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.