Museum of Science Mural project

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a super neat project for the Discovery Center at the Museum of Science, working with the staff members to develop a 16 – foot – long mural of New England Forest Animals.  Here’s a bunch of the progress work, with some color comps, one linework variation (we’re still moving some stuff around, so the final won’t…

caricatures for character design

Caricatures are crazy – how is it that you can exaggerate/minimize features and somehow get a likeness that can – when professionally executed – be more recognizable than a photo?  This guy – Wouter Tulp – is one amazing caricature artist (among his many talents). Hanoch Piven manages to create very abstract caricatures with amazing likenesses, using objects and minimal color. Here are a few…

fabric fold design

Take a look at your elbows – if you’re wearing a long-sleeve shirt, you’ll have a bunch of fabric folds there. Anytime you move, bend or stretch your arm, those folds change. The folds in fabric help describe the action of the figure, but sometimes they’re super complicated and it’s not necessary to include every single fold.  How can we simplify fabric so that…

shape character design

Here’s a fun recent assignment – create a character by starting with a shape outline that utilizes basic design principles (curves vs straights, small/med/large, intuitive lines.) Here’s my little final guy, with the earlier steps below.

museum birds

Some more sketches from my MOS days: bird-centric this time.  I love the look in this turkey’s eye – wary and slightly crazed. This owl is pissed.   Hooded mergansers have crazy serrated beaks that look like rows of teeth.

Colby Room animal sketches

Classes are starting up next week! I don’t have much left to post from my summer courses so here are some older sketches I did during my lunch hours at the Museum of Science when I worked there full time. The staff of the Collections department were always super helpful when they were working on re-cataloging the Colby Room (essentially, the recreated hunting trophy room…

smith family secret presentation boards

A couple months ago, my friend Alison asked me to illustrate these awesome books she’s written, about a boy who discovers he has the ability to make his drawings come to life. They are wonderfully written elementary-level stories and I know she’s going to have a lot of success with them.  Since I haven’t had a ton of free time to work on the…

trunk monkey storyboards

Our most recent assignment for storyboarding is to do a new take on the “trunk monkey” advertising campaign (here’s a link to the real commercials that aired around 2006). We had to create just 4 cleaned-up presentation boards to get our concept across – these are meant to be a summary of the concept for a pitch rather than move-by-move production boards. I went…

storyboarding

Classes just started up again this week! I’m taking Acting for Animators & Storyboarding. The acting class will mostly be videos of myself (& probably Nick) so I won’t be posting much from that class, unless we have some really Oscar-worthy performances.  The courses run double-time in the summer so I have two deadlines per week. I’m looking forward to the storyboarding class –…

layout design thumbnails

Here’s a quick post with some recent thumbnails from my layout design class, demonstrating some elements of design: