♪ ♪ Artworks is made possible in part by... And by... MOOSA: My goal of animation or drawing is like it's guided by drawing and painting basically.

Learning how to draw, I heard this quote once that says, "Art is a byproduct of learning how to draw," and that's what my process is mostly about, like finding new visual solutions through the act of creation and surprising yourself and uh, holding on to that intuition as a painter while exploring the visible landscape of animation.

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(chewing).

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MOOSA: My name is Moosa Khan I'm originally from Pakistan, Lahore.

Um, basic... um, basically I'm an illustrator/animator, I specialize in making unique visual products that are new to the market and finding a new way of like, finding a new way of depicting the moving image.

(monkey sounds).

(growling).

So animation is basically images being projected at you at a framerate of 12 frames per second, it's about storytelling, character design, background painting, and lots more.

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♪ ♪ MOOSA: So for me, abstraction, I feel like a lot of people look at abstraction as a way to cheat, but I think it's about taking the essence of a form, like how you make a juice, you don't just take the orange and start eating, you take the essence of the juice out and that's what make the shake tasty.

So for me, it's like discovering that essence and putting it in my work and seeing how that can exist in a digital animated platform.

And that's what makes it magical, I feel, as an artist I feel like there's two, uh, two things you will learn too.

One is looking and one is feeling, so in the earlier stage in your career you're looking, you're observing, you're looking at how a body functions, how muscles act with, within a face, everything is in real life.

Once you know how to replicate reality, you can start holding on to that aspect of feeling, which is like, how you feel about a certain subject, how you view the world, how you see a certain person's portrait and how, and after a certain point, with enough practice, you'll start melting into your own unique visual language.

Which is what I feel is the magic, because that's something you can't replicate, because it's just you and your experiences.

Coming from like an emotional and like creative perspective, I think it's a very fulfilling job, there's no other craft that involves a higher degree of learning, experimentation, and playfulness.

From a commercial point of view, I feel like it's a tool that uh, you can use to captivate audiences into watching something, buying a product, or learning something new.

It, it like saturates the information into more uh, conceivable products that can be consumed by an audience that is, maybe not the most literate about a certain subject.

STEPHANIE: Hello my name is Stephanie Williams, um, originally here from Washington, D.C. and I'm an artist.

Animation is um any kind of designed motion, um, which can mean lots of different things, you can work digitally and animate, if you're a vector you could work frame by frame the way that I do, it could be lots of different things but it's still, essentially any kind of designed motion.

I'm a stop motion puppet animator for the most part so um, I work frame by frame, um in one direction.

A lot of animation techniques you can go back in and insert frames, I kind of get a one-shot deal.

I pose the puppet, I walk back to the camera, I take a photo, do that thousands of times until I have motion.

And stop motion is anything that is physically manipulated in front of the camera, so if you have material that is physically present, um, and you change it, you know and take a photo of it several times over then it counts as stop motion.

Traditionally film is set to a variety of different frames beats, so 24 frames per second is a, is a popular one in animation, so what that means is that you have 24 individual frames per one second of motion or video.

So I work with 24 frames, 24 different poses move the pup, the puppet into pose, walk back to the camera, take a picture, walk back, pose it again, do that 24 frames per second.

Right, so if it's like simple breathing, you know, if that puppet's just not moving that much, and it's all about these really subtle gestures it might not take that long, maybe like a minute I could do, maybe in a day, right, working eight hours a day, depending on what it is.

But if it's something that's a little bit more complicated, on average I would say I do about five seconds a day, I'm a very slow animator, um some people work slower than that.

But um, but yea, if uh, if this puppet is doing like jumping-jacks, and flips and are all of these things that are really complicated I, I mean I might be there all week.

I'm interested in stories that are told but not often heard so um, I, I pull from a lot of lived experience.

So being a queer female in the D.C. area um, I've experienced some things that have a direct connection to things that I like to tackle in the work, so most recently um, I've been dealing with um, identities that don't really fit very neatly within a category.

So if for instance, my mom's from the Philippines, my dad's Black, I get asked all the time, "What are you?"

And I think there's a lot of really, there's a lot of really interesting things that you could, you could unpack with that question, it's not necessarily that I'm interested in answering that question one way or the other but I think that like a human need to know, it's a very American thing to want to know like who you are 'cause I know how to treat you, I know what context to really communicate with you in, I think that's interesting and I like unpacking that in the abstraction and in the work.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (door unlocks).

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♪ ♪ (door creaking).

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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ BRIAN: "Pickles" is a comic strip about Earl and Opal Pickles, it also involves their grandson Nelson, a daughter named Sylvia, and a dog and a cat.

It's about family and uh looking at the funny side of family relationships.

I kind of grew up in the, what I think of as the "Golden Age of comic strips," when everyone took a newspaper and everybody read the comic strips.

One of my favorite cartoon characters is Popeye.

I used to watch his cartoons when I was a kid and I've started collecting a lot of Popeye memorabilia over the years, just brings back good childhood memories.

I never took any art classes in high school or anything, but I always drew, that's where it all started it, was just scribbling on my school papers.

When I went to college, I majored in art with the idea of going into commercial illustration and things like that because I didn't think I had a chance of becoming a cartoonist.

When I was in my late-30s, I started thinking of my childhood dream of doing a comic strip so I decided to think of an idea for a strip and uh spent a lot of time drawing different characters in a sketchbook until I finally came up with this elderly couple that gave me all kinds of ideas.

And the word "Pickles" kind of reminded me of the term "getting into a pickle" which is kind of like the situations they get into.

"Pickles" is syndicated in about close to 1,000 papers around the world.

I've been doing it for about 28 years now.

In the morning when I sit down to the drawing board, I go through a file of things I've written down over the past few weeks.

I just look for situations that happen in real life that, that, uh I can place my characters into.

Once I get the idea then I draw the panel.

I usually work with four boxes.

I just rough out the first panel with pencil and I'll go over it with a pen.

I still use the old-fashioned pen you dip in a bottle of ink.

I just enjoy the process of holding a pen in my hand, dipping it in the ink, and scratching it on the paper, it's a very tactile sense of that that I enjoy.

In my mind, I've broken down the idea into four sequences, a little story with a beginning, a middle, and then a uh, punchline at the end, and hopefully that's the payoff where someone will chuckle and, and see themselves in it, or something like that.

♪ ♪ I scan them on a scanner and email them to my daughter, Emily, who colors them on Photoshop.

From that point when I've done a week's worth of those, I send them into my editor at "The Washington Post" and uh, she checks them over for any grammatical errors.

Occasionally a retired school teacher somewhere in America will find a misspelled word, or something and will let me know about it.

My wife is always my best editor.

She can tell if something's funny or not.

(laughs).

I really do agonize over each strip, you know, trying to come up with an idea.

Most of the ideas I get I don't use because I don't think they're good enough, so I'm my own harshest critic, I think.

I'm very seldom when I see my strip in the paper do I think I really nailed it.

I, I usually just think "Oh, I could have done this better," "I could have worded that better," or "I could have drawn that better," so I'm, I'm always critical of my efforts, but uh, I think that's a good character for a, for an artist to, to be critical of their work and not just think anything they do is wonderful.

I love making people laugh.

The big payout for me is when I hear people who say that my cartoon makes their morning, or it reminds them of someone they love, or something like that that makes me feel like I've contributing something to people's happiness and it's so much easier now to write my strip because uh, when I began, I was a, a 39-year-old writing about old people and now I'm, now I'm an old person writing about myself.

(laughs).

♪ ♪ JEFF: Watercolor is the toughest medium.

You can't back up, once you've started you cannot put another color on top of it, it makes mud.

So you have to work very fast.

A plein air artist is the type of artist that will work in the environment that their outdoors, typically.

A plein air is a French word and means "outdoor painter."

And I started doing it only about four or five years ago.

Schiller Park is a beautiful park, it's a 22-acre park that sits in German Village.

It's a, it's a park that attracts a lot of dogs, a lot of people, a lot of walkers a lot of runners.

It's so nice to plein air paint because you get outside, you get away from it all, it's, it's very relaxing.

It's uh, not that the cartooning is, it's just a whole different animal.

♪ ♪ I'm a graduate of The Columbus College of Art and Design.

I graduated in advertising with an illustration minor.

I uh, worked for several years in advertising but I always wanted to cartoon.

I, I did some cartooning a for a magazine, actually a weekly uh newspaper in Columbus, Ohio.

I was able to open another door and it opened for me in Cincinnati, Ohio.

And uh, I was a cartoonist for them, uh, "The Cincinnati Post" uh for 22 years.

Editorial cartoon is a cartoon with a point of view, uh trying to find a little bit of humor in it um, but typically it's gonna have, it's gonna fall on an opinion page so it wants to have, an editor wants to have an opinion with, associated with the cartoon.

It might not be funny, but many times, you know, I'm hoping that it is.

♪ ♪ When I got into editorial cartooning back in the um, early 80s, um, I think um, I was right at the beginning of the Reagan administration, so I've worked through all the presidents since then.

And they're, they're all a challenge and some of them are easier than others.

I started as a, as a one-panel cartoonist doing editorial cartoons and uh, so I got that uh science of that type of gag down.

I felt very comfortable then moving on to doing "Moderately Confused" which is social commentary on a different level, but uh appearing on comic pages.

I'm contracted to do three to four editorial cartoons every week and I do six daily panels for "Moderately Confused," so it's a total of nine cartoons that I, nine to 10 cartoons I do every week.

I work four weeks in advance on "Moderately Confused" whereas an editorial cartoon, I do it, I put it out the next day.

You have to have thick skin in this business but you know, it's, it's so rewarding, it's so much fun, and people always ask, you know "So what's your favorite cartoon?"

And it's, it's the one I did today.

BOB: I've written and drawn about every comic book character imaginable in my 45 years in the business.

It'd be easier for you to try to find what characters I haven't done.

Most of all I'm known for the reinvention of "Iron Man."

♪ ♪ So when I, when I heard that Marvel was going to kick off their entire cinematic universe with my version of that character, it was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.

In uh, 2007 I was asked by Marvel Studios to come out and do the narrative for the DVDs.

It, it occurred to me while I was out there that I had climbed every mountain, that I had done everything in comics, suddenly the whole cinematic world opened up to me and that just seemed like such an adventure and a chance to watch my characters breathe and talk and move.

So I moved to Hollywood and I learned the language and the customs of Hollywood.

After about eight or nine years in Hollywood, I decided to move back to Florida.

Uh, I really wanted to try to work outside the system, and at the same time, I realized I was missing my grandchildren's childhood and they lived here in Riverview so I wanted some time with them.

So I started my own production company.

After I moved back here, I met Tyler Martinolich, the Tampa Bay Film Commissioner.

Tyler kind of recruited me to help bring uh more attention and interest financially to making films and television in Florida.

I've always contended that Florida is a wonderful place to film because of one you have an amazing amount of talent here, you think of what comes out of Ringling College.

A variety of topography here, we work together to promote film in Florida, lobby the state house in Tallahassee, I said the one thing I have learned in all my years of traveling around the world is everybody has a Marvel fan in their family.

So I said I'm gonna take a lot of free posters!

Earlier this summer Tyler came to me and said that he had approached uh Mayor Jane Castor about having an "Iron Man Day" and to celebrate what I've done and what I've brought here to the city and to the state.

So Mayor Jane Castor proclaimed uh, August 4th "Bob Layton Day."

So I was just amazed at how this whole thing snowballed into this huge event with radio shows and television shows and signings and screenings of the movie and when commissioner Ken Hagan, he reading the actual proclamation.

Ken, thank you so much.

(audience cheering).

It was like very, very touching.

So Tyler asked me to come up to his office one day and to bring some of my artwork that we could display at the Scarfone Gallery and when I got up there, I found out what his master plan was.

BASK: Uh, Tyler reached out to me and said he had a pretty special project that he wanted me to collaborate on or get my input and uh, that's all he said.

BOB: A, a, another local artist who had worked and had a connection with "Iron Man" was Bask who lives in St. Pete.

BASK: We're sitting at the table and introduced to, to, to the group but I'm also learning that this is the project, it's to collaborate with Bob Layton.

BOB: Bask did all the, the, the graphics, the paintings in "Iron Man 3" so we are actually Iron brothers.

BASK: 2012 I get a phone call, he was like, "Hey Robert Downey Jr. wants your art in 'Iron Man 3'."

So immediately I was like... (gasps).

(laughs).

BOB: We began collaborating on some ideas for uh paintings that he could do based on my work.

Bask and I had similar backgrounds and similar problems that we had to deal with.

I grew up in the Midwest, uh, and uh, it was, it was, it was a difficult childhood because my mother had to raise five of us alone.

I learned to read from comics.

I'd bug my sister Sue to teach me how to read.

I could tell what was happening in the stories because the pictures connected one panel to another, but I didn't know what they were saying, I was so curious.

BASK: Growing up in the Czech Republic it's a, you know we lived under a communist oppression and it was, it was pretty stifling.

I'm always the outcast and I've always looked towards art to kind of help me through a lot of those moments.

BOB: I've, I've found that uh comic books were an incredible escape for me.

BASK: Started looking towards like art like as a, as a go-to form of joy and therapy, and everything, distraction, whatever it might be.

I didn't have that many friends growing up so it was just kind of something that it's like created my own worlds, my own places where I can go, sources of entertainment essentially.

BOB: Thank goodness for "Spiderman" and "The Fantastic Four" and all these other characters that kind of kept me going.

BASK: When I was drawing violent comic books or doing graffiti none of that made sense to my parents, but they were like, "We're gonna go all in and encourage it."

BOB: Uh, eventually when I got into comics, I started my career in D.C. and there I met David Michelinie who was my writing partner.

I convinced him to jump ship and go back to Marvel and they offered us three books that were in danger of cancellation and that's how they tried out new talent.

We basically did a complete overhaul of the premise of "Iron Man."

And at that particular time, uh, the Betty Ford Clinic had just opened up and the people were talking openly about drug and alcoholism for the first time.

We wanted to give Tony an internal struggle.

BASK: "A Demon in A Bottle" there, there is this real-world grounded element of it, and yea, it's, it's about a guy who is dressed up in a metal costume and he's a billionaire and all this, despite him having everything in the world that he wants, he still has this, this albatross around his neck that he just, is weighing him down and having him self destruct from the inside.

BOB: And it occurred to us that this would be an interesting villain for Tony to have to struggle with.

BASK: Anybody who's ever had a vice that they were struggling with or something internal, it's like the, the battle of self-versus-self is always the hardest.

BOB: I was struggling with alcoholism myself, you know, 40-something years later there was a cry for help.

BASK: Going through my own struggles with various things, various substances, or drinking, or partying too much as, as an adult, I got to truly appreciate how profound that was.

BOB: You know, "Demon in a Bottle" was uh, Robert, Robert Downey's, one of the reasons why he signed up to do "Iron Man."

BASK: Sometimes the message or the, what the artist is putting out there, things or thoughts, or images that reflect a point and time in his life that he wants some, he needs somebody to connect with that.

(inaudible crowd chatter).

BOB: In order for a story to really resonate, the story has to come, the conflict has to come from within the characters themselves.

BASK: It's truly something that is, that I connected with personally.

BOB: I saw a new way to kind of interpret the old "Iron Man" through Bask's imagination.

I don't know how you come to terms with like little art drawings into fine art?

That's, that's amazing.

Josselyn, the curator, brought all this together because she figured out a way to bring comic books and fine art together in the gallery in one showing, uh, it was an amazing experience.

It's something that uh, I'm going to remember always, you know, it was, it was taking something old out a new door.

♪ ♪ Artworks is made possible in part by... And by...