My Office + Artifacts From My Youth

It's a busy week for me, so I don't have anything new to post. However, last week someone had asked if I could post some pictures of my setup, so I snapped a few while my desk was uncharacteristically clean. This is my humble, temporary office in my LA apartment. I hang out in here pretty much all day, every day, doing work and drawing pictures and dicking around:

(click to enlarge)



From left to right: A TV for video editing (with a spider skeleton above it, and prints drying below it), an extremely geek-chic USB drink chiller, a Mac Pro with two Apple cinema displays, a Final Cut Pro keyboard, the lovely Cintiq 12wx tablet, a Kaiju Eyezon figure, a vintage 1982 Vectrex game system (more on that in the near future - and yes that's A.W.E.S.O.M.-O sitting on top of it), a vintage Metropolis poster on the wall, a buttload of hard drives barely visible on the floor, a big-ass two-headed dragon thing, an incredibly rad Japanese clock, one of my many metal robots (this one I got at the wonderful Wound and Would Toy Company, which has a fantastic selection of vintage robots), a MacBook Pro, a framed lithograph on the wall from a series I designed for Nine Inch Nails (although you can't see it because of the glare), and, most important of all, the Bib Fortuna ceramic mug, currently in use as a pen holder. On the sides of the room you can't see here are a couch, a big filing cabinet full of cables and equipment, a giant sexy printer, a bathroom, and a walk-in closet that you can't walk in because it's filled with all kinds of crap.

I snapped these while I was playing around with an early version of the tree people drawing. Here's a close-up of my main work area, since someone had asked about how the Cintiq tablet fits in with my monitors and keyboard:

(click to enlarge)



Just so this post isn't all boring pictures of my office, I'll throw in a little gem I happened upon while cleaning out some old hard drives: When I was young, I never had a video camera. I begged and begged my mother, but she said they were too expensive. It wasn't until I was around thirteen that my Uncle got a HI-8 camera, and he let me borrow it a couple times. For some reason, the first thing I wanted to do with it was make Claymation movies. So, at age thirteen, here is one of my first experiments with a video camera:



I filmed that on HI-8 with the camera's fancy frame-by-frame recording option, then I recorded it onto VHS while dubbing in the audio live through a Radio Shack microphone hooked up to a cassette recorder running out to the VCR. It's pretty amazing how much easier things have gotten even since my childhood for kids who want to play around with video. I borrowed my Uncle's video camera again a couple weeks later and began work on an epic sequel, which involved a mad scientist kidnapping Mr. Clay's newborn baby and enlarging him into an angry giant monster who wrought unspeakable carnage upon a Micro Machine city. I never was able to finish it though, and sadly, I think the footage is now lost. Anyway, more fun samplings of my absurdly violent teenage artwork can be found here.