This is a rough pass on a silly sequence from my Dick and Don project. The set up is that our heroes were framed for a robbery they didn’t commit and at the moment are hot on the trail of the real villains. The gangsters are followed to a newsstand which opens to reveal a secret passage.
What lies behind the newsstand no one knows.
I was on the road this last week. While waiting for delayed flights, meetings to begin, and hangovers to pass I was free to work on some new iPad paintings. They are both from my head as I couldn’t have been further from the wild.
Just being in California during in the summer was enough to have me dreaming of camping. I think my brain is permanently etched with details about pine, redwood bark and the smells of the Sierras. It’s a theme that winds its way though out my work and this point I think its is fair to say that I owe a debt to my parents for all of the vacations we spent in the mountains.
The painting above is the later of the two but I think the most successful. Both were painted in ArtRage and took about two or three hours to paint.
I believe this is my seventh, solid cover-to-cover finished book. Of those I have shelved it has taken the longest to complete as I have been distracted by a lot of digital drawing (Darn you Wacom!). This work spans the last two years and has a lot of road trips and projects scattered though out its pages. There are some sizable time gaps in it which I am not so happy about but as a viewer it probably makes for interesting browsing as the artwork stays fresh and changes often.
It is also notable that this is the first book where someone else’s drawings have shared the page with mine. Try as I might it has been impossible to keep my toddler son Silas away from this book. His handy work is present towards the end pages.
Below are some exploratory character designs from the “Dragon” project. Most of this designs are about four years old and were made right after I finished up my time working on Space Chimps. The script was finished by then but because of Space Chimps reception all of Vanguards projects were put on hold or outright shelved. It was a frustrating time for me so I started drawing Dragon art when I could, hoping that some fresh designs would help push the project forward.
This didn’t really work but it did open the door to a bigger movie and what was once just a little tale began to grow into a romanticized epic adventure.
Here is a collection of concept paintings I made for the Dragon project. All were painted in Photoshop.
There isn’t too much art to share for my thesis. I had a pretty clear visual idea of what i was going to make and jumped straight into the animation. There were a few pieces that I did make, some colour tests and a few character scribbles. Here they are.
Just so I can add it to the archive here are the original lype-synce test i made for Jimmy’s character.
This sketchbook was made while I was a student at USC Animation. It is dated 2002. There are a lot of figure drawings and surfing doodles in it which is very fitting since that is all I really did back then. It is a notable book as it was in this sketchbook that I first started to develop my own style.
I really should have a lot more work to show for this project. It has lived in my head for years. I really love it. I’ll leave the story for a future post but expect me to write a good deal about it in the future. Its my baby and I love it. Out side of friends and family this is the first time I have put any of it up for others to see.
There was a time when Space Chimps was being tossed about as a possible musical. This was one of the sequences I was asked to make while exploring that idea. Somewhere I have the animatic for this sequence. I will post it when I find it.
This is a lost space chimps one scene. The greasy salesman character, I believe his name was spyro gyro or something like that, was cut and with him these boards. The set up to this was that NASA was getting its budget cut and they needed to sell to Feds a new mission, Ham was the unwilling pawn that would get the agency the money it needed. He had just been seized and dragged from the circus in the earlier scene.
