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…

batman boards

This storyboarding sequence spanned two modules – we were given a script for “Batman: The Animated Series” to interpret through storyboards. These are more of a progressive step-by-step production board as opposed to the presentation boards we did for the trunk monkey assignment. It was a good exercise to try to work in the style of a show, except that the school provided a…

trunk monkey in color

Here we are – trunk monkey, color edition. The consensus from my instructor & classmates was that the colors were a bit too bright, but hey, I was restraining myself. It took a lot of self control to keep from going brighter.  Note the addition of keys in the guy’s hand in the first panel too. 

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).

snow white dancing scene – Drawing from the Imagination Final

Here’s my final project submission for my favorite class last semester, Drawing from the Imagination. The assignment was to illustrate an excerpt of “Snow White” … of course, I forgot to save the text… but to paraphrase, Snow White & the dwarves (none of them higher than Snow’s waist) have just finished cleaning all day. After a good supper, they all celebrate with dancing…

lip sync final project for Traditional Animation 2!

Sorry for the delay in posting! Here’s my final animation project -my first lip-sync attempt ever. The assignment was to take established characters and animate sound clips. I chose Foghorn Leghorn & Daffy Duck… the beaks were a challenge. Overall I probably worked on this for about 5 or 6 weeks from start to finish. I still have a few more things to work…

evil queen from snow white

We recently had an assignment for Drawing from the Imagination that required reflection plotting – so complex! The theme was Snow White’s evil stepmother; the process was challenging and counterintuitive. In order to make sure that the drawing included the both the queen and her reflection, we were instructed to draw the queen & her reflection first, then fit the frame of the mirror…

combat!

This assignment was a lot of fun to work on! It was a three-week process for my Drawing for Imagination class, and my instructor provided lots of great feedback along the way. Here’s the finished piece – I am really happy with the characters, their costumes and the general layout. The first week, we had to design nude characters in combat – this way…

layout building – "big city" theme

For my Layout design class, I had to create a simple layout using a number of layers including background, overlays, underlays & character level. Here’s what the final piece looked like, plus smaller versions of the individual layers.   If I had the time to work on this some more, I would make the sky part a solid block with a light gradient, rather than…

western layouts

Since my Traditional Animation 2 & Drawing from the Imagination classes have been so intense this semester, I haven’t posted much from my Layout for Animation course. Here’s an assignment from a few modules back – the goal was to portray the same Western town from two different perspectives. Here’s the one-point view: And here’s the two-point view, a bit further down the street:…