THE DAILY MONSTER

MONSTERS INFILTRATE BELGIUM

Stefan Bucher — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:50:54 PDT

Good afternoon. The solstice-adjacent sun still mercifully high in the California sky at 7PM, and I thought I'd show you the latest Monster expansion. I just received a sheaf of photos from Belgian friend of the Monsters Luc Debaisieux at JWT Group Belgium (J Walter Thompson) in Brussels. Luc runs a program that turns the agency's historic building -- the 1908 Maison Delune on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt -- into a gallery for a young artist for one year at a time. This year it's the Monsters' turn.

You may recognize a lot of these Monsters from the Open Source Monsters series, and from the Send A Monster Facebook app, but the biggest of the pieces contains a new Monster I brought out especially for the Maison. I'll add that at the end. For now, my great thanks to Luc for his endless energy in making this happen, and to his JWT colleague art director Sebastien Verliefde, whom you may remember from his stellar additions to the Open Source Monsters. You can see some of them in the bottom row, center frame. And here.

More Monsters are on the way, but even now
I hope you'll get the idea that 344 LOVES YOU

THE TOPANGA MONSTER

Stefan Bucher — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:39:53 PDT

Good morning. How are you? I thought I'd put the important thing up front for once and launch right into a brand new Monster. Karen Linderman of the Topanga Film Festival invited me to make a new Monster advertising the event, and I sprung into action. Or rather, I came up with an idea, and then asked friend of the Monsters Simone Giuliani to spring into action, which he did by writing and excellent, suspenseful 45 second music cue that became my guide for the animation part.

I'm teaching myself animation as I go along on the Monsters -- you can see the very first one on Monster 10 -- and because of it most of the Monsters tend to move at a rather stately pace. They also tend to inhabit smallish spaces. There's no real reason for this beyond an odd mental barrier towards changing the size relationship of creature to sheet of paper. Well, no more of that! This time around I thought I'd try for a fast Monster in a big space. Just to see if I could.

Simone's excellent music really spurred me on to push the speed and the mood, so that the animation could keep up with the music. I hope you enjoyed the result. (If you have a reasonably fast computer, check it out full screen. It's quite nice that way. :^)

More Monsters are brewing.
Please stay tuned.

344 LOVES YOU

MONSTER SPORTING NEWS

Stefan Bucher — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:35:30 PDT

Good evening. So... uhm... did I mention that the Monsters are now supporting a team in the North Hollywood Kickball League? Well, it's true! They're called the Monster Cartel® and I don't have to understand the ins and outs of kickball to know that they're badass. Check it out:

If you're in the L.A. area and want to support them, here is the 411,
courtesy of team member and art instigator David Osorio:

All games are played at the
Valley Plaza Rec Center
12240 Archwood St., North Hollywood, 91606
on Tuesday nights.

Game 3 vs. NoHo Hoodlums -- 7:30pm (June 23rd)

Game 4 vs. Where My Pitches At? -- 8:30pm (June 30th)

Game 5 vs. Greg Priestley Avengers -- 7:30pm (July 7th)

Game 6 vs. I'd Hit That -- 8:30pm (July 14th)

Game 7 vs. Drunk Again and Looking to Score -- 7:30pm (July 21st)

Game 8 vs. Wet Hot American Kickball -- 7:30pm (July 28th)

Playoffs TBD --

Rock'em, sock'em, Monsters!
You know that 344 LOVES YOU

MONSTER MAIL CALL

Stefan Bucher — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:20:23 PDT

Good afternoon. How are you? After a few weeks of June Gloom the sun has finally found the 344 porch again, so I thought I'd take a little break from fiddling with the latest Monster to show you some cool surprises that have come in the mail recently.

First off, I received a package from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

"Oh," I thought. "Have my people finally tracked me down?" But no. As it turns out, a teacher at Perkiomen Valley High School, Mr. Thomas Komp, gave his Graphic Design I class an assignment to make Monsters, and they went hog-wild. What did they send me? Well, after they were done making Monsters they had them bound into a book. 47 drawings, collages, and computer-manipulated images -- one from each student -- are shown side by side with letters from each of the students... to me. So that took me a minute to absorb. Top all that off with a cool DVD that documents their labors set to music, and that's a good day of mail.

If you're on Facebook you can see the video here.

What a mind-blowing effort! Thank you very, very much to the students of Perkiomen Valley High Graphic Design I for the beautiful and amazing gift, and to Mr. Komp both for guiding the effort and for teaching a graphic design class in high school in the first place. I know of one other, Scott Schaller's Cabrillo High School Design Lab, and I'm so jealous! I wish we'd had that back at good old Gymnasium Ernestinum back when I was there.

Side note: It's Per-ki-omen. In my head I kept pronouncing it Peri-komen. Which is silly. Everybody knows that science has yet to find a way to recreate Perry Como as a chemical element.

All the Pennsylvania glory found me a week or two ago. It's taken me some time to A. recover from the shock, and B. take pictures of the book and DVD. Now today, a big box arrived from Sara Gallup right here in Los Angeles. Sara saw the Monsters in the L.A. Weekly, got the book for her birthday from her significant other, and started making Monsters in her 3D class at Los Angeles City College. Here's what she told me: "I made matte and gloss acrylic medium transfers using photocopies of the monster images within your book. I took these transfers and hand-sewed them to various fabrics (some with feathers for added effect), stuffing them with cotton. They began to resemble small stuffed animals, maybe toys. I then constructed a home for these creatures using an old palette. Finally came the sale sign, also done using acrylic transfer." How totally crafty! How totally excellent!

Of course, I was delighted when Sara offered to send me one of the stuffed Monsters, and shocked today, when the whole gang arrived at my door, complete with its mini corral. (I'm glad that she kept a few of her favorites, though.)
Check it out:

Now the excellent plush Monsters by Jennifer Bennett Gubicza
finally have some friends to keep them company.

But wait, there's more! She also sent me a high relief collage made from Gendy Alimurung's articles on the Monsters and on Amy Winfrey's Making Fiends in the L.A. Weekly. Highly, highly excellent, don't you think? No wonder she got an A on both assignments. Thank you so much, Sara! I'll give them all a good home.

To sum up: I get the best mail, because the Monsters have the best friends.
It's no wonder that 344 LOVES YOU

OHIO MONSTERS

Stefan Bucher — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:41:03 PDT

Good morning. How are you? I hope you had a lovely extended Memorial Day weekend. To ease your return to work for the short week I thought I'd show you the Monsters I made on the plane last week. When I make Monsters there are occasionally ink blots that don't reveal their Monster to me right away. I save those, and when I fly I sometimes take a few, so I can draw on the plane. (The TSA frowns on compressed air cans in your carry-on luggage, so fresh ink isn't on the menu.)

Last week I flew to Columbus, Ohio to give a talk for the good people of the CSCA. It was kind of a big night for me, because it marked the end of the 344 Regional Domination Tour that started at the Y Conference in San Diego back in April of 2005 and has taken me to Washington DC, Chicago, Austin, Boston, a vacation resort outside Brainerd, DeKalb, back to San Diego, Portland, Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Louisville, Tucson, Phoenix, San Diego again, a ranch in Texas, New York, Denver, Orcas Island, Minneapolis, Seward, Jacksonville, Boston again, Orlando, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, DC again, Oklahoma City, and now finally Columbus, Ohio. Add to that a handful of events here in Los Angeles. It's been an absolute privilege to meet so many brilliant people at these talks, and a lot of fun, too. But I've decided to take a little break from the presenting, so I can make some new things to show you by the time I go out on the road again. That said, I'll be speaking at the AIGA National Conference in Memphis in October. It'll be short, that one, but it'll be good.

In the meantime, Columbus was excellent, and I had a great time. Jeff Seslar took some great photos of the evening (including the one above) and we filmed the whole thing, too, so I'll put up a few clips sometime soon. If you're ever in Columbus and you can swing it, I highly recommend you stay at the German Village Guesthouse. I'm not in the habit of giving plugs to the hotels I stay at, but this is a designer-owned, designer-run operation and I just went nuts for their garden.

But I'm getting off topic. Sorry. Planes. Monsters. I made six of them on this trip. This first one came through on flight AA 642 from Dallas to Columbus:

The second one started on that same flight, but had to wait until flight AA162 from Columbus to Dallas two days later to get some texture on its feet and some bark on its branch:

Monster No.3 came out on that same flight and was directly inspired by a young passenger two rows behind me, and another one in front of me and to the left. He's now also available as a Monster Onesie on Zazzle.

Flight AA 1677 from Dallas to Burbank started with this slender creature looking over the horizon:

Shortly thereafter, this strange and startled sea-monster surfaced:

Lastly, just minutes before the cabin crew made me close up shop, this friendly little bird came to rest on my tray table:

So there you go: Four productive flight segments, don't you think? I was happy the Monsters kept me company, and I hope you like our new friends here, too. (If you like, you can send them to your friends on Facebook using the SEND A MONSTER app.) Also, I don't think I have to remind you that 344 LOVES YOU