Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Spaceman Stu
Recently I was Art Directing with Leo Burnett in Chicago on a new campaign for McDonald's using some animation. This first one being "Spaceman Stu"...go ahead, try to keep from humming this tune later in the day. Thanks to Duck Studios in LA for such a neat and fun look.
Friday, May 21, 2010
How it all started...
If there was ever a fun career in which to get started - it was advertising. Here are some of my favorite commercials I had a blast making...AND they were all part of a balanced breakfast!!!
Animation Reel
Some commercials/animation I've either concepted, animated, helped animate &/or storyboarded, etc.
Row of Bravado
One of my favorite Rotten School spreads was this scene with Bernie Bridges bringing his very pathetic football squad into a huddle. It was fun assigning specific numbers that had hidden meaning to the players (for Jennifer Ecch - in another scene, she was a weight-reflective 125 - as in lbs.). One such number in particular was the bench-warming character "Nosebleed," who always gets nosebleeds. We gave him the number "O+." As in O positive... I also love how Feenman's helmet is never on the correct way - facing forward!
Watercolor for these was always done in Painter with a variety of spatter water brushes, colored pencils for touch-ups, and simple air brush tips.
Rotten Cast
While a lot of what on which I've recently worked can't be posted as it hasn't been released yet, here's a look back at the cast, practically in its entirety (apart from some random fart clouds and familiar cyclone, funnels of vomit - yes I just wrote that) of the Rotten School characters. The point of the full-color ones was to have them featured on the backs of the books...whereas the rest just weren't quite ready for prime-time yet.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Still a WIP (Work In Progress)
...And I keep getting side-tracked (who doesn't I guess), but here's where I've left off with these gals. Good thing I'm way ahead of schedule for this piece...nothing like thinking about the holidays in the springtime.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
What a Rotten Series!
It occurred to me that after 16 of these R.L. Stine Rotten School books, I never thought to post the covers I did. Digitally is a great way to show them as they were picked out to be the most vibrant (blindingly-so) colors on the shelves so they'd stand out just from their spines alone. See if you agree:
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
One Fishy Story
The average time I've had to work on picture books is nine months. During that period there's very little time for anything else as it's very non-stop. Perhaps the second most fulfilling part of working on these (aside from finishing them), is getting the array of pages in pencil form all completed and approved by the publisher. It is at this point you become a proverbial hermit, dying to show the publisher each individual page once they're done, but you know it'd be best to complete them all first. With Trout, Trout, Trout (A Fish Chant)! the biggest trick was to arrange April Pulley Sayre's poetry of fish names in a visual order near the individual fishies so that children would still follow the prose left to right accordingly (and this was very tricky as fish like to swim around the page a great deal!).
But then when the color pages come together you really start to get chills. I love a great picture book as much as any kid, but when you actually start to see your own pages come together and you realize they're on their way to actually becoming a bound entity, one gets a little giddy - so much so I have a tendency to hide things in the pages for fun. I put my kids' names in the pictures, there's an illo of a piranha from my first book, Gopher Up Your Sleeve, by Tony Johnston, in there, just to name a few things. Another fun thing is with the "Cavefish;" if you look at the cave-drawing in his cave, you'll see that the monster fish is the same shape the Starhead Topminnows take on the next set of two pages...
Friday, March 26, 2010
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