"The Toad"

I've been taking part two of Armand Baltazar's visual development course at the Animation Collaborative in Emeryville, across the street from Pixar. 

It's been an excellent course for stretching basic visual development skills; it is restricted to sketching in black and white with many exercises designed to challenge design skills. I feel so fortunate to be taking this class with Armand. His teaching and feedback demos are nothing short of fantastic. Watching his draw overs of both my homework and other student's work has been a profound learning experience I will carry with me for a long time on the road to becoming a better designer and storyteller. 

Here are a couple of finished pieces from an assignment. I wanted to explore the "Toad" character to show who he is publicly and semi-privately. I wanted to bring the main image, "The Act" into full color in order to show the glory of his celebrity in the fairy forest world. :)

"The Act"

"Flirty Toad"

 "Fan Mail"

"Promo Shot", Toad's celebrity promo shot in the fairy forest world.

 I have a couple more sketches that expand the portrait of who the Toad is and will update this post when I complete those. I'm tempted to paint all of these in full color - and I may do that after CTN when I have a little more time. A short story is brewing in my head about this guy and his band of fairy-circus performers.

At the end of the course I'll post a bunch of the sketches from class too. So much fun stuff to inspire me working on illustrations for awhile! :))

Thanks for reading!