Little Golden Book/Pawesome Costume Party with the Palace Pets!

I'm so excited! I illustrated a Whisker Haven Tales Palace Pets book and it has finally arrived!

Paw-some Costume Party is available for pre-order HERE. 

Enjoy!!! 

"The Little Mermaid" update/Viking Prince

UPDATE: I am in the throws of writing the script for this story this summer. Hoping to have my story locked down by mid fall, October, so that I can finally start penciling! 

For some time now I have been developing several stories of my own, but have decided to focus solely on my version of "The Little Mermaid" told in the Viking era. Originally I set the world in the Samurai era, which I still think would be pretty cool, but since I have roots in my Scandinavian heritage, I decided the project would be a cool way to learn more about the era of my ancestors. 

I am planning thorough research on my little mermaid character, but I really wanted to design the main viking character first, since he would firmly set the era in place for my story. I'm really glad I spent so much time working on him since designing the character brought to mind some interesting story twists and ideas that I hadn't thought of previously.

I imagined he is a prince of the village (if vikings really had "princes") and expected to help navigate and organize raids. He is reluctant, however, since he has a strong interest in music. He would be much happier roving around with local musicians but his father does not approve.

Here is some exploration for the character:

And finally a story painting. I spent a lot of hours on this painting, but in the end, I am still not sure about this style and color palette. I may go back and repaint this more graphically after I finish my Little Mermaid designs.

Random House "Little Golden Books"/"Pawesome Costume Party" Illustrations!

I was so excited earlier this year because I had the opportunity to illustrate a Whisker Haven Tales "Little Golden Book"! I'm STILL excited about it now that the work is finished, too! I love Disney's Palace Pets and the world we've worked so hard to create for them in the animated shows. 

On the animated show, I have been responsible for designing the environments and color palettes at Ghostbot, where they are produced and directed by the talented bots. The "Little Golden Book" I illustrated was based on the episode, "Masquerade Ball". It was so thrilling to translate the animated short into book illustrations. Painting everything to the nine's was super fun and definitely a learning experience that I hope to try again someday!

The process involved working up pencils for the entire book. Here are a few samples:

And after the pencils were approved by both Random House and Disney, I moved ahead with full color. The fun part! I could hardly wait for this stage, where I got to experiment with brushes in Photoshop to get the texture I was looking for. If I ever get to illustrate another book, I would like to push it even further. 

Look for "Pawesome Costume Party" with the Palace Pets from Random House "Little Golden Books" coming soon! 

"LOSING TIME", Poster Roughs

Update: I've decided to put this project on hold while I work on my "Little Mermaid" graphic novel. "Losing Time" requires some complex writing, which I am working on with my partner. Given that, there will not be additional art for this project while I work on "The Little Mermaid".

This year I have been very busy writing and rewriting, and then rewriting again the story for a graphic novel tentatively titled, "LOSING TIME". 

The story takes place in the same universe as HG Wells' 1895 classic, "The Time Machine", but is an expansion of that world and events. 

Since I am also currently enrolled in Pixar Production Designer Steve Pilcher's Production Design course at the Animation Collaborative, I thought I would focus my class efforts on moving forward with this project to see where it would lead with some really great feedback.

Immediately, Steve assigned "mood boards", story beats and other art that visualizes a general tone of the story, but only in three values. The idea here is to get a strong composition and mood that identifies the feeling of the story. I decided to focus on act 2 of my story, and although these are likely to change dramatically as the script develops, these were an awesome exercise that I will likely take with me on virtually every project I design on.

After the mood boards, we moved on to poster roughs. Creating a poster or cover art go a long way towards representing the overall motifs of the story. Working on this exercise has really helped me to think more deeply about the motivations and core ideas of the story I am developing in a way that I might not have otherwise thought of. 

Here are are my initial roughs. 

I will likely pick one of these from the second page, perhaps incorporating a border as well. I'll post the final after I finish it in a few weeks,  probably a week or two after CTN in Burbank this week! :)

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!