Star Wars "Forces of Destiny" Animated Shorts

I recently painted several key backgrounds for the animated series
Star Wars "Forces of Destiny". The shorts were produced by Lucasfilm and directed and animated at Ghostbot. I thought I would share a few of the backgrounds I was lucky to paint! 

The rest of the bg's are on my art station site:  here

The shorts are available on Disney.com and also youtube. 

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 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!