Touchstone Pictures is kicking us out to occupy the second and fourth floors.
Afterwards I was walking past the Disney Archives and I saw these!

When you're a kid growing up I'm sure most of you can recall that you had a favortie book or VHS movie that you watched to DEATH and never got bored of. For me, Disney's THE BLACK HOLE was it. Here's a trailer....

Sadly, I still know a lot of the dialogue by heart.... Don't judge me.
In retrospect it's kind of an odd movie to consider as a favorite as a child. It did poorly in the theaters, and you would probably consider something like 'Sleeping Beauty' or 'Shrek' to be a kid's favorite movie. Nope, little Dan Santat liked the psychotropic sci fi flick with Ernest Borgnine and a scary scene depicting hell. Wait...We're talking about a DISNEY MOVIE here!?!?!? Needless to say I was so obsessed with V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and I probably drew him a thousand times, so to see the actual movie props really brought back memories and is probably the reason why I'm so obsessed with robots.
Ugh...Did you watch the trailer? In retrospect, this is really awful....
I also saw the ROCKETEER shelving books.

Apparently his movie did so poorly that he needs a second job.

Some stuff

I've been working on multiple projects for the last few months and I thought I'd just share some recent work.

On another note my wife just recently finshed the last Harry Potter book (which means that I can now finally read it) and she made a funny quote, "If I summoned a patronus it would probably be a stampede of shoe shoppers that trampled through everything in ther path. It's my happiest moment in life AND it's unstoppable"

She then preceeded to act out what her patronus woud be actually doing and commenced with gesturing the act of pushing a shopping cart. Oh honey, you don't use a cart to shop for shoes..........*GULP*