Artist Exploration : James Farr

This guy is awesome. He is an extremely talented artist specializing in animation, specifically with flash. He is most well known for his immensely popular animated series called "Xombie" which, is about zombies. SWEET!

Here's chapter 2 of Xombie (for some reason chapter 1 is hard to find):



James started Xombie in 2003, and has consistently held a top 50 spot on newgrounds.com (a very popular flash animation site) for most viewed videos. He is also ranked #3 in the artists category. When going through and watching these Xombie shorts, the main thing I noticed about the animation was how much it changed. The style remains the same, but the overall quality of the animation improves significantly throughout the chapters. (so far there are 10). When I saw this I immediately thought of South Park, and how there animation came from cardboard cut-out characters to being completely generated on a computer, while still keeping the original 2d sort of style. It really shows how an artists skill, and possibly resources, can improve over a few years.

I personally like his work because I think it has a unique style that I may be able to relate to my own style. I haven't really done enough work in graphic or web design to really be able to "define" my own style but I would tend to use the words dark and futuristic alot. Anyways, James Farr has a "dark" sort of style and it really shows in his Xombie animations. Of course zombies sort of lend themselves to dark/evil/horror type feelings, but even still, the colors and animations are very dark feeling, without knowing what the content is.

James Farr is also currently working on a comic book, other animated shorts, and various interactive websites.