Season 3/ Disney Junior Palace Pets!

Season 3 of Disney Junior's Palace Pets has begun! Once again, I worked with animation studio director Alan Lau at Ghostbot on the shorts, this time primarily on color scripts. 

For this season, the color scripts were abbreviated; they function more as color roughs of key frames. For each short I did six panels. Here is one example from "Tunnels of Fun":

For a few of the episodes I also designed key environments. Here are a couple from "Tunnels of Fun" that I enjoyed working on. The underground tunnels were a challenge to make appealing. In the end, it all came back to thinking about the high end world that the pets live in, so of course they would have gems embedded in to the very ground they live on! :) 

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Here are a few screen shots of "Tunnels of Fun". Turned out pretty cute! You can watch the new shorts and the previous two seasons at Disney Junior.

From an art direction perspective, keeping colors in a certain saturation spectrum helps lighten the mood and makes the tone of the show feel airy, light, not too scary or ominous which can easily happen with underground lighting. 

I love the shine that the animators put on the gems. A cute touch! 

The way the pets pop out of the tunnels is fun to watch, also. The animation has a nice feel of gravity - great work! 

Thanks for checking in! Enjoy!

Holiday Party

I've been experimenting with pastel brushes in Photoshop. I am striving to make my digital paintings look like my plein air pastels, a look that I really like in terms of texture, soft edges and layering of broken color. I have a ways to go yet in developing this look, but happy with this experiment. More to come!

Happy Holidays!

Disney's Palace Pets, "Tales From Whisker Haven"/Color Scripts!

I recently worked on ten 3:30 animated episodes for Disney's Palace Pets, a new show on Disney Junior. There is also a new Palace Pets Website (!!!) which can be found at www.DisneyPalacePets.com. The show was developed and produced at Ghostbot, directed by the talented Alan Lau. It was such a fun project for me personally as I served as Art Director on environments, props and color design. The show was definitely challenging as the Palace Pets have been a successful toy line for Disney for a while now and have a multicolored pastel palette. For this reason, color scripting was necessary on several of the episodes for either a full episode or portions of sequences that were particularly tricky to work out.

Below is my color script for my favorite episode, "The Knight Night Guard". (available to watch on the Disney Junior app now!) Color scripts, if you aren't familiar with them, are a way to get a big picture take on the color design for an entire episode or sequence. It is important to focus on the storytelling as scenes move from shot to shot and sequence to sequence, and make sure the planning for the lighting and effects is consistent logistically from one scene to another. They also are very helpful for animators so they can get a big picture idea of what it is we are shooting for, and also are very helpful for the compositor when piecing together all of the various elements into one shot. Additionally, I enjoy designing color scripts since they give me a chance to think globally about how I want to approach the design of specific environments and how much work I will need to do for specific areas of a sequence, and the work load we are facing in terms of environments and props for a particular episode or sequence.

Below are some stills from Episode 3. They translated pretty closely to the color script - good planning is worth it!

Below is a partial color script for Episode 4, "Throwing a Ball". I didn't have time to do a color script for the entire episode so I focused instead on a tricky sequence that takes place with a time of day change.

Below are a few shots for the final. (Additional characters were added after I did this initial color script.)

I actually did a few more of these but those episodes are not yet released. 

Please check back for updates and be sure to watch Palace Pets "Tales of Whisker Haven" on Disney Junior! Next week I will post about some of the environments and props I designed.

Thanks for reading!

Monterey Bay Aquarium/Color Studies & Sketches

Jamie and I recently went on a trip down the coast to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of my very favorite places in the world. We both brought our drawing, sketching, and painting supplies, including my new samsung tablet. Because most of my color sketching was going to be done inside the aquarium, I carried around my tablet in my messenger bag and took it out when I saw something I wanted to study.

As mentioned in my previous post, the primary reason I purchased the tablet was so that I could do a lot more color studies of interior lighting in situations where it would be difficult to take out my usual paints or pastels, places like restaurants, cafes, aquariums, museums, unusual interior lighting situations. Boy am I glad I did. Each time I would sketch from life in the aquarium, I would take a photo before I left. When I would look at the photo later, I noticed a HUGE difference - the camera most of the time did not capture the lighting effects I observed, and if it did, the spirit of that light was completely lost, subdued, or just not there. What an amazing learning experience!

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Below are a few of my digital studies. I also did numerous pencil and watercolor studies of the animals in the aquarium, and a few pastels from up the coast. I will post those next week.

 The Kelp Forest. So glad I brought my noise canceling headphones for this one. There were deafening crowds of pre-teens on a field trip with their school. You never know what will confront you when plein air sketching - I highly recommend headphones if you sketch in public places. 

I liked the presentation of this display so much. The blue light spilling from the water and the  yellow-green reflections of the kelp were gorgeous. I felt the design stood well on it's own.

The sketch above is downstairs looking into the Sea Otter display, sea otters mostly spending their time up above water and only occasionally diving below. I noticed this perch watching people as they went by and thought it was funny...

Some sketches went faster than others. This one in the Deep Sea Exhibit was done in about 30 minutes. It was at the end of the day and just seemed to flow. I figured out a composition and story as it evolved in front of me. 

Of all the subjects I studied in the aquarium, this jellyfish display was absolutely the most difficult. I sat across from the display on the floor against a wall in almost total darkness. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, but when I looked down into the bright computer screen of my tablet, my eyes would adjust to that brightness, so that when I looked back up again at the jellies, I had to give my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness again. VERY tough! I spent a good two hours trying to capture the light of the tank. Wow, what a learning experience this sketch was! 

One sketch that I did not have time for that I saw over and over was the selfie in front of any given tank. Maybe next time.

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I am going to start posting every Monday, as best I can, over the next four months. I have a lot of work to share from my latest projects, videos, sketches, paintings, progress on a few personal projects and the occasional workshop experience to share. 

Next week:

puffin studies, rockfish, jellyfish studies and schools of sardines studies. 

Thanks for visiting!

Composition Breakdowns

In a recent class I took at the Animation Collaborative with the inspiring and seriously talented Armand Baltazar, we had an assignment to break down the compositions of narrative illustrations from visual development artists. 

We had to 

1. write one sentence describing the story of the piece, 

2. describe the point of view (POV) of the piece, and 

3. describe the emotion intended by the piece. 

After that, we drew over the composition breaking down these elements:

 4. the division of the graphic plane (the graphic shapes that make up the composition),

5. Redline the division of depth and mark the foreground, middle ground, and far background,

6. Mark the center of interest,

7. Redline where the eye moves across the piece.

This was an excellent exercise in understanding the architecture of a picture and the thought that goes into guiding the viewers' eye directly to the center of interest. I highly recommend analyzing compositions in this manner for anything from drawings, paintings, and even sculptures to increase your own narrative compositional chops.  

Although the exercise appears simple, I learned a great deal by analyzing each piece. There were some pieces that I haven't posted which failed compositionally; the artist meant the eye to go to one place but unfortunately the eye focused elsewhere. 

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In other news, I am still working on painting illustrations, about 20 in all, from three personal projects that I am really excited about. My paintings and development pieces have been on pause since January because I am designing on an exciting unannounced project at Ghostbot. 

In the mean time, I've been doing some digital speed paintings which are akin to exercising. I usually dedicate about 3 hours a week to either digital speed painting or alla prima plein air sketches done traditionally, either Friday morning or Saturday morning, and then spend maybe about an hour for editing video and posting. Starting in two weeks, I'll begin posting my efforts once a week on Mondays here and on my youtube and vimeo channels.

Please stay tuned!