Character Design

Here's another project I can finally let out of the bag. A large regional company is in the process of rebranding itself and expanding its market base. I was hired by an ad agency to help develop an updated version of this company's current mascot. After a couple of rounds of sketches the company decided to go in another direction...

The Teaser for Pixar's new film Up is now online. Not much is known about the film. However, a recent newspaper article described it as “a comedy about a cranky, cane-wielding 78-year-old who transports his home to exotic locales by attaching hundreds of helium-filled balloons”. [EDIT: The tech blog Gizmodo offers this description: The hero of the film is a 78-year-old man named...

A couple of weeks ago I announced my new finger-puppet business cards. I designed them to serve several functions: To demonstrate my abilities as a character desginer; To stand out and be a good conversation starter at networking events; To display not just my contact info but list past clients and quotes/endorsements from satisfied art directors. So far the cards have been a big...

Recently I came across a terrific article about business cards from the ProFreelancing blog. According to the author most business cards are largely a waste of money. People will quickly lose interest in you and your work if all they have to remember you by is your contact info. It's even worse at a networking event where everyone is collecting...

Sorry for the slowdown in blog posts this week. Things have been pretty crazy here. I'm putting in a lot of hours on an animation project, plus this week I also whipped together some storyboards for a major retailer, did some character design sketches for a major food company, and finished up designing a mascot character for a small business...

This past Saturday morning NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! which I had the pleasure of working on. There were only two characters who needed to be designed, Admiral Sowmaster and his assistant, Cash. Both were to be pig-like aliens. Here's an early rough concept. The Admiral is on the left. After turning in the first concept I received some very...