purple bird sketch

Another quick post! Here’s a 1/2 hour color sketch of a purple finchy bird that I did last week, been trying to get back into color. Also posted nine more sketch pages – lots more birds, but also echidnas! Alpacas! Shoebill cranes (those guys are five feet tall)! …And many more assorted animals. Check them out, let me know what you think.

Thesis update: New Monsters

Working on an update of my animatic and I’m happy to say that an old idea has worked its way back into the film – a sort of quick montage of unsuccessful candidates.  The new version of the animatic is coming soon, but in the meantime, here’s a sketch sheet of some new monster ideas:

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.

character design class & more!

School’s back in session! I have a fantastic lineup of classes this fall:– ANM 633 Character Design – basic character design, already lots of fun – FA 602 Head Drawing – a traditional fine arts class, mostly in the medium of sanguine & white pastel pencils on grey toned paper. – ANM 670 Preproduction- an excellent course to learn about film preproduction and to…

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…

layout design – ticino pan

Another simple layout design posting from the spring semester – I based this off of a favorite vintage travel poster of Ticino, Switzerland. The assignment was to design a pan – you can see the basic framing and simple ghosted characters in the second version below (after the jump).