Monty Mosquito

These rough puppet sketches are for Sock Hop bartender Monty Mosquito. He’s a creepy Peter Lorre type with a limp and an eye patch. As in many noir films, it will be unclear what side of the law he’s on.

I imagine he’ll be a thin, lanky rod puppet.

Less Creepy

For these mongoose puppet designs, I gave the characters black beady eyes. I had wanted use more realistic oval-shaped pupils, but they made the mongooses look creepy.

Howie Poster

I did this Photoshop illustration for a poster for The Howie Monologues. The show opens April 13 at the Lonny Chapman Theater in North Hollywood. For more information, click here.

Happy Easter!

Bugsy Brown Poster

Here is a rough poster mock-up for our new puppet show, Bugsy Brown, Private Fly. I found a great book at the library about film noir movie posters, which I used as inspiration for this design.

Final Bugsy Design

This is the final puppet design for Bugsy Brown. He turned out pretty close to my original idea of the character. I wanted him to be simple -- basically a head with eyes and no nose or pupils. In this final version I gave him a rounder, bulkier body to maintain a stronger fly look.

In this illustration you can see the drawing progress from initial sketch to final color treatment.

Bugsy Trio

Here are some color variations for Bugsy Brown. We may abandon the completely black-and-white look for the puppets in favor of muted colors.