In early 2000, I moved out to San Francisco. When I arrived here, the dot com crash had just about begun, leaving a lot of artists around town clamoring for freelance work. It was not great timing on my part, but despite the struggle, I did not regret moving to this beautiful California city. Most of the freelance work I found the first few years in living here was not local, rather it was either for Calabash back in Chicago, Celluloid Studios in Denver (which was bought by Will Vinton in recent years), greeting card and book illustrations in NYC. I considered going back to school at the Academy of Art in downtown San Francisco, but as it turns out, I was busy juggling various projects from various companies, leaving me little time or money to reinvent my career. I made a choice at this point to continue what I was doing and see where it would lead me. Over time I gradually built up as many freelance projects I could in order to customize my portfolio for the bay area, which is heavy in video game work and film. Try as I might, I finally found some good steady and rewarding freelance work through the Learning Company, who at that time was making educational cd games.

Given that this was still an animation based production, the work flow had a similar pipeline: layout was done by a layout artist, then colored by a colorist, which in this case was me. The drawing was done by [the great] Marcello Vignali. I painted it in Photoshop.

I'm not sure who did this drawing. I colored it, trying to make sure the palette and lighting was consistent from scene to scene.

This is a little spot illustration I did for a Reader Rabbit board game. I wish I could find more samples from this particular project. It was a fun one!