Big Dog

...and then Lizette Red Ridinghood said, "My Roxie, what a big Belly you have."

I can't touch the ground!

I have a friend at the studio named Lizette, who is the proud owner of a pudgey Chocolate lab named Roxie. This week she is holding a contest at the studio to draw the best picture of her dog. The winner receives one of these really cool sock puppets that Lizette makes. You can see the other entries on the Blue Sky Challenge.

This is roxie

Here is contest prize

Blue sky Challenge

So this week's challenge was Star Wars. I felt like drawing Chewbacca, and I have a John Singer Sargent book sitting on my desk right now- so there you go.

Switzerland part 1

Prior to coming to Blue Sky. I went on an amazing trip through Europe. The reason for going to the trip was to compete in a swim meet in Italy. However I decided to arrive for the meet and spent 10 days with two of my best friends and fellow swimmers, Walter and Jasmine, in Walter's hometown in Switzerland. For ten days, we trained at altitude in the Swiss alps and negated all that hardwork by eating an obsene amount of Swiss chocolate. Oh yeah, I also filled a sketchbook. In the coming weeks I will be sharing excerpts from my sketchbook, chronicling my experiences in Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK. I hope you enjoy them.

Rapperswil

Luzern in the rain

Color keys for Ice Age the Meltdown

One of the best parts of working in the film industry is the fact that each project we work on requires different approaches. As a result, I've had no choice but to expand my skill sets and learn new things. Painting color keys was not something I very experienced at ( I used to fancy myself as more of a character designer). When I first started, I had to struggle a bit because I didn't fully understand the difference between making a pretty illustration and painting a color key. In illustration we can cheat lighting to make something look good. With color keys, we have to try and make images that the lighters can actually use to realise the final look of a film. Painting keys forced me to have a better understanding of the principles of light, shadow and color.
Here are some of my keys from the film Ice Age the Meltdown.
When I work on color keys, I usually have all of them on the same page and go back and forth between the diffent keys. I find that if I build all of them up at the same time, the paintings will work together better as a whole. It's important to think of keys as a whole, because they have to work not only as a progression of shots in a sequence, but also from sequence to sequence, in relation to the whole film.
When I work on these keys one of the biggest challenges for me is to not getting hung up in unneccesary details. I think that good color keys are able to read clearly when they are the size of a postage stamp. The sequence above is from the second act of the film. The world is not nearly as sunny and pleasant as it was in the first act. Our characters were at a cross roads at this point in the story, because they were not really trusing eachother. We tried to design a color and lighting scheme that would complement the mood of the story.

All images are property of 20th Century Fox

As we get to the third act, the story is at its dramatic peak, we tried to make the color and lighting feel ominous and dramatic. We tried to do this by sucking a lot of the warm light out of the keys and using a very cool yellow light that makes the set look less inviting. This is is at the climax of the film and we wanted it to feel epic.

This project was really fun to work on. My job was made tremendously easier, because of the crew that I was lucky enough to work with. Xiangyuan Jie (affectionately called Master Jay) painted a stunning color script that helped guide us in painting our keys. Master Jay is probably the best painter I have ever met (we don't throw around the title "Master" to just anyone). Sitting next to him was kind of like going to graduate school. I also worked very closely with my Art Director/ Painting buddy Tom Cardone. Tom is an amazing painter and is a true student of painting. He also helped me score a Dean Cornwell painting so I am forever in his debt. The other color key artists on Ice Age The meltdown are Vincent Nguyen and Ron DeFelice. While sitting next to Jay was like being in grad school, sitting next to Vincent and Ron is like going back to grade school. Aside from the fact that they are both pretty hilarious, and we enjoy mercilessly teasing eachother, they are also really great painters. If you aren't familiar with their work, you should definately check them out. Vincent is a really accomplished children's book illustrator, while Ron is a great landscape painter (and my nemesis in Ping Pong).

nyc

I really love living in New york. Although I have had my share of friendly debates with my fiance about what area is better, East Coast v. West Coast (West coast, obviously), I have to admit, that there is no place like New York. It is a gigantic playground for artists and creative types to be inspired by.
These are some paintings that I have done on location in New York City.
This painting was done in the West Village a few years ago. It has a lot of sentimental value to me because it was my first impression on my first day living here. I was still looking for an apartment and was staying with my friend Dice Tsutsmi, when we went out to painting.

This painting of Central Park was painted last spring. It was one of the first weekends when the weather was good enough to wear shorts and a t-shirt. I went to the park with a bunch of friends and we had a picnic, ate food, drank wine and painted. That was a great day.
This is a painting of SoHo, that was done last November. I remember this day well-- it was so damn cold. I believe this was my last time painting before winter started.
This is another painting of SoHo that I did last week. I went out with my friend Tom Cardone, an amazing painter who really needs a blog :) The weather was extremely warm for a day in January. I was painting in a long sleeve t-shirt and it still felt hot. The conditions were very difficult because the light changed constantly, because the cloud cover moving so quickly. I can't complain though, I was outside painting on a beautiful day.

Nice Robots

These little robots are a little more gentle than the one I posted last week.

Evil Robot

This is for this weeks Blue Sky Studio Challenge, the subject this week was evil robots. Giant killer Robots are fun to draw. Maybe not as fun as pirates, but they are pretty cool. I am actually working out a story I developed with some friends at ILM a few years back that involves a giant killer robot. This is kind of what I was thinking of . . . a big, scary and ridiculous monster.

beach weather

I actually didn't paint these this weekend, but the weather is so uncharacteristic of this time of year, that I probably could have. I did these paintings last summer. The image on top is of my fiance, Alice and our friend Ellie on Fire Island. The second image is of Alice and her sister, Deborah on Jones Beach.
I actually did go out painting this weekend in SoHo, and will post the image when it dries enough to scan.

Wizard of Oz

This is an old image that I posted for one of the Blue Sky Studios Challenge a few months back. I love the Wizard of Oz. Not only is it a great story, It's loaded with really fun design challenges. I think Illustrating a version of this book would be a dream job, I mean who wouldn't want to draw witches, flying monkeys and munchkins.

Pirates!!!

As those who are close to me already know, I love to draw pirates. Maybe it is because of all the NC Wyeth and Howard Pyle paintings I have drooled over, or because I was fascinated by the them as a little kid, I have no idea. All I know is, there is nothing I enjoy drawing more, than a crusty pack of thieving scoundrels.