Honestly, updating three blogs is crazy, so I've decided to just direct you to my main blog. Please visit and visit often!

http://dantat.typepad.com/

My snowflake "Chillax!" is available for bidding all this week for the Robert's Snow cure for cancer auction. When I thought about it I realized that I know far too many people who have been affected by this disease mothers, friends, and so forth and I concluded that if I saw cancer walking down the street I'd punch it in the face and say "You're a jerk cancer!" and then run off into the night.

In any case, I wanted to add an extra incentive. If you are the winner of my snowflake I will throw in a signed copy of "The Secret Life of Walter Kitty" So if you win drop me an email and we'll discuss further details.

Bid for my flake here

Virgin America, Newman, and more.....

http://dantat.typepad.com/dantat/2007/10/new-york--day-1.html

Since I only have so much time I'm just going to link this blog to my main blog. It's not any less fun just easier and more organized..

Today I rant about turning 32 years old today *sigh*.....

http://dantat.typepad.com/

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.

Read all about my 2007 Comic Con experiece here.....

http://dantat.typepad.com/dantat/2007/07/comic-con-2007.html

Read all about my 2007 Comic Con experiece here.....

Look at this coolness! NPR has this cool interview with children's book icon Eric Carle. The even better part is that they have this even cooler audio slideshow which has him talking about his work. Did you know his favorite color was Yellow?

Check it out here.

Next week is Comic Con and I'll be giving out promo sketchbooks on a meet and greet basis. I look forward to this annual nerd herding every year and I'm sure I'll be bringing back some silly pictures.

Here's some other stuff I've been doing. Sorry, I've been way too busy to keep this blog up to date

So my brand new laptop (less than a month old) decided to try and crap out on me last week as it wouldn't activate the Operating System and I was left with a grayish screen and a taunting Apple logo. On Friday, I took it to the "Genius Bar" at the local Apple Store and they said they had no idea what the problem was and that they would have to hold it for a week. (Not so smart NOW are you GENIUS BAR?!) In any case, I got my baby back yesterday and they reinstalled the Operating System (which I was unsuccesful to do on my own because of hardware issues) and now I'm back in business.

How dare my new toy decide to die on me in less than one month of ownershp!

In any case, here's a sketch of Casey Calendar that I'm doing for a book series I'm repackaging for Scholastic called, "The Calendar Club"



I was at the bookstore yesterday looking at works by Loren Long, Tony Diterlizzi, and Brett Helquist realizing that my work has been feeiling a bit rushed lately and that I've got to slow down and step it up a bit. I think that ever since leaving the video game industry I've been wanting to do everything all at once and my mind has been jumping from project to project. Now I think it's time to try and apply myself a bit more towards making pieces a little more 'finished' I'm quite capable of doing it but I think it's just a matter of focusing and slowing down.

I just took a gander at the trailer for the movie adaptation of "The Spiderwick Chronicles" by Tony Diterlizzi and Holly Black and I have to say it looks pretty great. Now I think I'm gonna have to go out and pick up the book series. It's stuff like this that inspires me to write more.

See the trailer here.

Here is some sample stuff I just completed for Simon and Schuster. They were drawin in pencil, scanned, and colored in Photoshop CS
Here's this...



and this...




Enjoy!

Just as a reminder folks that Tomorrow at 1PM I'll be at Storyopolis in Studio City with Barbara Jean Hicks to sign our new book "The Secret Life of Walter Kitty" There will be free coloring pages, snacks, and one lucky kid will walk away with a free Walter Kitty print. ALSO, I just made this new Walter Kitty mask that you can download and make so you can all be Walter! It's free! It's FUN!....IT'S FREE!!!!



Download it here...

WALTER KITTY MASK

and the Storyopolis event info link.....

STORYOPOLIS EVENT

In other news I'll be in Hawaii (Kawaii) starting Sunday for a long much anticipated vacation.

I haven't been on a vacation since my son was born which was 17 months ago. Yeesh.

Yesterday, while I was working, I happened to find myself watching "Akeelah and the Bee" I found it to be a total formulaic waste of time because it was so darn predictible. Inner City kid is trained by Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburn) to be the "chosen one" to win the next Spelling Bee. And what is up with this impression that people in the ghetto don't want their kids to excel in school?
"Blah Blah Blah, I didn't want you to compete at a national level becaue I didn't want to see you fail!"....

I knew I should've watched my back when I realized the movie was produced by STARBUCKS PRODUCTIONS!

Yes, that same Starbucks that makes your C-O-F-F-E-E every morning.

Well, I drew my verion of Akeelah just out of my head for this morning's warm up. She was a stunning little girl by the way (the next Angela Basset) I figure, drawing a picture about the spellig bee will let me get SOMETHING benficial out of this whole experience.....

Nowadays, I like to warm up every morning and just draw stuff out of my head to before I start the day. This was a piece that I was inspired by when I was at the bookstore looking at a book about silkscreening. I'm also experimenting with the aspect of limiting my color palette and eventually evolving that more into my editorial work, which I feel could use a good revamping.

Some of you have been wondering what I've been up to and so I thought I'd share a layout sketch for the current book that I'm working on for Atheneum. I don't normally do sketches this tightly but it's by the publisher's request. I'm quite satisfied so far with the black and white layout and I must say that once color is added it is probably going to be some of the strongest work I've done in a long long time. Now that I don't have that other full time job sitting on my back I get to focus more on details. The designer I'm working with has an excellent design sense and pushes my design sensibilities to a much more subtle and sophisticated level that I normally wouldn't do and I'm learning a lot from it.

This entire piece was completed on simpe 11 X 17 paper with a Col Erase Blue prismacolor pencil which was then scanned and the values were addded in Photoshop.

Oh god, I started another one. Oh well, here goes....

Hi, I'm a children's book writer/illustrator...I will be sharing my work and all sorts of stuff here. To get a full sense of what I'm ll about visit www.dantat.com

I had a Blogger blog (which got severely outdated and spammed) and I use my Typepad blog as my website (which is fun and spectacular) but I figured I'd give this one a shake to see how it cooks and hopefuly make some new friends, since all my friends from art school moved away to New York and stuff....*sniff*

Peace out.