Lulu

A little illustration I whipped up one day based on "The Big One" Miss Lulu Belle!

She's "The Anniversary Basset" a little present my wife and I purchased together on our Anniversary in 2004. Here are some pictures of her on that day (Note: she's much bigger now).

enjoy

Batman Beyond Style Guides!

A friend, we'll call him William to protect his identity, has just handed me a set of Batman Beyond Style Guides. These are the guides that companies use to help design and manufacture things like Batman toys, in this case Batman Beyond!

These are, to date, my favorite style guides I have ever used. They are beautifully bound little books that have the CD trays for the artwork built right in. Each has a hard gloss cover, and gloss pages that have the artwork included on the CDs jumping out at you in four color process.

I remember using these to help sculpt the Batman Beyond Head mentioned in an earlier post, and also to set up graphics for various products. I never thought I would see these again and am glad William thought enough to bring these to me, knowing I'm a Batman Fanatic and having sat through many a lunch where I talked about these very same style guides. I hope to go through these in a little more detail in the future, but for now enjoy these pictures. Oh and William lunch is on be buddy!

Batman Collection

I know, I know, I've left all two of my readers days without a post. So I thought I would show off some of the Batman Collection here at Studio Howell. Maybe this will be a feature in the future? Who knows. Anyway this little teaser picture does contain an item I made. It's left over from when I was serving time at a little amusement toy company called Play By Play Toys and Novelties. We had about 98% of all the licenses out there that there was to obtain at the time, one of those being anything Batman. I was the Art Director over the Product Development division of the Art Department and I talked our Plush Department Manager to let a couple of the other artists and myself have a little competition sculpting the head for the vinyl head of the new Batman at the time, Batman Beyond. Thing is we had less than a week to do our sculpts and send them of to DC Comics. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention not one of us had ever sculpted professionally before?

Wether we were pros or not I worked two full nights on this bad boy and sent it to DC Comics on deadline. I actually received positive feedback on the sculpt with minor revisions as did one of the other artists, it then came down to time and I had to let the other guy finish as I was needed on a Superman or Looney Tunes project. I did have my sculpt returned and was allowed to keep it and knowing DC liked it really is something.

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Big Spider and Big Plans

Second post and still going strong! For this post I bring you a huge spider! This was taken on a street sign near our home. As we took the bassets for their daily walk we noticed this huge spider, and by huge I mean on the "Utini Scale" about a Jawa action figure heigh (for the non Star Wars people out there, somewhat larger than a half dollar). I snapped the shot and we saw this friendly little fellow for about two weeks ever day on our walk. A little research told me that this is normally called Araneus cavaticus - Araneus or an Orb/Wheel Weaving Spider. Turns out this was the kind of spider that inspired Charlotte's Web, though this one never did much in the way of weaving any messages - oh well that's some spider!

As far as big plans go I have a few features I will be working on in the coming weeks that will spotlight some cool collectables from some of my favorite properties, but be patient "Flying through hyper-space is not like dusting crops boy!"

and so it begins...

Here it is, the Studiohowell blog! Maybe this will get me to finally finish the main website!

Hopefully this will be a spot for the "employees" of studiohowell to show off some talent, bassets, toys, and whatever we can come up with. Also we are hoping it will be a great way for friends and family to catch up with the goings on at "The House of Howell".

So sit back and enjoy the ride, who knows where it will take us.