A Most Adventurous Dairy Cow

A Most Adventurous Dairy Cow was a small thumbnail book I developed very quickly by drawing (stream of consciouness) doodles one afternoon sitting on the hill at Kula San. One right after the other, out of order with no theme in place... just whatever popped into my head.

Later that week I sat down to (practice) writing song lyrics. I wrote them around the melody of a Beatles song - 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite' - not in any way trying to play on the Mr Kite aspect, just weaving together with words the sketches I had recently done. It all just popped together effortlessly.

So I asked a writer and two publishers if they thought it was worthy. They had zero interest in it, so I just let it sit on my shelf as a little homemade thumbnail book. When I decided I wanted to try my hand at animation, I started immediately with "that" and just made it happen by determination, finding every shortcut I could and using any art I had on hand where I could and painting the rest as I needed it.

Very close to finishing it, our computer crashed and I lost everything. So I started over. Three months of all-nighters later, I had this little movie, which is very rough and not at all what I had in mind, but close enough that I could put the whole thing to bed, and I've had a chronic neck problem ever since.

As a result there are lots of little pieces of abandoned stages of a project that went nowhere, if not for the little YouTube video... so it is nice to have it here.