Cartoons

Life as a Chalk Artist

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Life as a Chalk Artist Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/01/2019 - 00:00

Sarah Kuta

People love to stand, sit, stomp and jump all over Chris Carlson’s work.

He encourages it.

Watch a time-lapse video of Chris drawing Ralphie for the Coloradan cover.

A full-time professional artist based in Denver, Carlson (Bus’08) travels the world painting and drawing directly on sidewalks, plazas and pavement. His artworks are pelted by rain and hail, walked all over and, eventually, washed or rubbed away.

You won’t find them in climatecontrolled museums and galleries (“Don’t touch the art!”) — but they’ll stop you in your tracks as long as they last.

Carlson specializes in 3D, or anamorphic, chalk art, a genre that makes you feel as if you’re falling into a pit or staring face-to-face with, say, a larger-than-life cartoon character. Now six years into his career, he’s emerged as a premier practitioner of the form, creating original pieces at art festivals and conventions as far away as the Netherlands and Paris and working with the likes of Nintendo, Nickelodeon, Hershey and Disney.

It’s a line of work that traces its roots to the 16th century, when itinerant artists called “Madonnari” traveled Italy painting on the ground, primarily religious figures.

Today, the subject matter is broader. Carlson draws heavily on pop culture, including video games and cartoons, to great effect.

“Chris is an artist who really understands how to bring joy to people,” said fellow chalk artist Nate Baranowski, who calls Carlson’s work “whimsical and playful.”

Chalk art combines elements of fine art and performance art: Spectators watch the creative process unfold and chat with the artists as they work. Anamorphic chalk art is specifically designed for people to jump into the scene and pose for photos.

It’s not how Carlson, now 33, expected to make a living. For most of his childhood in Lakewood, Colo., he wanted to be a stockbroker; he bought his first stock shares in fifth grade. That’s what led him to ��ƷSM��ӰƬ’s Leeds School of Business.

Supply list for a professional chalk artist:

Tempura paint, to make a base layer on the pavement that can be washed away later, or acrylic paint, for permanent installations.
Soft pastel chalks.
Photoshop.
A tablet and pen for digital drawing.
Sunscreen — lots of it.
Knee pads, elbow pads, padded gloves and a gardening pad (to sit or lean on).
Water, for drinking during blazing hot days.
Inspiration, wherever you can find it.

But as he got deeper into his finance courses, Carlson realized he didn’t have the stomach for playing with other people’s money. After graduation, he and his sister opened a hookah bar in Lakewood.

That’s when, out of necessity, he discovered his artistic spirit and aptitude: They couldn’t afford decorations.

During long, late nights checking IDs, Carlson worked through instructional drawing books and tried to sketch photos he saw in Time magazine. Eventually, he painted a backroom floor black and began experimenting with 3D art.

Carlson can thank his CU marketing professors for what happened next: He made a time-lapse video of himself drawing the video-game character Mario. It went viral on YouTube, and before long, he was getting chalk art gigs from companies, festivals, trade shows and conventions.

Carlson had never considered that chalk art might become his career. He didn’t imagine there was a market for the work, and he doubted his abilities as an artist. He still gets nervous before he starts drawing in public.

It’s a long performance: Each project takes between 18 and 55 hours, depending on size and complexity. On average, he completes about 20 large drawings per year. Some of his favorite projects depict a mash-up of a dog (inspired by his English bulldog, Banksy, who’s named after the world-famous street artist) and a purple dinosaur. Another combines Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” with a Darth Vader mask.

“His style is very fine-tuned,” said Naomi Haverland, a professional chalk artist in Seattle who met Carlson at the Denver Chalk Art Festival. “He’s a perfectionist. He makes sure the blending is perfect and the colors are just right. He doesn’t rush anything. But, then, his concepts are super creative, too. He’s got a well-rounded artist’s arsenal.”

A Marie Kondo-esque attitude has also served Carlson well, in work and in life. He describes it this way: “Just be open to what really brings you pleasure and joy or contentment and satisfaction."

In the Fall 2019 print edition, this story appears under the title "The Everywhere Canvas." Comment? Email editor@colorado.edu.

Photos courtesy Chris Carlson

Chris Carlson's art will rise up and grab you. Chalk it up to an open mind.

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Cartoonist in the Cabinet

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 17:15:00 +0000

Cartoonist in the Cabinet Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/01/2015 - 11:15

Marty Coffin Evans

Stoiber in Paris at a memorial for slain cartoonists.

Carlton Stoiber is a nuclear law expert with a funny bone.

Safely buckled into his seat on Air Force Two as it hurtled toward Moscow, Carlton Stoiber (Phil’64, Law’69) pondered the agenda of the imminent Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission meeting. When his seatmate, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, mentioned he would be talking with the Russians about the International Space Station, Stoiber did what came naturally: He sketched a cartoon.

It depicted the station as a bundle of minarets crowned by the trademark onion domes of Moscow’s St. Basil’s Cathedral — a cheeky nod to the Russians’ push for greater control over the station.

“I don’t remember showing it to the Russians,” jokes Stoiber, a nuclear law expert with the U.S. State Department at the time of the 1995 Moscow trip.

Stoiber did show the cartoon to Goldin, who hung it in his office, he heard.

During Stoiber’s five decades as a high-level government lawyer, his cartoons have found their way into the hands of many of the nation’s political elite, offering moments of levity amid long days and relentless responsibility.

He recalls a surprise phone call in the 1980s from President Ronald Reagan during a super-secret meeting at the National Security Agency.

“He told me that the secretary of state had given him a cartoon about the president phoning someone unexpectedly, and he just had to call me about it,” says Stoiber, the lead author of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s two-volume Handbook on Nuclear Law. “When I asked how he found out where I was when my secretary, Ruby, didn’t know, he replied, ‘Well, Mr. Stoiber, when presidents need to find somebody, they have ways of finding them!’”

Another time, Stoiber sketched a series of cartoons for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s 60th birthday party.

“And I have lots of pictures that never get circulated to these folks,” he says.A visual person from childhood, Stoiber began cartooning in the 1950s at Casey Junior High School in Boulder, where he penned a strip called “Twitterbird.” He gave it up through college, saving his energy for CU’s student government (he became president), then resumed in law school following a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.

“Law school was too much of a cartoonist’s dream,” he says. “Lawyers do a lot of funny things.”

Stoiber has been drawing ever since — nearly 50 years now — producing thousands of cartoons and publishing hundreds. They’ve appeared on the cover of Jane’s Defence Weekly (a British publication), in the Washington Post and in the State Department’s magazine. For more than a decade, he has drawn cartoons for a caption contest in the Biblical Archeology Review.

“A picture leaps out at me to put down and express what I’m thinking,” says Stoiber, who lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife of 49 years, Susanne (PolSci’66).

(They met his senior year at CU: “First date was March 11, 1964,” he says, “at the Goldovsky Opera producton of Rossini’s Marriage of Figaro in Macky Auditorium.”)

After law school, Stoiber joined the U.S. Department of Justice, working in the Civil Rights Division, then as director of the Office of Indian Rights.

He developed expertise in nuclear law in the mid-1970s after a friend lured him to the newly formed U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“That was almost an accident,” Stoiber says.

He’d left the Justice Department a few years earlier to study international law in London and The Hague. When he came back, he needed a job. The timing was perfect: In the 1970s, nuclear safety and nonproliferation were hot topics worldwide.

Sitting in meetings in Washington, Moscow, Vienna and other world capitals, Stoiber found abundant source material in front of him.

“I’ve been really surprised at the degree to which most everyone seems to think that [cartooning] is appropriate and moves things along,” he says of others involved in the weighty affairs of state. “Sometimes if you get into a tricky negotiating situation, a little humor will really relax people and allow them to move away from rigid positions.”

Like many cartoonists, Stoiber has found that portraying animal characters in human situations helps readers laugh at themselves: “Dogs and other animals can say something, get away with a statement which wouldn’t be acceptable from a human.”

Nature is another favored subject. Stoiber has climbed all of Colorado’s 14ers, as well as Mt. Fuji, Mount Olympus, Mount Sinai and Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere — always with pen and paper.

Now 73, Stoiber continues to work part time as a consultant on international and nuclear law and lectures annually at the International School of Nuclear Law at the University of Montpellier in France, which he helped found.

“I still feel it’s worthwhile to spend my time on these nuclear issues since I have the expertise and experience,” he says. “I’m committed to keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and saboteurs.”

And, of course, Stoiber continues to draw, typically with a Sharpie fine point permanent marker for lines and a gray Prismacolor marker for shading.

“I can’t imagine not cartooning,” he says. “Unless some sort of paralysis hits either my mind or my right hand, I don’t intend to lose my identity as a cartooning lawyer who climbs big mountains.”

Illustrations and photo courtesy Carlton Stoiber

Carlton Stoiber is a nuclear law expert with a funny bone.

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South Park’s Unsung Genius

Anonymous — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 06:00:00 +0000

South Park’s Unsung Genius Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 09/01/2013 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

Eric Stough has been the animation director for the hit series South Park since the beginning.

When animation director and co-producer of South Park Eric Stough (Film’95) started work on the quirky adult sitcom show 16 years ago, he cut out the famous cartoon characters from construction paper.

Today, he and his team use digital software to produce a similar effect, lending, in the process, a certain creative genius that has helped the animated sitcom become one of Comedy Central’s highest-rated shows.

“I feel extremely blessed to be doing what I love,” says Stough who has watched the show’s production team grow from just a few people to a team of 80 during his tenure.

The creators of the show, Trey Parker (A&S ex’93) and Matt Stone (Art, Math’93), spotted Stough’s talent for animation while they were attending CU-Boulder, and Parker convinced Stough to join them in the film department to broaden his animation abilities.

“Eric’s long-standing relationship with Matt and Trey is beyond valuable on a day-to-day basis,” says Frank Agnone, South Park’s supervising producer. “He is as much a part of South Park as Matt and Trey are.”

Stone and Parker first developed the South Park concept and characters at CU in 1992 in a short animation called the Spirit of Christmas. It was, in true South Park nature, as humorous as it was crude but was well-received in its student screening. Stough — who had worked on various animation and claymation movies at CU — helped the duo create a second rendition.

“I believed in Matt and Trey’s comedy,” he says.

The second film was a hit on the Internet, becoming one of the first viral videos. Comedy Central awarded Parker and Stone their shot at a show in 1997, and Stough was the first person they hired. During the past 16 years the show has run 237 episodes and won four Emmy Awards and a prestigious Peabody Award.

In the third season Parker wrote one character into the show loosely mirroring Stough. The character “Butters” borrowed its name from the nickname given to Stough by Parker and Stone.

“It’s very unusual and very surreal,” he says on having his own cartoon character. “I’m honored.”

For each episode, Stough takes the script Parker writes and brainstorms animation ideas to bring it to life. He conveys his and Parker’s ideas to the animation crew through storyboards and carefully watches retakes to perfect the details in each scene. He then views retakes with Parker four times a day to make further adjustments.

South Park will air 10 episodes per year for the next four years, meaning the show’s production staff only meets a few months a year to complete their work. Each episode is created in six long days to ensure the freshest jokes. Often the day before an episode airs, the crew works a grueling 24 hours to complete it. When the Wednesday evening show airs, Stough and his wife watch it together.

“I can tell if it’s a good episode if it gets two or three laughs from her,” he says.

While he has considered creating his own show someday, for now Stough fully embraces the South Park experience.

“It’s so great to see something come to life from paper,” Stough says. “It’s a thrill.”

Photo by Patrick Campbell

When animation director and co-producer of South Park Eric Stough started work on the quirky adult sitcom show 16 years ago, he cut out the famous cartoon characters from construction paper.

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The Man Who Shaped Pinocchio

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 06:00:00 +0000

The Man Who Shaped Pinocchio Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/01/2010 - 00:00

David McKay Wilson

Willis Pyle (A&S’37) reflects on his decades working for Walt Disney creating some of America’s beloved childhood characters.

While walking to art class at Boulder in 1937, Willis Pyle (A&S’37) saw a poster from the Walt Disney studio seeking animators for his fledgling operation in Hollywood. Pyle, a senior who was art editor of the university’s satirical Colorado Dodo, and an advertising illustrator for Gano-Downs clothing store in Denver, decided to mail his best work to Southern California.

“A few weeks later, Walt offered me the job,” Pyle recalls. “So I headed to Hollywood, found a room within walking distance of the studio and got to work.”

The Disney job, which included drawing animation for such classics as Pinocchio, Bambi and Fantasia, launched a storied career in the creative arts that continues to this day with Pyle, 96, showing oil paintings last winter in Manhattan.

His recent show came 84 years after his first drawings were showcased in Cora’s Restaurant in Bethune, Colo.

Although Pyle has slowed a step — he stopped driving last year and gets around with the aid of a walker — he continues to draw and paint. He’s still experimenting, too. At his exhibit opening at Manhattan’s Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, Pyle created several drawings with black tape forming the outlines of horses or female nudes. Other works included post-Impressionist paintings of horses in motion — either on the racetrack or in the wild galloping across the Plains.

Early sketches by Willis Pyle (A&S’37) for the first Mr. Magoo film, Ragtime Bear (1949), aka Strike Up the Banjo

“Willis has an amazing sense of shape and form,” says Montse Coll, who owns the Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery that has exhibited Pyle’s paintings for 20 years. “He’s always exploring, always moving forward to something new.”

He also caught the eye of New York art critic Maurice Taplinger who, in the magazine Gallery & Studio, likened him to French masters Toulouse Lautrec and Honoré Daumier in the way he chronicles “the human spectacle with timeless verve and wit.”

Pyle maintains his delight for New York culture, classic cars and the cool spring breezes in the Hamptons on Long Island’s south shore. He’s a member of the Dutch Treat Club, an invitation-only social group that meets weekly at the National Art Club in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park to discuss the latest sensation on Broadway and enjoy performances by emerging artists.

He keeps a brown 1972 Mercedes sedan in the Hamptons where he stays in the spring and fall. When at his home in Seal Beach in Southern California, he tools around on special occasions in a 1969 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow.

“I love the shape of it, and it still looks like new,” says Pyle, whose brother, Denver Pyle (A&S’42), played Uncle Jesse in The Dukes of Hazzard,which originally aired on the CBS television network from 1979 to 1985. His sister, Farrel “Skippy” Lorayne Pyle (Edu’35), also studied in Boulder. “I’ll go on trips with the Rolls Royce Club, as 50 or 60 of us will go for breakfast at Tiffany’s or a picnic at Santa Anita Park. They’ll let us park in the middle of the track, and we watch the horses race around us.”

While at the Disney studio, Pyle was best known for drawing Pinocchio, the wooden puppet brought to life by a fairy. Over and over again he’d draw the character — with movement, a different facial expression or in relation to other characters. It took 12 drawings to make Pinocchio walk. Pyle would do the pencil drawing, then send it to the women in the inking and painting department to be enhanced.

“The character had to act — raise its eyebrows, turn and jump and react to other characters,” Pyle says. “And the way you could do it was by looking at yourself in a mirror to see what that expression looked like.”

Pinocchio sketch by Willis Pyle (A&S’37)

When World War II erupted, Pyle joined the U.S. Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, Calif. There, movie mogul Jack Warner oversaw industry actors and animators who cranked out films and animated shorts to support the war effort.

After the war Pyle found a toehold in the world of fashion illustration drawing the latest haute couture for Vogue. In 1949 he created the squat, nearsighted character, Mr. Magoo, for United Productions of America. When a children’s writer named Ted Geisel — known as Dr. Seuss — needed an animator for a film about his story, Gerald McBoing Boing, he turned to Pyle. The eight-minute cartoon won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Animated Short.

In the same year Pyle and his wife, Virginia Morrison Pyle, headed east after reading E.B. White’s essay, “This is New York,” in the New Yorker. He has lived in New York for six decades.

“We couldn’t wait to get there,” he says. “So we sold our house, canceled my contract, put the top down on my Studebaker Commander and took two weeks driving cross-country.”

New York agreed with the Pyles. After a few years in Greenwich Village they settled on 77th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He rented a studio at the Abbey Victoria Hotel near Rockefeller Center where he drew for Disney and branched out into television advertisements for IBM, Ford and American Airlines.

After the hotel was torn down in 1982, he found a studio in Greenwich Village and seriously delved into painting at age 68.

Portrait of Henri Matisse by Willis Pyle (A&S’37)

“I had been a Sunday painter, but after renting the studio I began painting every day,” he says. “I was done working for producers. I wanted to be able to get up from my desk to walk to the Museum of Modern Art in the middle of the afternoon without somebody looking at me.”

Since then he has painted with oil-based paints and watercolors as well as drawn in ink. On a trip to Majorca, Spain, in 1996, he discovered he could create interesting lines by using chopsticks dipped in ink — a variation on the process used by the 17th century Dutch master, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn.

It was a new way of portraying the world as seen through the eyes of a man always yearning to provide a glimpse of the world from a new vantage point.

“Rembrandt picked up weeds and used the stems to draw with,” Pyle says. “I used chopsticks. You get a different texture to your line, and it has more character to it.”

This spring, Pyle was back at the easel, still yearning to communicate his artistic vision to the world.

“I’m upright and I don’t have a single pain,” he says. “I’m still painting and drawing. I’m living a pretty good life.”

Photos and illustrations courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

While walking to art class at Boulder in 1937, Willis Pyle saw a poster from the Walt Disney studio seeking animators for his fledgling operation in Hollywood. Pyle decided to mail his best work to Southern California.

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