With our special Guest Star...

Barry Sanders (not to be confused with the football player, apparently) is in town. You should hang out with him. I did.


Thanks to the time-waster known as Facebook, I heard (read, I guess) that Barry was ‘going to make a Muppet!’ Really the word ‘Muppet’ was all I needed to convince me to ditch my work load for a few hours. The word ‘make’ sure didn’t hurt either.

So I pulled on my boots, broke out my umbrella and headed to FAO Schwarz to make a Muppet. Well, to watch Barry order a pre-made Muppet, actually. (Note to the reader: if you really want to make a Muppet, visit www.projectpuppet.com.)


On the one hand,it’s basically like the loathsome Build-A-Bear shops except with cooler characters.


On the other hand, I’ll be the first to admit it: if I ever need a second job, I’d be happy to build Muppet parts all day.

So, the whole Muppet building process was short and sweet and (kinda) lame, at least from the buyer’s point of view. But, what did we care? There was still the whole rest of the store to explore!


Now, I’ll confess, I’ve only been to FAO Schwarz once when I was young, so most of my memories of the store come from that Home Alone follow-up. In fact, I was almost positive they shut down. But it seems business is, well… Okay, it may not be booming.


As Barry said, you know there's a recession on when the unicorn goes on sale.


Unicorn, schmoonicorn... What about the dragon? I guess we'll be heading for the end of times when that hits the market.

No good for Jewish mandables...

At first, I wasn't planning on posting today but figured I'd do a little self-promoting and offer you all a lesson on Jewish customs at the same time.

For the last month, I've been doing work for a client (who shall and must remain anonymous) courtesy of the talented and worldly Nick Fox-Gieg. Basically, the job has me producing an animation each week depicting consecutive parshats from the Torah using limited Flash animation.

For my first parshat, I got to work from a fun song about what animals are and are not kosher. Have you ever found yourself wondering if a ostrich is kosher? Find out here.

These types of projects are always loads of fun for me because, like my father, I'm a collector of knowledge. I love learning lots of stuff that I may or may not ever need to know in life so, it's kind of nice to learn stuff and make money while doing it.


Apparently, the jury is still out on whether or not a capybara is kosher.

Who? What? Where?

Alright, so this is it. My first blog.

I'm gonna be honest right from the start. I'm not a writer. I'm an animator. But everyone tells me I should do this, so I figured I'd give it a go. Besides, how many people on here are actually writers? Professionally? I also figured this might be a great place to get out a lot of the ideas that I have floating around my head... ideas that aren't solid enough to get pumped out into drawings or animations, yet. So, here goes nothing...

First I guess I should just let everyone who cares enough to read this know who I am, what I do and all that good stuff. I'm Liesje. I've been drawing since I was little. I went to college in Philadelphia and got a BFA in Animation. I worked for a film and video company for a year after that doing graphic and animation work. Then I did what any sane person in the United States would do... I left to live in Japan for two years. While abroad, teaching paid the bills but in my free time (and I had a lot of it) I worked as a layout editor for a magazine, as an animator and layout artist for a video game and developed logos and graphics for companies and groups. Then I came home.

What am I doing now? Besides writing this blog? Now I'm working as a freelance animator and graphic designer for several different companies. While it's not as exotic as traveling the world I'm quite happy to be home and back to my old tricks. As an added bonus I now have friends in England, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, China and of course, Japan that I can go visit if I get the urge to travel again.

So, there you go... I think that's a decent first post. There'll be more to come (soon I hope) so stay tuned and see what happens.