Category: Art: Animation

20 Years In Hollywood!

Post author By Chad Frye
Post date July 7, 2017

I realized a little late that today, July 7, 2017, is exactly my 20th anniversary of working in Hollywood!

My professional art career really began in 1991 when I started illustrating my first children’s book, and my career in animation actually started in 1994 back in South Carolina for a small cinder block studio behind a car wash working on computer games (anyone remember King’s Quest VII?). When that studio folded, I spent a couple of years illustrating children’s books before the lure of year-round sunshine and Mickey Mouse came calling.

Just look at that clean-shaven face all full of youthful enthusiasm.

In the summer of 1997, a fresh-faced young Chad made the move to CA with eyes bright and wide to work for Disney where his first project was behind-the-scenes on Mulan. (My shirt is correct – my first Disney boss was Walt Sturrock who had hired me.) I remember flying out on a Friday, and had the weekend to start looking for an apartment. When Monday morning rolled around, I started work.

That first month was tough. I lived out of the Burbank Hilton (now the Marriott), worked by day, apartment hunted at night, and somewhere in between I illustrated the cover for a book I was still under contract to produce. Yep, set up a make-shift studio in my hotel room complete with an airbrush compressor. (I also remember being robbed in that hotel room, and the Hilton did absolutely nothing to compensate me for the items stolen from my dresser – one item being my favorite Mickey Mouse watch. Haven’t stayed in a Hilton since.)

While my time at Disney was almost ten years collectively, other studios also found use for my abilities. Eleven feature films, three television series, several DVDs, many web cartoons, and even a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade have encompassed the past twenty years! It has just flown by! With my slate currently open, I am looking forward to seeing what the future holds!

Memorial Day 2017

Post author By Chad Frye
Post date May 29, 2017

Here in the United States, today is our Memorial Day. It is a day we honor our fallen warriors who gave their lives in the service of our country no matter which war over the course of our country’s history. We are grateful to all our veterans and heartily applaud them for their service today and especially on Veterans Day (which will be November 11 this year), but today is the solemn remembrance of those who gave their lives in service.

When I worked for Disney Feature Animation a few years back, our country entered into war after the events in New York and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001. It was a scary time, not knowing if other parts of our country were also going to be attacked. We had received word that possibly the movie studios in Hollywood could be attacked, and security got really tight for a while with bomb sniffing dogs, checking all employee cars for bombs in trunks and underneath, and etc. We were appreciative of the troops that were being sent to the Middle East to try to prevent such a thing from happening again.

During that time, the studio put forth an effort to have employees draw, make cards, and participate in care packages being sent to our troops. I was asked to create a poster in support of these efforts. This Goofy image is what I came up with, and it was on display in the lobby of Feature Animation in Burbank, CA, for a while.

For those of you who are interested in art creation, Goofy was painted in gouache paint with colored pencils. Tanks and helicopters were inked on paper, then the rest was painted and assembled in Photoshop.

I was extremely honored to be asked to do it, and did so with an eye on the old posters for World War II. It was my goal to stir folks into helping out by hearkening back to the sacrifice many Americans made during that daunting time in our history. No one knew how long our latest efforts would take. Unfortunately, those efforts continue today, but we also continue to SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!

Two years ago I was fortunate to visit the Middle East and Africa with several of my cartoonist mates as we traveled with the USO to bring a few smiles to our soldiers. We visited with many of them listening to their stories while drawing for them. We brought to them a little piece of home, and they brought to us the realities of war. It was a sobering time that I shall never forget. (CLICK HERE to see previous posts of that trip here on the ol’ blog.)

I mention that because I brought this Goofy along with me on that trip. The USO printed up cards that each of us could give to the soldiers as a little memento of our visit, and this was the image that graced my cards. The cards brought many smiles to the folks overseas, and hopefully reminded them of all of us over here in the States.

One of the posters in the Middle East advertising the arrival of we cartoonists coming to visit with the soldiers.

On this Memorial Day, thank you to all the soldiers who have given the ultimate sacrifice, and I wish comfort to those they left behind. I thank our veterans for their service, thinking especially of my father, David Frye, who served during the Vietnam War. And thank you to the thousands of you serving today in some pretty rough places in this world. After having spent just a few days in some of those places with you, I came away with a greater appreciation for what it is you do and where you have do it.

No matter how tough things get in life, I always try to keep this passage from the Bible close to my heart:

Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

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Cat Scratches

Post author By Chad Frye
Post date April 3, 2017

Some cat scratches today made with just a pencil and paper. Crazy that those tools still work in our digital age.

Lots of different cats, and not one of them cares if you like them or not.

As a character designer for animation (which I do from time-to-time), it is important to be able to really explore the needs of the story with your designs for just a single character. Often you will have to play with head shapes, attitudes, expressions, fur, teeth, eye shapes, etc. There is an endless amount of combinations out there. (I once did over 60 designs for one character to try to satisfy a client!) These cats were not specifically for any project, but just a personal exercise in my sketchbook to try different things within the same species.

Also, when designing a character, it isn’t just about what the character looks like, but what the character looks like doing something. In animation, the character obviously has to move, hold things, talk, emote, interact with others, and even just walk. If you design something that looks good in a held staged pose, but really can’t move or bend in a simple walk, then you have a character that is non-functional.

Believe me, I’ve had this problem when working on projects for clients who don’t understand the design properties necessary for movement. I won’t get specific, but one project I worked on had characters that the client had first developed to a certain extent for print, not animation. In their drawings, appendages never were drawn bent, and their characters were always drawn from a front view. When I introduced elbows and knees to the designs, they panicked. When I made the thumbs slightly bigger than their initial nubs so they could hold things, that inspired a slew of discussions. When I drew an accurate side view, the sky caved in.

So, when designing, don’t just draw something static. Draw it doing things. And if you are drawing for other people, don’t fall in love with what you came up with, because they will always want to change it for good or bad.

This kind of turned into a lesson! Sorry about that. Just enjoy the rough sketches of cats!

Animals Art: Animation Character Designs Development Art Random Doodles Sketchbook

NCS Foundation Charity Auction

Post author By Chad Frye
Post date February 3, 2017

Over the past year, Bongo Comics’ Bill Morrison and I have been working on putting together a fundraiser for the National Cartoonists Society Foundation. This week we launched the auction on Ebay.

We have 85 items featuring the work of over 70 of the nation’s top cartoonists, illustrators, and animators, most of whom donated their own work to our efforts for which we thank them!

All the money raised goes to the NCS Foundation, a fully licensed 501(c)(3) charity, to help them continue their work in assisting cartoonists in need, providing scholarships to students, and further promoting the cartoon arts which has been the hallmark of the National Cartoonists Society since its inception in 1946.

To see the art and to place bids, CLICK HERE to go directly to the NCS Foundation seller page on Ebay!

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Do You Instagram?

Post author By Chad Frye
Post date August 25, 2016

Earlier this year a friend talked me into joining Instagram. I was apprehensive at first because it was going to be yet another thing to update constantly, but when I took a look and saw all the amazing creativity there, it felt like I should have joined that party long ago. So, I got on my computer and joined it, not realizing that the only way to post was to do so from a mobile device. As a non-mobile phone user, this complicated things.

Well, I got it worked out, and have been posting lots of art there. While some drawings only make it to Instagram, some also get posted here on the ol’ blog. So, I invite you to check it out if you also are an Instagram user, and follow me there. My handle is ChadFrye_IllustrationGuy (naturally), and you can get to it by CLICKING HERE!

You can also be whisked away to Instagramland by clicking on the image below that features some Instagram posts.

Some of the many pieces posted on my Instagram. Click on the image to check them out!

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The Fellas

Post author By Chad Frye
Post date August 4, 2016

A couple of weeks ago I shared with you the fact that Paul Coker Jr. drew me into his story in the August 2016 issue of MAD Magazine. He later gifted me with the original art which I received two weeks ago. Since he poked fun of my Disney past (CLICK here to see Paul’s version of me), I thought I’d make him a thank you “card” that was Disney themed. So, it was time to draw the fellas again – Mickey, Donald and Goofy.

I liked how the finished piece turned out, so I thought I’d take you through four of the major steps in creating the painting.

STEP 1: Sketch the Image

I tend to sketch out all my illustrations on my Cintiq monitor. I draw with a stylus right on the screen using Photoshop. I am a sloppy sketcher. Lots of extraneous lines come out of my pen as I look for the right shapes. Quite frankly, when it is a piece just for me, I don’t need to be any neater. I know where I’m going with it. If I am working on something for a client, I would likely clean up the sketch by going over it one more time to make it less sketchy.

A few sketchy characters.

STEP 2: Underpainting

Well, before I start the underpainting, I need to transfer the art from the computer to actual watercolor paper. I print out the drawing in black so it is nice and dark, and I put it on a lightbox to trace it onto the final paper. It is at this time where I draw nice clean lines, and I finesse the drawing a little by making little tweaks to improve it.

Once the pencil drawing is on the paper, I did a purple underpainting of all the shadows. This is a little thing I picked up from Jack Davis who just passed away this week. (CLICK HERE to see the eulogy I wrote for the National Cartoonists Society’s website.) The idea is to let the purple do all the hard work of creating the shading when I lay down the colors in thin layers later.

It’s kind of neat to see them in this monochromatic stage, but this is just one step in their quest for color.

STEP 3: Upperpainting

This is simply picking the final colors and painting them down quickly over the purple underpainting. I say “quickly” because A. you don’t want the paint to streak by drying before you can continue the color, and B. if you linger too long, you will start to smear the purple underpainting and get a muddy mess.

Almost done. Colors are in place, but now for some final touches.

STEP 4: Final Details

This final step involved using colored pencils to give the characters an outline which tightens them up, and I added colored pencil here and there to accentuate the shadows and to create highlights. Very rarely did I use white. In most cases, the highlights were created with lighter shades of purple, pink, blue, etc.

Here are the fellas all finished with colored pencil and a little paint splatter tossed on for interest.

So, there you have it – a super quick tutorial on how to create an appealing piece of art in a relatively short period of time. The more you do it, the less time it takes. Also, this fast technique creates a certain loose quality to the art which gives it more energy.

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John Silver

Post author By Chad Frye
Post date July 19, 2016

A couple of weeks ago, I spent six days camping in the untamed nature of Russia. You read that right – in RUSSIA! I am not much one for going on a genuine camping trip. My last camping trip was when I was 14 years old, and it was the trip that convinced me to never go camping again. Well, sometimes you have to break promises you made to yourself.

This isn’t an official post about my camping trip. Maybe I’ll share with you more about that another time. However, this IS a post to share a drawing I did while on that camping trip. I went into the Russian forest with a large church group where we heard many messages preached from God’s Word, we went swimming in a lake, played volleyball, and had craft time every day.

Craft time for me mostly meant doing drawings for everyone else, which was perfectly fine. I drew several Mickey Mouses (or would that be Mickey Mice?), Donald Duck, Winnie the Poohs, a Kronk used on a nail craft project, and even some of my own creations. One that was maybe the most fun to draw, and most unusual to get a request for, was John Silver from Disney’s Treasure Planet.

While I did work on Treasure Planet, I was not one of the animators. I had done some sketches of him back in the day, but was long removed from the project. One friend of mine had internet access out there in the middle of nowhere, so we looked him up for reference, and I worked out this sketch of Silver with his companion Morph. I loved how it turned out, and thought maybe you’d enjoy seeing it, too.

Camping – in the woods – in Russia – with internet access – drawing John Silver – very strange, yet memorable.

Arrrr! The Russian woods be a risky place to be drawin’ pirates!

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Norm of the North

Post author By Chad Frye
Post date January 15, 2016

Today a new animated film is being released in theaters across the United States called Norm of the North. I was one of the character designers.

I worked for several months on Norm back in 2014. At that time, Stephen Silver and I designed most of the main characters and some incidentals, while some other designs came from a studio in Ireland.

Two of my favorite creations for the film are these two caribou brothers seen below. I never did get a script to read, so I’m not sure what their function is in the movie other than what I saw in the trailer, but they sure were fun to draw.

Two caribou designs were my personal favorites to create for "Norm of the North." — These two caribou designs were my personal favorites to create for “Norm of the North.”

I also came up with the look for a crotchety old seagull character named Socrates (voiced by Bill Nighy) that in early designs was based on Michael Caine from the 1960s, then later became more John Gielgud with Caine’s old glasses. His CG interpretation in the trailer looked pretty close to my 2D drawings.

Other characters from my pen for the movie were some incidental humans, along with finessing designs by others, and breaking down attitudes and movement for Norm (voiced by Rob Schneider), Mr. Green (voiced by Ken Jeong), and the lemmings. It is always fun working on characters, and the ones for this film were especially fun to draw because director Trevor Wall was interested in being really cartoony with them. You don’t have to twist a cartoonist’s arm very hard to get him to draw in a cartoony way.

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