So, I hear beards are in these days – IN my sketchbook that is! ZING!
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Art: Animation Art: Colored Pencil Art: Drawings Character Designs Random Doodles Sketchbook
Category: Art: Animation
Last year I helped out on an episode or two of Disney’s upcoming The Rocketeer show. If you follow my blog, you know I’m a fan of the original Rocketeer character (which you can see in a previous post if you CLICK HERE), so it was a real treat to be invited to work on this continued legacy.
Last week at San Diego’s Comic Con, Disney unveiled a trailer for the new show being made for kids, and it’s animated. Check it out!
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A new Scooby Doo show began airing/streaming a few weeks ago on Boomerang – Scooby Doo and Guess Who? It features the Scooby gang with a celebrity guest or two in each episode.
Why am I mentioning this? Because two years ago, I was invited to help design characters for the very first episode they were making! Warner Bros. released a trailer promoting the series, and the green ball of flaming skulls that’s in the trailer was a “character” I designed for the show. Take a look!
Thought I’d show you my early color concept of the ‘ol screaming skulls, along with my final black and white drawing.
I’m cheering on series producer Chris Bailey & the crew who dutifully worked on the whole season, and hope they have a lot of success with it!
Toy Story 4 opened in theaters last weekend. The Toy Story gang and I go way back together – back to the first movie in 1995. I was a young illustrator who was not that long out of university when I got to illustrate a couple of Toy Story books that came out in conjunction with the movie. They were coloring/activity books, but were a blast to work on.
I was given lots of blurry still images from the movie, and then had to reinterpret them into drawings that kids could color. I really had no idea what the movie was truly about, nor what the significance was of all the characters, but hey howdy hey, it turned into a juggernaut of a hit, and I became a fan along with everyone else.
Despite the date you see by my signature, the drawing above was published in 1995. All three characters have a part in the new movie which I was fortunate to see back on June 12. Toy Story 4 is funny, heart warming, and made me wish I had some tissues towards the end.
This last pic is from maybe 2007 and 100 lbs ago when I was working for Disney Television Animation, and treated my folks to a trip to Disneyworld in Florida where we got to hang with the gang from Toy Story 2. My only experience with that second film was getting to spend a day on the scoring stage with Randy Newman, but that’s another story for another time. Hard to believe this all started 24 years ago!
I’m sharing with you today, some actual animation character design work I created a while back. Thought it might be interesting to give you a little taste of the process.
The assignment in this case was to create a little brother character for an already designed big sister. The only stipulation is that he needed to be wearing a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers, and the script called for him to be mischievous. Hoo boy, what a task it turned out to be! You see before you about 20 or so exploratory sketches, but I did about 60 different versions in all.
The client just couldn’t decide which way he wanted to go. Every time I presented a few versions, there would be comments and suggestions on how to change it whether it was the weight of the kid, his hair – whatever! Two other designers eventually got involved, too, and they experienced the same indecision from the client. It was certainly frustrating, because we wanted to please the client.
Eventually a design was chosen (one conceived by one of my colleagues), and then I created the turns (that’s the view of the character from all sides), and continued with some personality sketches, mouth charts, etc. I never would have thought a little boy would have been my toughest character design assignment, but it was.
So there you have it – some of the glitz and glamour of being an artist for hire.
Today is my last day at Warner Bros. Animation. For the past year, I’ve been proud to be a part of the story team on Green Eggs & Ham that will be unveiled on Netflix sometime in the fall.
It has been a thrill to work on this show, especially since the book of that same title was my favorite Dr. Seuss book when I was growing up. I remember my mother even making for me green eggs and ham for breakfast one day. Ended up that I didn’t like them, Sam I am. My little brain thought the eggs tasted like spinach.
Netflix hasn’t revealed too much about the show, so I’m not at liberty to do any Green Eggs specific art. Since that is the case, it seemed appropriate to commemorate my dear departure from WB in a more Looney Tunes worthy manner – why not go out in style a la What’s Opera Doc?
To paraphrase Bugs in the original cartoon, “Well, what did you expect in animation? A happy ending?”
This is a recently created drawing that will be sold by auction at a benefit on March 29 for the Epilepsy Foundation Washington! It’s always a treat to get to draw these fellas after having spent two television seasons with them a while back on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
If you are in the Seattle area, info about the benefit can be found here: https://epilepsynw.ejoinme.org/%20LTF2019
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I’ve been busy this past year working on the animated series Green Eggs & Ham for Netflix over at Warner Bros. Animation. Today, Netflix made the first revelation of what the characters look like, they announced our first season cast, and they posted a short teaser!
To read more information about the show, and our cast (which includes Adam Devine and Michael Douglas as the two leads), then CLICK HERE!!
Meanwhile, check out the short teaser here:
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