The Chad Frye - Illustration GuyRecently at the office I’ve been working on some drawings of cute characters. I couldn’t quite shake the cute out of my arm when I got home, so I drew this pencil drawing of a young squirrel in my sketchbook. I’m thinking of doing another one in watercolor at some point when I have the time, but for now, enjoy this big-eyed acorn lover…
I’ve never been one to take very comprehensive notes in school. Always having an interest in art, many doodles littered the notes of any academic class I happened to be in. I usually was paying attention to the teacher, but somehow the margins were always full of stuff another part of my brain generated.
I recently started taking a storyboard refresher class at the Animation Guild that has been meeting on Monday nights. The teacher, Bob Kurtz, has been very interesting and informative on a topic near to my heart. However, knowing my proclivity to doodle during classes, this time I immediately cut to the chase by bringing a sketchbook along instead of note paper. I figured I’d be drawing more, and class notes would be relegated to the margins instead.
So, here is a page from my notes on the first night of class. The sketches had absolutely nothing to do with what was being taught. The closest thing to being remotely connected to what was happening in the room is that fella in the top left – he was one of my fellow students. Yes, I was paying attention. It’s just that my hand was off doing it’s own thing.
On a completely unrelated matter, I just wanted to wish my sister Tori a happy birthday today! And she is about to pop with her first kid, too! If he arrives today, that will make a new birthday in the family easier to remember!
– Epictetus (55 – 135)
It is hard to believe, but the last Drawn & Quoted column was posted way back in June of 2010! It is high time to resurrect these combinations of quotes by famous people with drawings that relate to their words of wisdom in some way. I say “some way” because some drawings have been straight forward while others have travelled the path of the sick and twisted. If you would like to see any of the previous Drawn & Quoted columns, just CLICK HERE!
Yeah, yeah, it’s Wednesday. Consider this a bonus issue of Tuesdays with TIM! The Tuesday thing still applies because the video I’m about to show you was filmed yesterday which was (drumroll please)….TUESDAY!
Well, since Brian and I are in our final week of fundraising on Kickstarter, we wanted to make you an offer that is harder to refuse! We really need your financial support to help us make this film. If we don’t reach our total goal, all the money pledged thus far will revert to its respective donors. So, between now and the end of our pledge drive next Tuesday, March 29, if you pledge $500 or more to us, I pledge to do an ORIGINAL drawing of our lead character TIM! The only catch is that we have to make our full Kickstarter goal before I start wielding my pencil for you!
The type of drawing you can expect will be like this one…
Each drawing will be unique because each drawing will be drawn by hand – my hand! In addition, with your pledge you will be entitled to any other rewards we are offering on Kickstarter for the level at which you pledge! Does this sweeten the pot for you? If you need further convincing, check out the video below that we just put together for your amusement:
TIM Video Update 3 from Wonder Motion Studios on Vimeo.
Today’s post is a page straight out of my sketchbook. While they are pretty much just random faces that popped out of my pencil, a few of them explored a certain head shape. You can see that about five of those heads have a plump pear shape to them. Just alter the eyes, nose and mouth a bit, and you have five completely different characters ranging between a good ol’ boy and an alien!
It’s Tuesday, so that must mean it’s time to share some more behind-the-scenes tidbits with you about my short animated film TIM. My producing partner, Brian Joseph Ochab, and I were recently discussing the need to have a logo that would appropriately communicate the vibe we are trying to elicit with TIM. It needs to be fun, whimsical, and maintain a creepy Burtonesque vibe that the film itself will have. In essence, something that can be the public face of our project. So, I broke out my sketchbook and started conceptualizing!
When I begin the visual thought process, often a flurry of very loose doodles tumble out of my pencil. My hand just whirls around the paper blorping out whatever it wants in the search for the right idea. You’ve heard of someone’s hand having a mind of its own? Believe me, sometimes it’s a challenge to get my actual mind to coordinate with the hand. My hand can go off on its own like a teenager who is handed the keys to the car for the first time. In this case, the hand was exploring lots of things that just weren’t working. It spent several hours involved in this pursuit until one sketch fell onto the page that caused my actual mind to say “THAT’S IT!”
After working out a more detailed pencil drawing, the next step was to create a nicely inked drawing. I do like inking by hand with brush on paper. I bought a really terrific brush pen a year or so ago and use it almost exclusively over my traditional paint brush/bottle of ink. It’s a Japanese brush pen sold by Pentel here in the States, and the ink in the cartridges is a nice solid and permanent black ink. That sucker really holds a point, too. Anyway, enough about my love for my brush pen. I also use permanent black ink pens like Microns or Prismacolor to supplement what the brush pen can’t do.
So, Tim was hand-inked, then scanned into Photoshop for some coloring. In this case, I did a kind of digital airbrushing to bring little Timothy Todd to life. The final art has all kinds of potential applications. We already made it the face of our “TIM – the movie” Facebook page (come join us by clicking here!), he makes an appearance on a coffee mug in a video update we posted on our Kickstarter page, he’s in an ad on Stop Motion Magazine’s website, and he’ll pop up in other places as well. In fact, we believe that a version of this drawing will even be the special limited edition collector’s pin that we are offering as a reward on Kickstarter!
This image may also become a T-shirt down the line. Well, it IS a T-shirt now, but only a one-of-a-kind at the moment. Just this past Saturday, Plaxico the dog featured TIM on his website. (If you’d like to take a look, CLICK HERE!) We’d like to eventually make shirts down the road, but for now am concentrating on trying to actually get the film made! But, if we do make it a shirt, it would likely look something like this…
Welcome to another fine addition to my Tuesdays with TIM posts showing you some of the artwork created in the development of this exciting short film project I’ve been working on with my producing partner Brian Joseph Ochab!
When trying to develop the visual style of TIM in early 2010, we didn’t wish to stray from the visuals of Tim Burton’s creepy animated films. We wanted to channel the look of Burton’s 1982 short Vincent while combining it with the visual sophistication of films like Corpse Bride and Henry Selick’s Coraline. Vincent was in black and white, and had a certain economy of scenery that was inexpensive to produce yet visually compelling. The latter films incorporated color and style to their imagery that just captures the imagination.
So, with visions of the macabre dancing in my head, I grabbed my sketchbook and started to draw various scenes based on lines in the script. We chose a couple of them to illustrate, and I got to work on this particular piece.
Yes, the art below is a genuine old school painting in real life. I created it primarily in watercolor, and incorporated the use of colored pencils just a tad. I really love the watercolor medium, and use it often for my development art on this film. I think the uneven nature of it helps give a certain tactile feeling to each scene, and helps give the viewer a certain uneasiness with the creepy subject matter.
If you would like to hear Christopher Lee’s narration that goes with this piece, we feature it in our promo film over on Kickstarter. If you watch it long enough, there’s even a quick shot of me working on this very painting. You can go there right now by clicking on www.TIMtheMovie.com.
If you go to Kickstarter, please consider pledging some money to us so that we can actually make this film. We are in our final month of fundraising. I know at the $100 level, one of the things you’ll receive is a special limited edition print of one of my paintings. We have a few to choose from, so the print might even be of this particular painting.
When you are in a meeting at the office, you can always look around and see that people have paper and pen in hand scribbling as other people are talking. One would assume that they are taking notes, and often that is the case. When you work in an animation studio, however, the scribbles are very likely doodles – doodles that usually have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I first started doing this years ago. I used to sit in meetings, and would have trouble keeping my eyes open. In order to stay alert, I would let my hand wander on a blank piece of paper before me. Sure, I’d sketch something now and then that had to do with the meeting at hand, but this was my way of staying alert.
I know what you are thinking, “How can you pay attention to a meeting when you are drawing something else entirely?” Beats me. It’s something I discovered I could do back in high school. I would be doodling away on my notepaper, and yet when a teacher would call on me, I’d be ready with the correct answer. If my hand is silent, my mind tunes out.
So, all you really need is a ball point pen and a pad of Post-It notes. Then, let the parade of the imagination come forth! Here are a few such doodles that spilled from my hand in a recent meeting.
