The Chad Frye - Illustration GuyAnyone out there a fan of Netflix’s Green Eggs & Ham show?
I just found out that season 2 will drop on November 5th of this year! (Thanks for the news, IMDB.com!) It’s hard to believe, but it has already been TWO YEARS since I finished my time working on the season 2 story team. I’m pretty excited to see what the crew has been working on since I left!
In my excitement, I did a new watercolor & colored pencil piece of Sam I Am and Guy Am I.
So, did any of you check out Space Jam: A New Legacy over the weekend? Seems like a lot of folks saw it at the theater, but I understand it was also available through Warner Bros.’ streaming app, so no doubt tons of folks saw it. While I did not get to join many former colleagues as part of the crew of the movie, I did get to work on some official marketing art for Space Jam!
I was hired to draw a number of international celebrities in a Looney Tunes style the way LeBron James was in the movie, making them a part of the Tune Squad team. Those celebs could then share the images on their social media accounts. Unless you follow the specific person, you may not have seen the efforts, so I thought I’d share a few of the ones I found on Twitter and Instagram.
Over all, I drew 8 or 9 people for this campaign, and a colleague of mine did another batch that are all floating around out there on the web. I only found these four of my pieces, so those are the only ones I can pass along to you for now!
And just to be clear, I ONLY drew the caricature of the celebrities. The rest of the art was put together by other folks, most likely from a library of approved poses.
Glad to have been a part of Space Jam in my own small way! Hooray for projects with hand-drawn animation!
Spent some time the other day doing some exploratory sketches of facial expressions for Mickey Mouse in my sketchbook, one of my favorite characters to draw.
Back in the mid-aughts, I worked for a few years on a Mickey TV show drawing him and other members of his world such as Minnie, Daisy, Donald, Goofy, Pluto, Chip ‘n’ Dale, Willie the Giant, Pete, Ludwig von Drake, Clarabelle, Horace Horsecollar, and so on and so forth. Having grown up reading Disney comic books, it was such a blast to get to draw those characters every day for a while.
So, while I do sketches like these from time to time for my own pleasure, I look forward to the next legitimate purpose to work on them again one day!
Of all the characters I’ve drawn from Disney’s Winnie the Pooh world, Eeyore seems to get the most love from folks. It’s strange, but his depression seems to give everyone a lot of joy. Maybe his “Debbie Downer” look on life calls attention to our own doom & gloom attitudes about things, and causes us to realize things really aren’t as bad as they seem.
Now if only members of the news media would latch onto this, we’d have more positive takes on things happening in the world to lift us up instead of tear us down. They need to watch more Winnie the Pooh for better life perspective!
Deliver the letter, the sooner the better! (And may all the dogs you encounter be friendly dogs.)
I recently took a page in my sketchbook to play around with a different style of character design away from my natural way of drawing. These were the results!
I actually really love trying different styles. Rare is the character designer in the world of animation that is hired to draw exactly the way they always draw. Every project I have ever worked on both as a character designer and as a storyboard artist has had its own unique style. I am hired to draw in the style of what the show/movie requires. It’s always a fun challenge at first, but usually after a couple of weeks, you find your rhythm and off you go.
It’s kind of exhilarating in one sense, because drawing in different styles forces your brain to think a different way. You end up learning things in the process, and isn’t the path of an artist to always be inquisitive and always learning? If we are ever pleased with exactly where we are and there is nothing left to learn, then what’s the point?! Art becomes boring.
So, keep things interesting! Now and then, draw in a style that you don’t normally do, and have a little spontaneous fun!
A few years back, I was having lunch in the San Fernando Valley at a place called Slaw Dogs with my buddy Tom Cain. While eating, a woman walked past us on the sidewalk LOADED with perfume, and her own sense of bedazzled/leopard print style. When I got back to my desk, I quickly roughed out an impression of her from memory. I recently revisited that sketch and worked up this drawing.
Bless you Los Angeles, for all your quirkiness. I call it “Slaw Dog Millionaire.”
Back in June I had another one of those out-of-the-blue, who-would-have-thought, stranger-than-fiction work opportunities come up.
I had already storyboarded a Frank Sinatra music video earlier in the year for the Fantoons studio. They liked what I drew for them, so when they were given the opportunity to animate a music video set to a recording of Irving Berlin’s song White Christmas as sung by the incomparable Bing Crosby, they called on me once again to board for them.
David Calcano wrote a script that set the song around the military at the time of the holidays that had some real storytelling in it. It begins in the late ’60s with the Vietnam War, and later comes to our modern era. It had nostalgia, love of family, tragedy, and full circle resolution – a whole lot of the human experience packed into three minutes.
I love doing caricatures, but just like in the Sinatra video, I was asked to NOT caricature Bing in my boards. The studio was coming up with their design for Bing, which was going through approvals with whomever had to approve. If I drew him my own way, that could have complicated things. So, a generic character in a hat is what I drew (though I did get away with half-lidded eyes and big ears).
So, I had a very busy week boarding the piece. 217 panels later, it was finished and sent off. The drawings above are just a few individual panels of those efforts that the team at Fantoons used as a blueprint for their music video.
And here’s the finished product! Merry Christmas everyone. Hope you get to enjoy a white one!
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Disney’s comedy feast The Emperor’s New Groove directed by Mark Dindal! This film holds a special place in my heart, for it was the first big Hollywood production on which I received screen credit! To celebrate, I created a new drawing to mark the occasion!
I actually started at Disney on Mulan, and also worked on Tarzan and Fantasia 2000 before this, but back in those days, the studio didn’t give screen credit to everyone like they do now. I wasn’t a production artist on the films, but rather was considered “support staff” with my computer job.
New Groove was such an interesting journey. It started as a musical drama called Kingdom of the Sun, later changed to Kingdom in the Sun (that’s what all those songs were written for that are on the soundtrack), before changing to the comedy that folks have come to love.
If you are ever curious to know the sordid details of the production journey, Trudie Styler (Sting’s wife) made a documentary about it called The Sweatbox that while never having been released to the public other than a short Oscar qualifying run in theaters 20 years ago, it does pop up every now and then on youTube.
Hard to believe all this was twenty years ago. I feel privileged to have been able to be a part of it. Of anything I have ever worked on, this is the project that lights up the most eyes when folks hear I was involved with it.
So, celebrate with me in this special birthday for a special Disney movie!