Ostrich Concept Sketches

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A few months ago I was hired by an independent film studio in Hollywood to work on some concept sketches for an animated feature film they are developing. They had brought in an artist to do some concept work but that artist was no longer available. I was asked to do some sketches of one of the characters (a young ostrich) and, if things worked out, I would be hired to design all of the remaining characters for the movie.

It was a fun project but unfortunately things didn’t work out. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes. The studio asked me to design a character in a similar style to what the previous artist had done, and I did my best to match that style. I also played around with other shapes and designs to explore different ways of thinking about the look and personality of the characters.

Here’s a few of those rough concept sketches I developed.

Concept Art: Buffalo Wings

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buffalowingsLast year I was hired by a local agency to develop a packaging icon for a new snack food with a buffalo wings flavor. The project ultimately went in another direction so this is as far as my involvement went. I don’t know if I have permission to mention the product name so I won’t, but the agency has finally given their permission for me to post these concept sketches.

More “3-2-1 Penguins!” Concept Art

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I’ve been at the Motion 08 animation conference in New Mexico all week. More on that tomorrow. For now, a blog post I meant to publish earlier this week:

The past weekend NBC aired another brand new episode of “3-2-1 Penguins!” for which I designed some characters.

Here’s a few misc. characters –  a butterfly, firefly, and frog:


The script called for the frog to be placed in a large glass jar, and then to get his tongue stuck on the glass.

At one point in the episode the villain (an evil hamster, far right) turns all the other characters into hamsters. So I designed hamsters loosely based on the likeness of each character. That was a fun challenge.

For each hamster character I had to do turnarounds, mouth charts, and an expression charts to assist the animators. Here’s a sample expression chart for one of the hamster characters:

Info about the Motion animation conference tomorrow!

Peter Krause Has A New Website

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I wanted to take a minute to plug a fellow Twin Cities illustrator, Pete Krause. He’s been doing concept art, storyboards, and comic books for years and his work is excellent. His website just got a face lift, and it looks very nice. Take a peek:

www.peterkrauseillustration.com [EDIT: Broken link has been fixed.]

My own website is badly in need of a facelift. I mean badly. Seeing Pete’s new look has lit a fire under me to stop waiting for “free time” to magically appear and instead to make time to develop a new design. My new goal: To have a spanky new website up and running by the end of the year.

“3-2-1 Penguins!” Character Designs (part 2)

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Continuing yesterday’s post…I also designed a future version of Zidgel, the ship’s captain. He’s big on vanity and low on brains. As an old man, er…penguin, at first he appears to have retained his youth and vigor. Then, through a series of gags we find that he is actually wearing a truss, false teeth, and a toupe. It was a lot of fun to design both versions.

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Finally, there’s Kevin. In this episode the malfunctioning time machine has a reverse effect on him. Instead of growing older, Kevin actually regresses to a young penguin and eventually an egg:

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There was one last misc. alien character I designed for a brief “talking heads” scene on the ship’s monitor. Here’s the turnarounds and an expressions chart:

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“3-2-1 Penguins!” Character Designs (part 1)

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On Saturday NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! for which I did some character designs. The plot centered around a malfunctioning time machine that sends the penguins’ space ship into the future where they meet their future selves. (The lesson for kids was about respecting the advice of our elders.)

The original penguins were designed several years ago when the series premiered on DVD. I don’t know who came up with the original designs, but I’ve always admired them. The characters have great personality, contrast, and appeal. It was a real treat to take three of the four characters and create an elderly version of each one. Here’s the first two:

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I was also asked to design a generic alien character, a veeery old war-weary soldier. The director suggested he have three eyes and one of them be covered with an eye patch. The character only has a couple of scenes (no dialogue), and while he is held up as someone for the kids to revere he’s also played as a comic character. I wanted the design that was both respectable and a little silly:

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I did a lot of art for this episode, so more will be posted tomorrow.