Seasons Greetings

Now for something completely different!

Sometimes I want to move forward by trying something a little bit beyond my comfort zone. It's also nice to take a break from the same old 'same old'.

Here are a couple of sketchbook pages from my trip to England this month. I use quite expensive Namiki pens and mechanical pencils and I have this, probably irrational, fear they will confiscate them at the airport lest they be used as weapons to hijack the airplane!

Spooky Castle

It's that time of year again. Spooky stuff abounds. Here are some Maya sketches from a project I was working on a couple of years ago. Characters by David Feiss and some input from Luc Desmarchelier on the tower.

Elephant sports

I have to confess, mine is no occupation for a grown man!

Concept pieces from Over the Hedge. I always liked the idea of the mice watching a horror movie on the stolen laptop.

A few characters I sketched at a La Jolla art show this weekend.

Shrek's house. Early concepts.

Shrek first lived in a garbage dump near a human village called Wart Creek. At one time it was thought that he lived with his parents and kept rotting fish in his bedroom. Here are more of my early concepts  for the first Shrek film, circa 1996/97.

Most of us, if not all of us, were used to designing for flat 2D animation. It seemed to me that our gouache paintings, delightful as they were, with their brush marks and paper textures, were not going to get us near to the CG look that Shrek was going to have so I started building models, photographing them and working with them in Photoshop. Using Photoshop was a fairly new concept in those days though I was by no means the first to do so.

Shrek. The first one, that is.

With the fourth Shrek movie soon to be released I thought I'd dig out some of my old concept drawings from around 1996/97 when I was working on the first Shrek movie in LA, before it moved up north to PDI. Yes, it really was that long ago. The Art Department was just learning how to use Photoshop 2, there wasn't a digital camera in sight and I don't recall seeing too many cell phones, if any.

These are landscape ideas for Shrek's world. We didn't have a Shrek or Donkey model at this stage and there was a fad for making drawings brown. These were done in black and white with pencil and then colorized on the photocopier. I'll publish more when and if I can find stuff.

How to Train Your Dragon

Here's another early concept piece of mine from "Dragon", the nursery. I'm told that Dreamworks has issued it as a limited addition giclee. I'll keep you posted.

Copyright Dreamworks SKG

'How to Train Your Dragon' early concept art circa 2004-2005

Here is some of my early concept art from 'HTTYD'. It's amazing how long it can take to make a good animated feature film and remarkable how much the story can change in five years.

This is Valhallarama, Hiccup's mum, who never made it into the final film. Below is Old Wrinkley who also got cut.

 

Toothless (above) was more like a petulant five year old in the early days.

Some more sketchbook stuff, this time from a rather well to do place about two hours drive from LA called La Quinta.