Time for a new chapter

As I walked along the Glendale river walk I counted birds. 40 + black necked stilts, 2  cinnamon teal, 6  blue winged teal, a flock wigeons, a great blue heron, a great egret and a lot of garbage. Tires, shopping carts, plastic bags stretched thin looking like bad Halloween decorations. I had and hour to kill before my next meeting so bird watching with the new binoculars my wife gifted me sounded like a good idea. 

The glittering shallow water of the man made river somehow supports life. I wish it could be a real river with silt and mud, not one with a concrete bottom. You could drive a truck though it. I know, because I saw one today plow through 3 to 6 inches of water.  The walk along the river took me to my first real job, DreamWorks Animation. It’s a beautiful campus full of fantastic people. I was there for about ten years. 

I rounded the corner and left the concrete bottomed river and started walking on Flower Street.  For what seems like miles there are Disney buildings on both sides of the street. So many buildings that Disney once tried to gate the whole street off.  I’m glad they didn’t.

Each building has the signature san serif font marking its address. There’s the Imagineering Building and the Marketing buildings. But I was looking for a particular building that after over ten years I had yet to visit; the ARL. It was once called the morgue. No dead bodies but full of the incredible artistic heritage of over 100 years of animation filmmaking.

I did bring a few pieces to the ARL to add to the heritage and for safe keeping. To help our incredible design team I made a rough sculpture of the giant ancestral whale shark.  The sculpture is oil based and without proper preservation it would lose its shape.

I didn’t want to impose and even though I’d just directed Moana 2, I elected to tag along a pre-scheduled tour. The people getting the tour had only been at  Disney for a few weeks.  They were all interns. Bright eyed and excited for a beginning chapter in their careers. I was there as part of an ending chapter in my career.  For the past 10 plus years Disney has been my creative home. A place full of mentors and  friends who helped me to eventually become a director.

Walking through the ARL I got to see original paintings, story sketches and hand drawn animation. The building houses so  much artistic legacy and history. I loved seeing the maquettes, sculptures of the characters, all the way from Fantasia’s dance of the hours to Moana. While these new recruits were greeting these characters and dreaming of adding to the great heritage of art I was saying goodbye.

After very careful consideration I had decided that I needed a bold new chapter in my career, one that would take me away from Disney. It hasn’t been an easy choice, working and directing at Disney was absolute dream fulfillment. After the impressive tour I said my goodbye to our guide and wished the interns luck in their careers. Then I strapped on my birdwatching binoculars, you know the ones my wife gave me, and started walking back down the street, to the river walk and to my car. As I walked away I felt content to have added my own stamp and even artwork to the great heritage of art at the ARL and was excited about my new undefined chapter ahead of me.

Why Bloody Tigers?

Why have I dedicated so much of my life to drawing a gory webcomic with tigers, wolves bears and Russian history? There are lots of stories, worlds and animals that inspire this story. Definitely my love for the spaghetti westerns by Sergio Leone and my admiration of Princess Mononoke (obviously). Novels like Animal Farm and Watership Down also influence and inspire my story. But the actual inspiration for drawing “bloody tigers,” as my family calls it,  started when I was very young. 

It was in first or second grade if I’m remembering correctly. Like many artists I have learning disabilities that I’ve worked very hard to overcome. In my youth my inability to do math or read well was a huge impediment. Fortunately I had incredible parents who worked hard with me to catch up academically and manage my inherent learning difficulties.   

THIs is the only kindergarten sketch my mother kept. There’s no gore but you can see me wearing a tiger shirt surrounded by animals at the zoo.

Every Friday we had vocabulary tests. My mother worked hard all week helping me learn the words. By the end of the week I had memorized all the words perfectly. I was ready for the test. The teacher would very slowly say the word and we were supposed to write it down with the correct spelling. She was so slow, I remember her saying one word several times. Who has time for that?  I certainly didn’t, so I wrote down all the words in my own order as fast as I could. This made it possible for me to draw the one thing I was obsessed with; Tigers. Not just tigers, bloody tigers. I made sure to draw them with fangs dripping with blood over dead prey. Every blank space on the margins of the test were illustrated the life and death stories of tigers and their prey.

I thought I was pretty smart. I spelled all the words correctly. Who cares if they were in the wrong order and that I covered all the blank spaces with blood, gore and death? Unfortunately my teacher did care and saw my test completely different. My parents were brought into the school. My teacher , having all the best intentions,  thought that my detailed drawings of gore and tigers with test answers all in the wrong order was an outward expression of turmoil and maybe even violence in my home. After what I imagine was an awkward conversation my parents were able to convince my teacher of the truth that I just really like drawing bloody tigers.

My first year film at CalARTS was inspired by learning difficulties and my long running desire to draw tigers.  I was persuaded by my animation teacher at the time to avoid drawing the tedious stripes and turn my tiger into a lion. The short gives an early creative window into my desire to create dramatic, even gory stories, with a tiger as the hero. Ghost of the Gulag has many influences, but the greatest one is truly the raw creative desire to draw “bloody tigers” that I’ve had since I was a little kid.

Camera Trapping: I’m not very good at it, but I love it.

Is it an obsession? My old art professor would always say: “ If you have to ask, you already know the answer.” So yeah camera trapping is a bit of an obsession for me. Within my yard and just up the hill behind my house I’ve placed several cameras to capture the comings and goings of local wildlife.

Typical shot. Great sighting of a BEAUTIFUL young male bobcat with bad lighting and out of focus.

I’ve been able to watch a family of four bobcats grow from kittens to adults. Coyotes have stolen my cameras and used them as chew toys. The only trick is, I’m really not very good at camera trapping, at least by the standards I hope to reach. Lemme explain. I want to get Nat Geo level shots, not fuzzy security camera footage.

I have a wonderful career telling visual stories through the medium of animation. For a lot of people it’s a dream job and don’t get me wrong I love it. But if I’m being honest I always wanted to be a wildlife artist and photographer.  So to that end every few weeks I scramble, stumble and crawl up our hill to set up my remote camera to live out that fantasy.

An example of the typical camera set up on the hillside.

I use Camtraptions, a cool company in the UK that provides all the gear necessary to convert an SLR camera into a high end trail camera. However, it takes a lot of parts: receivers, transmitters, sensor, housing, flashes, batteries, battery ups and solar chargers.  If there’s a failure at a certain transmitter, the entire set up won’t trigger. On top of that I have to dial in the settings with the flash to hopefully work in all weather and light conditions. I attach a security video camera so I can see how the camera trap performs.

I thought this was the perfect capture. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

This shot killed me! Too much flash, there’s dust and dirt on the lens cover.

Let’s just say I do the best I can. More often than not what I thought was going to be the perfect shot, is over exposed, or under exposed or a battery failed and the camera missed the shot entirely. 

What I love is, even with my imperfect and hopefully improving camera trapping, I’m able to see the hidden lives of wild animals. It’s not just coyotes and bobcats, short lived possums, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, wood rats, even the rare mule deer have wandered in front of my cameras. Ground dominate birds like California Thrashers, California Quail and even the occasional road runners have also made appearances. There have been sightings of bear and mountain lion nearby, but I’ve never caught either on camera. But maybe one day I will. It’s a little like playing the lottery. You might get a great shot, you probably won’t. But there is a chance. Most of my pictures and footage leave a little and sometimes a lot to be desired. While I know I’ll never be at the level of a Nat Geo photographer, the journey, the quest to get “the shot” is fun and rewarding.

Be like the Bees

Smoker

My wife, Tiffany, and I were standing side by side stuffing cut burlap into metal cylinders with attached bellows and a hinged lid in what looks like a tea kettle from the world of Mad Max. With a lighter we lit the burlap pieces and shoved them to the bottom and began pumping the attached bellows. As the fire grew we each smothered the fire with even more burlap and then quickly closed the nozzle lid and began pumping the bellows until a cool white smoke emitted from the funnel top.   Keith, our instructor, came by and graded our effort. Tiff passed right away, my smoke wasn’t cool enough so I stuffed more burlap in and pumped the bellows until the smoke was white and cool. This was the first part of our assessment to become certified beekeepers.

Next it was time to suit up!

Once again it took me a little longer to make sure I had done the zippers in the right order: zip up, zip left then right, making it impossible for a stinging insect to get into my suit. Approaching the hive from the back I smoked the stacked boxes that make up the hive. Tiffany used her hive tool and removed the migratory cover revealing thousands of bees on top and between ten vertical frames. With quick staccato squeezes of the bellows I smoked the bees. The smoke blocks the alarm pheromone to keep the bees calm. Then working from the outside we removed frames and inspected the cells for eggs, brood, pollen, nectar and honey. We both marveled, what was academic knowledge became tactile. We had read the eggs were like a grain of rice, in actuality they were way tinier than a grain of rice. Tiff used the tools and techniques better than I did, but I didn’t roll (kill) any bees as I worked the hive so I consider it a success.

“Be like the Bees.”

We started this journey over 7 weeks ago and I never knew how much I needed the bees. Holding a frame of bees you can only think about the task at hand, a gift in a world full of distractions. Bees work together to become more than any one of them. In a bee’s busy lifetime a single bee will only produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.  To make one pound of honey bees have to visit 2 million flowers! Yet together the hive can make pounds and pounds of honey. It’s all about community with bees. Our instructor Keith has a bluntness and humour as a teacher. But he also has a deep love and admiration for the bees which is infectious. “ Be like the bees.” he simply said with moisture in his eyes. “live for others not for yourself. We are meant to be a community, we are not meant to be divided.”

Our Buddy

Our Buddy

I picked my seven year old from school. He was very excited to see me.

 “ I think I saw your buddy today dad, but I’m not certain.”

He wasn’t talking about anyone who attended or worked at school he was talking about one of our favorite birds, the American Kestrel.

I’m a birdwatcher. Always have been since I was a kid. Near a church I attended as a young boy there was tall dead tree with a Kestrel nest inside. I would take a camera and a sketch book to document the tiny bird of prey as if I were a National Geographic Explorer. They’re not much bigger than a mourning dove yet they are raptors through and through. Their markings are bold with contrasting black and white markings along with complimentary colors of rusty orange a blue gray. They are bold, small, fierce and adorable all at once. 

There’s a nostalgia and a comfort to finding Kestrels for me. When we drive by open fields and spaces we look for them on trees or power lines. We find them almost everywhere we go. They remind me of home in a way, of the boy I was and the love I still have for them. 

Driving back from school my son and I pulled over to a field.  We both started looking. Well I was looking for a kestrel and my son was looking for quartz amongst the rocks and gravel.  There are three trees in the field, but the kestrel wasn’t there. Then I saw a little bump high, high up on a power line.  Binoculars confirmed it. “ I found our buddy.” 

My son came over, his pockets now bulging with rocks and maybe quartz. “ Yup,” he confirmed that’s our Buddy.”

I’m back and so is the comic!

Thank you for patiently waiting for Ghost of the Gulag to return. I never wanted to stop creating pages but ultimately my role as a director at Disney Animation on Moana 2 demanded too much time and effort. I hope you all saw and enjoyed the film it was almost 4 years of work. But in the dark recesses of my brain I kept mulling over the story of Gulag and how I would finish Volume 3. This violent and dramatic story has always been an odd form of therapy. I see myself as both the wolf and the tiger. It’s a project I’ve made for myself and not for any studio. Every ink line, dialogue line and brush stroke are done solely by me.

To reset my brain and return creatively to the Taiga I went to one of my favorite places in the world to watch wild wolves: Yellowstone National Park.

This will be the final Volume and I have it mapped out and mostly written. It will be action packed, gory, emotional and hopefully cathartic. I will try and deliver one to two pages a week dropping on Mondays.

This is a passion project but you can support the work by spreading the word or purchasing the print versions of Vol.1 and Vol.2 on my Etsy store. https://davidderrickjr.etsy.com

Tiger Verses Wolf

There has been a lot of discussion about my most recent page on Ghost of the Gulag .

The big Question is: Would a tiger hunt and kill a wolf?

I do a lot of research and try to ground my fantasy with reality.  At the core this comic is about the conflicts that animals have with one another woven into historical human conflicts.  One of the books that first inspired my comic is The Tiger a true story of Vengeance and Survial by John Vaillant.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the book supporting tiger/wolf predation:

“ For all these reasons, there is no creature in the taiga that is off limits to the tiger; it alone can mete out death at will. Amur tigers have been known to eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears. There are few wolves in Primorye, not because the environment doesn’t suit them, but because the tigers eat them, too. The Amur tiger it could be said, takes a stalinist approach to competition.”

“Dogs seem to trigger the tiger’s wolf-killing instincts, and they also seem to relish the taste. Many is the Far Eastern hunter, farmer, or dacha owner who has risen in the morning to find nothing but a broken chain where his dog had been. When one former dog owner asked what these attacks sound like, he answered acidly, “ It’s more of a silence.”

Here is a short but fascinating article about the complicated relationship between wolf and tiger by Jonathan Slaght Ph.D. (Is the Russia and Northeast Asia Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society.)

Unfriendly Neighbors

https://blog.wcs.org/photo/2015/11/04/unfriendly-neighbors-amur-tigers-wolves-russia/

Going beyond the book I’ve read several scientific studies of tiger predation. And it’s true that they hunt bear, even enormous brown bears!  This following excerpt directly inspired the comic where the mother is hunting asiatic brown browns that are nestled in their den.  

“In 2 cases tigers attempted to prey on denned bears, once successfully and once unsuccessfully. A radiocollared adult male tiger killed and ate a radiocollared adult male Asiatic black bear on 5 December 1998. The bear's movements had been localized for 14 days, suggesting it had denned, but we were unable to locate a den site because light snow had covered most of the tiger and bear tracks. Blood and claw marks indicated that the tiger climbed and extracted the bear from 2 different trees, one of which was a cottonwood large enough to contain a bear den.”

You can read the full scientific paper here https://www.bearbiology.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Seryodkin_14_2.pdf

This article blew my mind! Amur tigers were hunting hibernating bears!!!! I worked out an entire version where the mother actually hunted and killed the bear. Ultimately I backed off the idea. When you start drawing Asiatic black bears you realize they’re probably the cutest animals in all the Taiga. I want the Shadow the Walker’s mother to be inspirational and killing the bear went too far for me so I re-wrote and re-drew the whole section.

Deleted Scene

For a while I was planning on having the tigress kill the bear

Dog Experiment

For a little while I experimented with the tigress hunting a dog.

I then started experimenting with the tiger’s mother eating a hunter’s dog- I even drew it out too. Ultimately I came to the same conclusion as I did with Asiatic Black Bear. Which brought the wolves back into the story, they are inherently in conflict with one another and it would be powerful to give the tiger real motivation for hating wolves.

The relationship that tigers have with wolves in my comic is directly inspired by the way wolves and tigers interact in the wild. Yes I do take wild liberties, they speak, the tiger is blind but at the core I hope the research I do helps ground these animal characters in a more believable and entertaining way.

Coloring pages and Animal Masks!

Corvid-19 has thrown all of our lives out of balance. As a father with kids this stay at home quarantine is exhausting. Back when I wasn’t drawing “bloody tigers” I was drawing cute tigers in picture books. Here is a free template to make your own tiger cub mask or crocodile mask along with a coloring page. Hopefully your kids can have fun with this and you gave get a much needed break. Thanks for following my comic- hang in there we got this!

Short Summer Break

Thanks for following Ghost of the Gulag. There’s a lot more story to come- out of necessity I am taking a short summer break. New pages will resume at the end of July.

Thanks,

David G. Derrick Jr.

I hope you’re enjoying Volume 2 of Ghost of the Gulag. Volume 1 is currently being printed and is available for pre-order through my backerkit website. Volume 1 has improvements in text, color and layout from the online version. Thanks for following the comic and spreading the word!

Pre Order Ghost of the Gulag Volume 1

Here’s an image ready for painting from Volume 2.

The Kickstarter is Live!

We are live on Kickstarter! 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ghostofthegulag/ghost-of-the-gulag-volume-1

If you like Ghost of the Gulag share it with your friends. Here are a bunch of images and links you can use to share with people.

Season 1 Break

Season 1 Break

Thank you for reading The Ghost of the Gulag.  I just completed the six chapter and am taking a short break to prep and run a Kickstarter campaign to print the first volume of Ghost of the Gulag which will be over 230 pages.  Don’t worry there is a lot more story to come, some stuff I’m really excited to share.

I’ll be posting some of my research and development process in the meantime. Color is really important and something I struggle with. In addition to studying paintings and reference photos I took a tiger toy all through the snowy mountains of Utah and Idaho for reference. click on the photos to see the slide show. More updates soon. 

Ink Bleeding

I love drawing and painting with ink. Recently I've been experimenting with ink washes. First I draw the image with water, which is harder than it seems because you have to be super fast and the lighting has to be right so you can see what you're doing. Then I use a dropper to add ink. He'res an experiment I did yesterday of the Ghost of the Gulag.

Ghost of the Gulag is an ongoing web comic by David Derrick Jr. Updates every Monday and Thursday. www.ghostofthegulag.com

How to Draw a Tiger

The tiger is finally in the comic. As you may have guessed he is the titular character in this comic. Here's a little "how to" video on drawing tigers. The story takes place in the Russian Far East so the Tiger is an Amur or Siberian subspecies- the largest big cat in the world.

Happy Earth Day

Thanks for following my blog and comic. Happy Earth Day. Today is a day that should be celebrated every day. We must protect wild places and wild animals.  Here's a quick timelapse sketch I did of a wolf.

How big is a Siberian Boar?

How big are the boar? Yes I definitely take artistic license here. But they do get large and dangerous. The Ussuri Wild Boar which inhabit the Tagia and Russian Far east can weigh up to 1,179 pounds and stand up to five feet at the shoulder. In my designs of the boar I have incorporated elements of several wild pigs including warthogs, red river hogs and bush pigs.  Later in the story there is even a design inspired by the babirusa. Here are some of my initial design sketches with some final designs.  This Thursday I'll add more pages which will finish the Prologue.

New Pages Monday's and Thursdays

I just  uploaded three new pages to the Prologue. Thanks for following my web comic. As I'm developing a rhythm for my work and posts, I decided that I'll post new comics twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays. Below are some of the rough designs I made for this episode. Unfortunately only one wolf made it out alive.

When is a Moose not a Moose?

When is a moose not a moose? When it's an elk.  In Europe a Moose is called an Elk. When settlers came to America they saw an Wapiti they called it an elk and we now know them as American Elk.  So the Moose was given it’s Native American name which means “eater of twigs.” Where’s the tiger? Just wait. I want to set the table, familiarize everyone with the world (the Taiga) and it’s major players. The taiga is such an interesting Biome, full of familiar and unfamiliar animals.

Here we go! Welcome to the comic

Welcome to the Taiga. This comic has been a long time coming. It started as an idea between me and Joel Crawford when we were both working on Rise of the Guardians at DreamWorks Animation. I have long since left DreamWorks but Joel has been a consistent sound board and consultant on the project. Now many years later I have toiled over two full scripts and a few rough passes of the entire comic and now I feel like I’m ready to start sharing the story as I finish it.  There are many influences on this story: Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollar and the Good the Bad and the Ugly, Alejandro Inarritu’s the Revenant and Quentin Tarantino’s Django,  George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Richard Adam’s Watership Down. So if you have an aversion to some of these story tellers this comic may not be for you.

This was one of the first images I drew for the comic.

The original opening I drew a few years ago is very similar. I decided to expand the moment to show the pack hunting and establish a few of the characters.