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!

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!!! 

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! 

Disney's "Whisker Haven Tales with the Palace Pets", Season 2!

For the past year or so I've been working on a new web and tv series called, Disney's "Whisker Haven Tales with the Palace Pets", published on the Disney Junior website and network. The latest episode, "Chowing Down" (Season 2), can be seen here:

http://watchdisneyjunior.go.com/whisker-haven-tales/video/vdka0_w80egsrv/chowing-down

All of these shows are developed, directed and produced at the awesome Ghostbot animation studio, where I have been working as Art Director with the Director-bots, Alan, Roque and Brad.

I am SO, SO proud of the really hard work that we all have done on this series. The best part has been meeting kids that tell me all about the shows and the characters. There is nothing better than that!

Here are a few production stills from this episode (I think this one is my favorite!), directed by Alan Lau. The color script on this episode was really key in getting the lighting, mood and tone just right, and also making sure transitions worked from the first sequence which was the set up to the indoor Kibble shop and dream sequences. 

Below is some of the design work I did for the spring episode, "Hearts, Hooves, Eggs!", directed by Roque Ballesteros. The biggest thing I learned in this episode was scaling of details in the distance vs. the scale of details in the foreground. I spent a lot of time looking at mountainscapes studying how to make them work atmospherically.

The color script for the "Masquerade Ball", directed by Roque Ballesteros, was one of my favorites. The episode practically designed itself! A dark room with a party atmosphere was pretty interesting to explore in the color script and in the background design. I was surprised at how dark it could go, actually, and still read as long as the main characters had a good amount of light on them. 

"Buddies Day", directed by Brad Rau, was really fun to design since the fall season was a character in the episode. I thought about things like how the color of the grass and the position of the sun in the sky would be different and distinct from episodes that take place in the summer or spring months. The most difficult part was the lighting in the maze from shot to shot, which required a color script - absolutely. In addition to that, getting a hay texture and shape in flash without it becoming too distracting or vector-y looking against the action of the characters was a real challenge. In the end, I think we found a good balance after a lot of trial and error. 

I just wrapped on Season 2, 13 episodes, which will be released throughout the year including a Christmas episode I'm really excited about. I'm really hoping that we get a 3rd season. After 23 3 minute episodes I feel like I've really gotten to know the world pretty well. I enjoy every single part of the storytelling process in animation and film making and especially working with the Bots. I hope to visit the world of Whisker Haven again sometime soon! 

Disney's Palace Pets "Whisker Haven Tales"/Environment Designs and Color Keys

I recently had the honor of working with Ghostbot and Disney Publishing on ten 3:30 minute episodes of Disney Junior's "Whisker Haven Tales with the Palace Pets", directed by Alan Lau.

Episodes can be seen here: 

www.DisneyPalacePets.com

My primary role was to develop background "key" environments working from the approved animatics. If you aren't familiar with animation, a color key is an environment design that establishes a location, color palette, and lighting. It is then referred to by other artists on the  the team that need to create various points of view surrounding that piece of the film in the sequence. 

Elements like water that animate were tricky, especially bubbles. We had to take a close look at how bubbles looked under the water and out of the water. 

Time of day was a major consideration in many episodes. I created guides for blocks of 2-3 hours for each time of day so that the color remained consistent throughout the episodes. 

More episodes will be available soon via the Disney Junior Watch app on iTunes! The show is doing very well. It was a pleasure to work with Ghostbot and Disney on this exciting new show!

More of my work can be seen on my website as well, julialundman.com

Thanks for reading!