The Chad Frye - Illustration GuyI was sitting staring blankly at my screen yesterday, and this happy little puppy simply spilled forth from my stylus. He was just going to be a little blue-lined dog, and then he started getting some monochromatic shading, which in turn led to a touch of pink here and there. Despite blue typically being a sad color, hopefully the little guy’s really big joy will make you feel that all is okay on this mid-March Hump Day.
Enjoy!
I was going through some of my old art the other day, and came across this small Donald Duck watercolor/colored pencil piece I did just for fun a few years back. It was painted around the time I was finishing up my time working on two seasons of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. I LOVED drawing those classic Disney characters for the time I was given, and still will often doodle Mickey and the gang on scratch paper while talking on the phone.
Did you know that long before I worked on Donald for animation, I wrote a six-page Donald Duck story for Disney comics, too? I talk about that a little bit on my website. You can check that out by CLICKING HERE!
At any rate, enjoy this Donald Duck piece from the bygone year of 2009.
Ever wonder what an evil pirate bunny would look like? I hadn’t given it much thought either until I started doodling this rough and tough hare in my sketchbook. Thought maybe you all would like to see how he recently randomly spilled from my pen.
This morning, NBC’s Today Show gave a little sneak peek at a few of the floats that will be in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year. I was surprised to learn that there will be a Zhu Zhu Pets float based on our little animated Quest for Zhu movie that is currently on DVD. I was even more surprised to see that at least one of the characters, Pipsqueak, is based off of a drawing I did back in the development process of the movie!
While an annual tradition for New York City, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was also a tradition in the Frye home. We always would watch it on television, but as Jersey people, we had also gone to see it live on the freezing city streets. (I remember fondly seeing the Big Bird balloon getting sucked down an alley by a gust of wind with all the balloon handlers being dragged behind it – good stuff that they never show you on TV.) To have a small influence on a float in this year’s parade is truly mind-bending for me.
Here’s the clip from today’s Today Show! I’ll be looking forward to seeing the full float on television on Thanksgiving day! Enjoy!
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There’s nothing quite like an ocean breeze, don’t you think?
And with that little joke, ladies and gentlemen, we have truly reached THE END of this year’s MONSTER MONTH selections. Thank you so much for coming each day to see what has kept me amused at my drawing desk!
By the way, if you haven’t noticed, on the homepage of my blog there is a list of categories, one of which is MONSTERS! Feel free to come back anytime and click on that to have quick access to all the monsters on my blog, including the MONSTER MONTH drawings from years past!
Every now and then I pick up my sketchbook without an inkling of what is about to come out of my hand. Often this approach is helpful to get some bad drawings out to make way for the good ones. A few weeks ago I was having one such sketch session, and the page was just full of lousy drawings. There was only a small space still untouched at the bottom of the page when the head of this creature just appeared!
Even though it was just a head sketch, almost immediately I could clearly imagine this creature’s whole body, and just had to get it onto paper! I grabbed a large 24″x18″ piece of textured paper and went to town! So, kids, start a sketchbook and doodle bad drawings every chance you get so you can recognize the good ones when they come!
When you work in the world of animation, you have to be prepared to draw some pretty interesting stuff when the script calls for it. In the Zhu Zhu Pets DVD movie, The Quest for Zhu, we had to come up with a hamster based abominable snowman. Stephen Silver did some initial designs, and I proceeded to refine the character.
The following are some of my pencil drawings of the winter sasquatch creature we called Zhusquashya.
In the recently released Zhu Zhu Pets DVD, The Quest for Zhu, there are all manner of beasties ready to threaten the four hamster heroes Mr. Squiggles, Pipsqueak, Num Nums and Chunk. One such danger is a pack of saber-tooth tigers called Zhurassic Zhus.
Today I thought I’d share with you two versions of these growly striped kitties. Like a nature photographer, though remaining at my much safer desk, I was tasked with capturing the behavior of these creatures for inspiration to those that followed me in the creative pipeline. In our story, these fellas reside in the snowy mountain cliffs. Putting myself in the position of the hamsters, I imagined that the most frightening introduction I could have to this life-ending threat would be to perch them above on a cliff looking hungrily down while being framed by the blinding sun. So, I penciled out the pose, scanned it in and added some dramatic flare in Photoshop by including shadows.
Usually when I did these kinds of character development drawings, they would be passed along down the production line just as you see it. This time, however, the director took a shine to the drama in this piece, so he asked my buddy Tom Cain to paint it in color as I moved on to do other drawings. I really loved how Tom handled the whole scene so I thought I’d share with you his terrific version of these snarling, drooling hamster nightmares.
