THE BLOG OF KELLAN STOVER

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Sidereal Slough, by My Neighbor Kellan

12 track album

Wanted to plug my talented and dear friend for dropping his album! Please give a listen and consider purchasing! You can also stream the album on Spotify.

I’m thankful I was at that party that debuted “My Neighbor Kellan”, as well as witness to so many of the crazy awesome things you do, buddy. Hate that I can no longer send you a stupid gif and hear your reactionary laugh from down the hall, or witness all the Smash shenanigans. Congrats on this awesome album!

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Meg is the sweetest person, guys. Lordy lordy. Lemme tell ya. <3

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I write and record music under the name My Neighbor Kellan and completed an album cover illustration for a nearly complete album, Sidereal Slough. Check out that other profile for some tunes and lookout for the album later this month. https://www.instagram.com/myneighborkellan/

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I made a 4k wallpaper for myself, reorganizing the elements I made for the ‘poster’. If you dig, feel free to use it. :)

full res: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ivbtovdfjzmtt1s/SitP_4K_desktop.jpg?dl=0

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A little concept sketching for Dirk’s overly evil-looking base.

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Space Is The Place has received a visual overhaul. Can’t tell you how much I want to make this thing happen.

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Here’s another Swords of Ditto trailer I directed at Powerhouse! I think the whole crew had a lot of fun revisiting these characters and this style, but this time with more freedom and emphasis on action. Quite a few good reel shots to be pulled from this. I handled a few shots of animation and background, and helped composite the dimensional zoom shot on the path to Mormo’s Palace (the evil tower thing). As always, Powerhouse effing loves Devolver Digital. The game comes out tomorrow. Can’t wait!

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Alfie and Bert redesigns. Was thinking of making their helmets uniform, but then was like ‘nah’ and kept the swoop on Alfie’s.

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I’ve also updated the Space Is The Place theme song to be less child-like, replacing the ukulele and toy piano with electric guitar and overdriven synths. Tight stuff, I think.

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I’ve really let this blog go, huh? Turns out instagram is just much easier for me to stay regular. if you haven’t followed me over there, consider checking it out:

https://www.instagram.com/stovepipe_art/

In the meantime, I’ve been making fresh progress on Space Is The Place, having had a constructive, but unsuccessful, meeting with Netflix in Burbank last month. The experience itself was worthwhile, and I came away from it understanding my concept even better. My current efforts are to aesthetically update Space Is The Place to hit the audience I truly want, 8-12 yr olds. This comes with new character designs, a scaled back emphasis on the educational aspect, and further expanding the universe with antagonists, locales, creatures and more characters.

I’ve wrapped up years of contracts that, while profitable and career-building, sapped almost all my spare time and energy, letting this concept sort of stagnate. But now I’m back into the swing of things and have made a sketch of a new promotional poster that shows some of these changes. I’ll be posting new model sheets and sketches soon to better highlight them.

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Here’s another Devolver Digital game trailer I directed at Powerhouse Animation. My other efforts included the animatic and all the backgrounds. Check the game out and enjoy!

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My copy of the Directory of Illustration came! My page looks sharp and I’m pretty chuffed about it.

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I’ve taken to Instagram lately, and failed to post quite a lot to my tumblr page. But I figured it was worth popping back in here to post some more redesign work for Space Is The Place. The ball is slowly rolling on getting this in front of the right eyes and making connections. My main efforts now are to come up with a working idea of how the series should be visually aged up to accommodate the ideal audience that my original designs and animation test fell below. So here’s some style exploration followed by a loose model sheet for Ralph.

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Reliving his Space Ranger Pup days, Ralph leads the crew into Valles Marineris on Mars...promptly getting them lost due to Mars’ lack of magnetic field.

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Ralph and Laika ice fishing on Europa.

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Earlier this year, I won the prize of a free full page space in this year’s Directory of Illustration, as well as a portfolio space on the DoI website.

I was able to design my own ad page for the hard-copy DoI, and this is what I ended up creating.

To view my listing:

https://www.directoryofillustration.com/artist.aspx?AID=10773

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It's been a busy time, having been back at Powerhouse Animation for 6 months, and balancing my freelance career alongside. I briefly posted about the release of my first children's book with the intention of going more in depth, but seemed to have forgotten! I've had my copies of the book for a while now, and thought I should get around to a more in depth look! It's a commercial product so I won't post digital originals, but here are some shots of the cover and a couple samples of my two favorite spreads within. See Inside Space Stations and Other Spacecraft is an Usborne Publishing flapbook I spent the greater part of 2016 illustrating. I worked with fantastic writers and editors at Usborne to create this book crammed with content. Flapbooks have die-cut tabs meant to be pulled back to reveal more content "inside". It works to great effect in this book, as you are able to "see inside" historic spacecraft and learn all about their functions. The design and planning of layouts was handled by the talented designers. Luckily I just had to illustrate! I'm proud to have Usborne as an ongoing client, and I hope they're glad to have me, too! For a closer look: https://youtu.be/LsjPQYSqi4k For purchase: USA- https://www.bookdepository.com/See-Inside-Space-Stations-Other-Spacecraft-Rosie-Dickins/9781409599197 UK- https://usborne.com/browse-books/catalogue/product/1/11856/see-inside-space-stations-and-other-spacecraft/

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Here's a rad piece I directed, and did a bit of animation for. Thanks to Wieden+Kennedy for the opportunity. Props to Ryan Cullen, Robby Cook, Tyler Richlen, Jeff Freeman, Louis Norris, CJ Walker, Chris Beaver, Aubrey Archer, Victoria Grace Elliott and Lindsey Leigh Robins for all their hard work! We've done enough work for Old Spice campaigns that I now buy the products. I'm not sure that's how advertising is supposed to work...