Your Guide to the World of Furry Fandom
Audrey Miller is an illustrator who works in numerous 2D and 3D media, and she’s another artist whose work often involves animals — both real ones and toony ones. A graduate of the Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach, California, she has studied both animation and illustration and since put herself to work creating prints, sculptures, plushies, and children’s book illustrations. Take a look at her web site and marvel at her way with color.
image c. 2015 by Audrey Miller
John Will Balsley is a cartoon artist with a distinctly “loose” style of design. He shows off his drawing talents on his web site (www.jwbalsleycomix.com) where he’s created several rather-adult-leaning graphic stories with titles like The Devil’s Henchmen and Taboose the Meerkat. Many of these feature various critters who are collectively referred to as The Roofles. Makes more sense if you look at it… or, maybe not.
image c. 2015 by JW Balsley
More entries in the chibi parade. Michael Banks is an illustrator who specializes in full-color portraits of cute anthropomorphic animals with Really Big Eyes — in the old days, this stuff would likely have been painted on black velvet. You can probably guess what he had in mind when he named his company Sugar Fueled. He sells individual prints, but he’s also put together several collections of his artwork that are available at his official web site.
image c. 2015 by Michael Banks
TeeTurtle.com are an outfit (pun intended) that specialize in t-shirt designs featuring animals and familiar cartoon characters of a particularly “chibi” variety. “Teeturtle was founded in 2012 by designer RamyB to scratch your insatiable itch for cute, funny, popculture-y shirts. Since then, we have made it our goal to provide the best possible experience for you… Here at TeeTurtle, our shirts are our pride and joy. That’s why we use only the softest shirts on the market. We know that you will fall in love as soon as you slip into one of our ultra comfy tees. Plus, with killer designs from both our in house artists and some of the best guest designers on the internet, what more could you want?” They said it.
image c. 2015 TeeTurtle.com
The cartoonist known as Linda Panda has a thing for, yes, pandas. Pandas who… fart. Friendly farts that smile and make comments. Seriously. This is the odd world of Linda’s panda cartoons, and she’s been creating them daily and putting them up on the web for some time now. More recently, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, she’s collected hundreds of her daily works (as well as her more “traditional” sketches, perhaps) in book form. Head over to her official web site to find out how to get your own copy — as well as buttons and prints and other such ways you can see farting pandas.
image c. 2015 by Linda Panda
Richie Wu is an artist who spent six years working in the gaming industry, as well as teaching illustration on the side. He’s worked on feature films like Toy Story 3 from Disney/Pixar, and TV series like Ben 10 Alienforce from Cartoon Network. Now he’s aiming his artistic talents at a new outlet: A line of illustrated t-shirts based on his original canine comic creations. Dogs like Garlic the chihuahua, Booze the bulldog, and Mocha the German shepherd, among several others. Visit his web site, Bad to the Bone, to see the latest in his growing set of designs. Currently residing in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mr. Wu also has a permanent display selling his t-shirts at the Galleria at Sunset Mall in nearby Henderson.
image c. 2015 by Richie Wu
Life is a scary adventure on board Space Base 8. At least from the point of view of Cargo, the base’s resident Rocketship Crash Test Monkey. Cargo, along with a menagerie of aliens and robots, are the “stars” (that’s a joke) of Space Base 8, an on-line comic strip created and illustrated by David Scott Smith. Check out the Space Base 8 web site to see the latest comic and find out about picking up the first compilation book, Blast Off! It’s available as an e-book, in print, and as a special “artist’s edition” which includes a free personalized sketch.
image c. 2015 by David Scott Smith
We simply can’t describe Amity Blamity any better than the publishers do: “Meet Gretchen & Chester. Gretchen is a shy 4 year old and Chester is a potbellied pig. They live with Gretchen’s Grandma and listless Uncle Downey in rural America. Mistaking their afternoon activity of playing office for entrepreneurial gusto, Downey recruits the duo to assist in his deluded aspirations of running moonshine (echoing his boyhood heroes Bo & Luke Duke). Unbeknownst to the outlandish family and their activities, strange forest critters begin to lurk in the woods nearby, disrupting their quirky daily life and sending them on an adventure to save their degenerate Uncle from a strange genetic mutation!” Got that? Now Slave Labor Graphics have published Mike White’s black & white on-line comic strip story (so far) as a single soft-cover trade paperback. Check it out (including a YouTube trailer) at SLG’s web site, and see the comic itself (including more full-color “Sundays”) at the official Blogspot.
image c. 2015 by Mike White
Making quite a buzz at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was a series of animated shorts made for television and the web, of all things. Animals is a black & white, minimally-animated series which “follows various New York City creatures as they get into awkward (and sometimes deadly) encounters with one another.” The series was created by Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano, two employees at a commercial production house who took some time off to make little animals talk to each other. Check out the Animals web site to see what the fuss is about. (Here’s a hint: Click on the clouds!)
image c. 2015 by Phil Matarese / Mike Luciano
