Joshua Menas

The children's book I was working on is now on the iBookstore!

Some character/Illustrator practice... From left to right: Tugs Milliron, Clog Johnson, Buff Rottweiler

On Thursday, my wife asked me if I wanted to meet her at the theater after work to see ParaNorman. I was like, "Hell ya!" ParaNorman is pretty special... well written and beautifully animated. I love the organic nature of stop-motion animation and Laika isn't afraid to push the handcrafted feel in their films. Character designs aren't perfectly symmetrical. Backgrounds and objects are slightly skewed. I think my favorite scenes in this film to look at were the least fantastical. The lighting, colors, and textures make these scenes feel like ordinary life, but there is so much fun distorted craftsmanship to keep your eyes entertained. The incredible amount of energy, care, and artistry that went into this film is apparent. Keep up the good work, Laika!

I did these illustrations and this animatic for a Tongal pitch I submitted a while back. It wasn't selected for the final round, but I might finish the animation some day...

I illustrated a few backgrounds recently for a scenario driven e-Learning course. This is my favorite of the bunch...

I'm a fan of Genndy Tartakovsky and I recently read a good article on the LA Times website about his directorial approach to Hotel Transylvania. I'm looking forward to seeing the movie now and I illustrated this poster featuring Mavis to tide me over until it's out in theaters...

Here are some sketches I did in Bamboo Paper on the iPad... probably my favorite app for quick sketches.

I finished illustrating Chris this past weekend. It turned out pretty good. I'm mostly just excited that I finished it. Next step will be to get it on the iBookstore. I completed the online application to partner with iTunes as a content distributor a few days ago and haven't heard back from them yet... not sure how long this process takes. Waiting...

The cover of the book will look like this!

Seems like you can do some pretty detailed work in Adobe Ideas, but I've been using it mostly to rough out compositions and color ideas like the images below. I still feel more comfortable fine tuning my ideas with a pencil and paper.

Here are some rough sketches for the first few illustrations in the book I'm working on. The colored sketch was done in Adobe Ideas on the iPad! WOOO!

I just started illustrating a children's book this week. It's a story my grandmother wrote a long time ago about a boy and a snowflake. I'm hoping to sell the book on the iBooks store when it's finished. Helping me out with the layout and publishing duties is an iPad app called, Book Creator . It's great for creating fixed layout picture books. You can open previews of your book directly in iBooks as you go. The app publishes out to a standard ePub file which should also work on devices other than the iPad.

A vector illustration/design I did for a Threadless entry.  

My first post on my new blog.