Category: Development Art

Justin Beaver

I know the title is corny, but it made you look, didn’t it? I suppose the only thing this critter has in common with his namesake is the feathered fur, which, by the way was completely drawn on a Wacom Cintiq tablet – my first decent digital drawing posted here on the blog!

Chad's Beaver Drawing
* No wood (pencil) was harmed in the creation of this drawing, though I can’t say as much for the tree he took that branch from.

For those of you not in the know, a Cintiq is pressure sensitive computer screen on which you can draw with an inkless pen called a “stylus”. Press lightly, your line is thin. Push harder, the line gets thicker. Pretty neat stuff that has been sweeping through the artistic community within the past two years even though these tablets have been around for close to ten years now.

Back when I worked at Disney Feature Animation, Wacom loaned the studio one of their first generation Cintiq tablets. It was housed in my office where many of the artists could come down and give it a try. Most hated it back then, but technology has a way of improving, and some of those guys now not only use one at work, but they’ve bought them for use at home, too.

I’ve been using one at work for a few months now, and had a few minutes of my own time yesterday to play around with doing something more than storyboards on it. Hope you like the results!

Categories
Animals Art: Drawings Art: Photoshop Character Designs Development Art Random Doodles Sketchbook

Tuesdays with “TIM”

For the past year, I have been working on a secret project in my spare time with my friend Brian Joseph Ochab. We have been so excited about this for so long, that our joy can no longer be contained!

Brian and I have known each other for quite a few years. We first met when I saw him performing magic at a local Los Angeles establishment. A wonderful magician who often performs at the famed Magic Castle in Hollywood, it turned out that Brian is also a filmmaker! He came to me with this wonderful idea to make an animated short film that parodies Tim Burton’s first short called Vincent.

In Vincent (narrated by the great Vincent Price), a young boy named Vincent Malloy tries to emulate the creepy Vincent Price. Over the years since making Vincent, Tim Burton has obviously become somewhat of a name himself. Our film TIM will be about the young Timothy Todd who wishes to be just like his hero Tim Burton.

While the late Vincent Price is no longer available, last July we were very pleased to be able to work with the legendary Sir Christopher Lee who lent his wonderful distinctive voice to the role of the narrator in TIM. Brian flew to London to record Christopher who also was happy to be a part of our behind-the-scenes footage.

My involvement in this project has been as Co-producer and Art Director. I’ve been busy creating character designs and development art, and soon will be diving into storyboarding Brian’s terrific script. So far the pre-production work has been done by just me and Brian, but we will need a crew to build our sets and animate the thing, and that  can be expensive.

We discovered this great website called Kickstarter.com where people can go and donate money to help fund cool projects. Basically it is like a PBS fund drive – we promise you neat gifts for your various donations. Brian put together a great little promo film showcasing what we have been doing thus far and it tells how YOU can lend a hand! Check it out….

If the film doesn’t play here for some reason, you can access it directly by clicking on TimTheMovie.com!

Since our fundraising efforts on Kickstarter will be active for the next two months, I’ll continue to talk about it here on the blog where I’ll show you some of the art and behind the scenes moments from our journey thus far!

And if you dig what we are trying to do, please pass the word along to your friends about how they can also be involved in helping us bring this cool little film to life!

Categories
Development Art TIM the Movie Videos

Gnomeo & Juliet 5

Well, here is the last of my 2002 audition pieces to work on Disney’s Gnomeo & Juliet (opening on February 11). Not having seen it myself, I can’t vouch for its content. With all the years it has been in development, one would hope that it is every bit as fun as they are leading you to believe with the advertising. After all, it MUST be good because it had 9 writers – 10 if you count William Shakespeare. (cough cough)

I am glad that it is completely animated though. Early on there was talk of having the gnomes be realistic and set in a live-action world. If they had gone that route, kids would likely run crying in fear of any actual garden gnomes they would encounter in the future. I might even have reacted that way.

At any rate, here is my final submission for your perusal. It’s a watercolored piece inspired by the first drawing I posted on Monday. I expanded that idea of the “bent over” lawn ornaments to epic proportions by making a Braveheart gag out of it.

Gnomeo & Juliet
Nothing puts a cold fear into the hearts of the opposition like teddy bear underwear.

Thanks for checking out my Gnomeo & Juliet inspired art this week. While these proposed pieces didn’t land me a job on the film back then, they were fun to come up with. And I’ve managed to work on a few fun things since then in the world of animation.

Categories
Art: Watercolor Character Designs Development Art Disney Illustrations

Gnomeo & Juliet 4

When I lived in Greenville, South Carolina back in the mid-1990s, this one house near downtown was just COVERED in lawn ornaments. In particular, they had soooo many whirly-gig type devices that made their whole property look as though it was in constant motion. You know what I mean, right? They had anything that had a moving part when the wind blew. That was in my mind when I drew this next piece for submission to the Gnomeo & Juliet team back in 2002.

I thought of a wooden duck that had propellers for wings like you see on those whirly-gigs. If the Montagues and Capulets were in full blown fighting mode, why not have an air force of gnomes riding on the backs of these devices? If the wind was low, they could attempt to keep themselves afloat by blowing on the propellers!

Gnomeo & Juliet

Come back again tomorrow for a final look at my 2002 Gnomeo & Juliet development art submissions!

Categories
Animals Art: Photoshop Character Designs Development Art Disney Illustrations

Gnomeo & Juliet 3

For those of you just joining the blog this week, I have been showing you some art each day that I submitted to Disney back in 2002 in an attempt to get on Gnomeo & Juliet as a development artist. I had been working for the Feature Animation division for five years at that point as an in-house instructor of creative computer programs. My background had been as a children’s book illustrator prior to working for them, so I was itchy to get involved once again in creating art.

Today I share with you TWO gag pieces that were more verbal in nature than the others. The first was a quickie just to get out a little Fantasia joke…

Gnomeo & Juliet
Sometimes lawns have ceramic mushrooms decorating them as well. Fantasia’s Hop-Low character makes a cameo in this “Made In China” joke.

….and the second piece plays on the fact that these gnomes are also breakable with Grandpa referencing some dog attack from his past…

Gnomeo & Juliet
Talk about a trick knee!

Just in case you can’t read it, the girl is saying, “Mommy! Mommy! We can hear the ocean in Grandpa’s knee!” Grandpa adds, “That there is from the Great Canine Calamity of ’39.”

Come back again tomorrow to see another Gnomeo piece!

Categories
Art: Photoshop Cartoons Character Designs Development Art Disney

Gnomeo & Juliet 2

I mentioned yesterday that the upcoming Disney release of Gnomeo & Juliet was ultimately created up in Canada and was NOT the product of Disney Feature Animation down here in Burbank, CA. I was never privy to the big business branches of the studio, nor was I really all that interested in those decisions. I was just the little guy trying to scratch my name in the tree trunk.

I would imagine that part of the reason Gnomeo moved out of house was due in part to the fact that it was being developed right at the time that the studio was laying off half of its workers that was documented so well in the film Dream On Silly Dreamer. That’s about the time I was laid off, too. Not long after, Disney’s corporate management was having its own disagreements with Pixar, and had started to develop a version of Toy Story 3 apart from Pixar in the building where they had been developing Gnomeo. Those were dark days indeed.

In honor of those dark days, here’s a bleak piece I submitted back then. Somehow the thought that the deep feelings a ceramic gnome would have in losing a dear friend (that just so happened to be a ceramic lawn deer) made me laugh. Twisted? Perhaps.

Gnomeo & Juliet
Whether you are on the side of the Montagues or Capulets, you can’t help but shed a tear at the agony of this scene.

Come back again tomorrow to see TWO more Gnomeo inspired gag drawings from my archives!

Categories
Animals Art: Inking Art: Photoshop Character Designs Development Art Disney Illustrations

Gnomeo & Juliet 1

Back in 2002, Disney Animation Studios began to develop a film about lawn ornaments based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet called Gnomeo & Juliet. It only had a few people doing some visual development and storyboards as they tried to explore this idea that I heard had been brought to Disney by Elton “Lion King” John.

Gnomeo seemed to be one of those pictures that was a little under the radar with not many in the studio showing interest in working on it yet. I saw it as a possibility for a lot of comedy which was right up my alley! Maybe it would be a way for a young eager Disney employee to get his foot in the door of actual production work. So, with the encouragement of the acting producer in those early days, I started submitting some gag drawings hoping to get on the film.

The idea of lawn ornaments from rival yards in a feud with each other just rang a bell in my head for some reason. I knew yards that had been chock full of ridiculous sculptures and whirly-bobs. So much humor could be derived from the drama of warring “families” combined with the crazy decorative contraptions coming to life.

With Gnomeo & Juliet opening Friday, February 11, I thought I’d share a few of my 2002 gag proposals with you that still make me smile. I’ll post something new each day this week up to Friday. I never did get invited to work on the film, but then again, Disney didn’t actually end up making it in-house either. It was shelved for a few years, then resurrected up in a studio in Canada.

This is the first of many pieces I submitted (created with pencil and Photoshop). It was also the first piece of art I did that was hung on a development board in the hallways of Disney. That alone was unbelievably encouraging.

Gnomeo & Juliet art
Remember those lawn ornaments that looked like a girl bending over? Thought it was ripe for comedy with these nervous garden gnomes.

Come back again tomorrow to see another of my Gnomeo & Juliet submissions!

Categories
Art: Photoshop Character Designs Development Art Disney Illustrations

2010 Monster Month: Day 16 – The Red Scare

I tend to draw in my sketchbook often. It’s a place where I can go to get all the bad drawings out of my hand, and hopefully get some decent visual ideas on the page, too. Often I’ll look at that blank whiteness that mocks me without a specific thought as to what I’ll be drawing. Even as I put the pencil to the paper, I’ll begin a nose and let the face organically materialize around it making the design decisions along the way. This unstructured method really allows for random experimentation.

For those of you who regularly follow my blog, you know that from time to time I share a drawing here and there from the sketchbook. I try to select a decent sketch to show while shielding you from lesser ones that may share space with it on the actual paper. Once in a great while, a whole page in the sketchbook just clicks and is worthy to be unveiled. This is one such page…

All I knew at the start was that I wanted to draw some monsters. While they aren’t masterpieces, they each have a little something interesting about them, don’t you think? If you like to draw, PLEASE buy yourself a sketchbook and fill it with the random musings of your mind!

Well, to continue the creative process, tomorrow I will have a more fully developed full-bodied drawing of one of these fellas that just started here as a random red monster head. Come back to see which one I picked!

Categories
Art: Preliminary Sketches Character Designs Development Art Monsters Random Doodles Sketchbook