The Little Mermaid, A different take

I recently saw some online images of the Finnish ballet of Hans Christian Andersen's, "The Little Mermaid" and was totally floored. Everything from the costume design to the lighting and dance have a slightly dark and mysterious tone that feel just right for the classic tale, departing completely from the Disney version. It made me wonder what other cultures and takes on the tale might be interesting to see. I was inspired by the architecture of Okinawa and thought perhaps the Little Mermaid might fall in love with a Samurai. I'm not sure I really got it but it was seriously a blast to dream about.

Some initial thumbnails, dreaming about what kind of island The Little Mermaid first encounters the Samurai.

This is an establishing shot of the island I chose from the thumbnails, just before The Little Mermaid meets the Samurai she falls in love with.

I was thinking of some foreshadowing in the architectural motifs. These are a few ideas. The possibilities are endless, really. Below are a few variations on The Little Mermaid. I still feel like I want to do a few more pages of these and then move on to the Samurai, Triton and the Sea Witch.

Many more updates coming in a few weeks! Thanks for visiting.

The Unfortunate Toad

This summer I have been working on a short story that I plan to bring to print. It is about a Toad, and is tentatively called, "The Unfortunate Toad". 

There is a cast of characters that you'd expect in a fairy tale, but in this story their roles are a little different, due to some unforeseen circumstances.

I thought I would share some of the work I've created so far. There is a lot more in the works, including many more characters, but I will be keeping those to myself for awhile. In addition to "The Unfortunate Toad" story,  in the next few months I will be posting a few more updates to "The Time Machine" and other art that I have been working on behind the scenes. It's really exciting stuff that I can't wait to share!

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Please stay tuned for more in the next two months! Thanks for visiting.

CTN Expo in Burbank and new website updates!

Hey friends! I will be attending the CTNX animation expo in Burbank, California this upcoming weekend in order to show my portfolio, get some much needed feedback, meet up with friends, go to lectures and geek out over all the awesome art! Here are a few highlights from my portfolio. Although I am in the midst of working on a couple of story projects, I put together this basic portfolio with highlights from those projects (still so much more to come) and a couple of images from my game experience. I'm going to the expo with the intent of getting some feedback on the personal work so that I can focus for the next few months on what I need to accomplish.

THE TIME MACHINE: Visual Development with Armand Baltazar/Animation Collaborative

I recently took a visual development course at the Animation Collaborative taught by senior visual development artist Armand Baltazar, who has worked for many years in animated film, with credits on Dreamworks, "Shark Tale", "Spirit", and "A Bee Movie", as well as Disney's "Princess and the Frog", and more recently Pixar's "Cars 2", among many others. Of all the classes I've taken in recent years, I found this course to be perhaps the most exciting. I've always been deeply interested in visual storytelling, although I've not always had ideal opportunities to practice that very fine art to the fullest I've wanted. So when Armand's course came up on the roster and time in my schedule allowed, I jumped. Aside from my own interests,  I feel a good visual development class is an excellent experience for any artist at any level to go through. So many of us have grand ideas around stories, world building and stylization, but how many of us have really gone deep into our visual storytelling skills? If you've not had the opportunity to take such a class, I encourage you to find one or else pick up a few good "art of" books for film, games, and television.

 Regarding this specific class at the Animation Collaborative, I felt it was absolutely worth it. Armand was a fantastic teacher and really put in a lot of extra work and effort in teaching the class, even staying late to give back really valuable individual feedback, paint overs and advice tailored to each student. Each class was chock full of fantastic information about visual development, portfolio development, and tips and techniques for working quickly, as is required on any project in development.

For the class we each picked a classic book to visualize as an animated film. I picked HG Wells', "The Time Machine", a book that I illustrated years ago, but unfortunately didn't do a very good job of it due to the extremely rushed deadline. For years now I've wanted to revisit the story, and have imagined a reboot tailored toward an animated young adult film. I thought I'd share my character design concepts here, and later will share more development. Over the course of the next year I'll be working up ideas around this story and will share more as I solidify ideas.

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My Time Traveler in my reboot of "The Time Machine" is a young woman in present day. When I draw character sketches, I like to keep a very, very simple line with almost no detail. I like to save any modeling or texturing for painting. I really enjoy the challenge of trying to capture a gesture in as few lines as possible.

I envision the Time Machine device to be wearable tech made up of everyday things like hacked ipads, iphones and a laser tag vest. Like in the original book, the time machine does not move the individual through space, but only through time.

Imagine what happens to those digits after thousands and thousands of years of swiping/touch technology… I enjoyed working on my take on the ELOI quite a lot. I envisioned them growing tall and thin with elaborate hairstyles and lots of adornments. 

 The Morlocks live in underground caves where they have evolved eyes that allow them to see in the complete darkness. They live amongst the ruins, pollution and grim of thousands of years of human corruption.

Below are some quick color comps and sketches of what I have been developing around story moment ideas. Most of these are pretty quick, like 2 hours each or even less in the case of sketches. All of these are meant to be exploratory in nature, and will eventually become more finished paintings. I can't wait to work on these!

 I've long been a fan of Douglass Trumbull, well known in the film industry for his innovative special effects on movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I wanted to emulate his effects in some way, and have envisioned the bottom row of images to be my take on time travel effects.

This is my quickie version of a future city, although I have plans to iterate on this a bit more. Given that our class was only 12 weeks and I only had the weekends to work on it, I felt that I didn't have enough time to really dig through this juicy subject. Looking forward to exploring some more concepts!

Hey, who doesn't need a hot Eloi boyfriend in the future? Actually, this is one aspect of the story that I am quite excited about: the friendship between The Time Traveler and Weena, in my version female (time traveler) and male (eloi). I think this can be resonate with the story themes in some unusual ways - I'm so excited to work some more on these ideas.

I actually have a number of additional sketches and comps, but they are still a little too compy to share. Hopefully soon! 

As I continue to develop my ideas I will post. I hope to put a little book together by sometime next summer, if all goes well. 

Thanks for reading!!!

Character Design Course at Animation Collaborative

I recently took a really great character design course at the Animation Collaborative with Pixar Character Designer Dan Holland. 

During the last several sessions of the class we worked with the Story Class team and their teacher/director Louis Gonzales to develop character designs for their story. I focused on the satan character, "Booker", who is a voodoo supernatural otherworldly creature. 

I first started with a lot of research on voodoo both in the Caribbean and in Africa. I found some amazing reference and riffed on the designs keeping in mind that the creature underneath was supernatural.

These are my first pass very rough 5 minute sketches meant for exploration:

I also explored some ideas with incorporating alligator features in his face, since alligators are a common animal in the New Orleans region. These were super quick, like 5 minutes each - just gut reaction sketches.

After creating lots and lots of quick "gut reaction" sketches like the above, I started seeing if I could combine the two ideas into one. I gravitated toward a black gown, a skull with alligator like teeth embellishments as well as possibly gold filigrees, and necklaces that have lots of jewels and charms. I wanted the hands to suggest that the guy under there was not a human but some other being. I wanted the eyes to look like alligator eyes.

I narrowed in on the historical concept of satan: a former man who then became an angel, who then fell from grace and became the devil. I thought about what he looked like as a man, then an angel, and then the devil. I wanted to incorporate some evidence of that story into his design.

I wondered what he looked like without his mask - a demon with alligator teeth and eyes, alligator skin and maybe even snakes crawling all over him. Perhaps the mask he wears is the skull of his former human being self.

The Booker/devil character in the story presents the main character, Lou, with a magical trumpet that can play anything he wants with the expertise of a seasoned artist.

I thought he might also sit on a throne of sorts made of animal skins, horns and imagery that symbolized fate. I didn't have time to explore the throne more than this - I would like to go back and do a much more thorough exploration.

After presenting these to the director Louis and the story team, Louis felt that the Booker character was even more of a human being than I depicted him rather than a demon like creature. I went back to the drawing board and did some more sketching. The story team really liked the quick sketches I did of the character in a zoot suit with charms and a head dress but wanted a human face.

So I worked up some exploration of variants of the head dress, all based on the alligator motif with feathers, shells and sometimes horns. I also like incorporating charms which seem common in voodoo art. 

The one I liked the best is in the middle. His design is derived from african mask animal designs. I thought his beard might be dread locks with some charms worked in. I looked at patterns of fabrics from African voodoo culture and tried to think about how I might incorporate those designs into the zoot suit. I also tried adding some pins like you would see in a voodoo doll.

I think I could probably come up with many, many more concepts for this character, but I want to make some final decisions now that the class has ended. I'd like to paint these up and also put them into some compositions. 

Bowie the Greyhound

 On Thursday evenings, I attend a sculpture workshop with some friends. Usually we hire a model for figurative work. This time, however, we thought we'd tackle something different,  the greyhound of one of our favorite models.

 We set Bowie up on a sleeping mat while we sculpted. Occasionally she would get up and walk around the room or go outside for a quick run. 

While I was making the armature, I observed the incredibly graceful movements of our model. I noticed the long flowing s curves repeated throughout her form and her incredibly "springy" stride. I wanted to somehow capture that kinetic grace in the pose.

I didn't make any gesture drawings, but instead decided to just mess with the armature until I found a pose that worked. I put a base layer of clay on the armature, adjusted it several times, and after about two sessions found a pose that had movement. I had trouble with the armature because I used aluminum wire where I should have used steel; the clay is heavy and can bend the aluminum wire. To compensate I decided to make a sturdy base at the bottom and balled up aluminum foil for the rib cage.

Eventually, our Thursday night sessions ended and our model was no longer available. I decided to take the sculpture home to work on it little by little after work.

The truth is, I am not really a sculptor. I am a two dimensional artist studying the 3rd dimension, sculpture. In the 3 years since I have been learning about sculpting with my friends each Thursday, I have found that the practice aids my understanding of depicting nature in two dimensions greatly. My mind is better able to process how form turns and how light falls on those forms far better than if I hadn't.

My underlying interest in visual language is the idea of making something, anything feel alive to the viewer, whether it is realistic or fantasy; I want to be able create an illusion and spirit of life, the sublime. I strive to transcend technique in order to create something beautiful that reflects Nature in a visually poetic manner. It is this idea that keeps me pushing forward, wanting to learn more, improve my abilities and become increasingly skilled at how I might do this. Sculpture has helped me understand in a different way how to think about how to capturing "aliveness" of a creation. While I am certainly a lesser sculptor than others, I feel exploring this medium has helped me solidify ideas about visual illusions.

At this point, I decided to place a black board behind Bowie so that I could see more clearly the lines of her form. I started to soften the muscles and add some areas of compression along with skin folds. I came to the conclusion that although some of the sculpture might not be entirely "correct", it was my choice in serving the design at this point; I enjoyed rounding out forms and accenting areas I found the most beautiful.

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My "finished" sculpture, at least as finished as I want it to be:

"Bowie", oil based clay on wood base.

s curves in motion:

While I worked on this sculpture throughout the summer, I took breaks to attend the Weekend with the Masters painting conference, which you can find in some of my previous posts, but, perhaps more interestingly, during this time I immersed myself in the work of string theorist Brian Greene, author of "The Hidden Reality". *

Aside from ideas about the shape of our questionably infinite universe, one fact about Greene's work stands out as entirely relevant to every day considerations: 

"Nothing in the laws of physics points to free will. Therefore, like time, it is a useful illusion. We are a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics.  And that’s it.”

 (from an interview with screen writer Charlie Kaufman)

 Really? Assuming Nature created these complex particles, it also created the desire for some of us to want to recreate it in art. Why? To understand it? For what purpose? Maybe meditating on Nature's beauty is somehow important in the grander scheme. It certainly is for me at least.

*You can also watch a fantastic PBS dvd series based on his book by the same name, "The Elegant Universe", which explains quantum mechanics in layman terms and is pretty enjoyable regardless (among numerous articles and speeches published all over the web).

Study of a Leafy Sea Dragon + Some

I recently visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see the amazing Seahorse Show. Wow... I did so many sketches, took photos and afterward obsessed over these tiny leafy sea dragons. I did this little study and added some fantasy color - I scanned in my sketchbook drawing and added some Photoshop color to it. 

Here are some of my sketches. After awhile I tried to draw them from memory. I'm not sure if they are accurate but I think the spirit of them is there. I studied Leafy Seadragons, Weedy Seadragons and plain old Sea horses. Such amazing creatures!

This is a leafy sea dragon with some fantasy coloring using colored pencils in my sketchbook.

Plain old seahorse, but just as fascinating. They seem to almost have exoskeleton forms, very angular, more than you would think by looking at their silhouette. 

This page is a mix of both Leafy Sea Dragons and Weedy Sea Dragons. You can tell the difference by looking at the amount of decorative fins. Weedys have much more elaborate fins than Leafys. 

A portrait I tried from memory of a Weedy Sea Dragon. I could study these guys forever!