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Happy Holidays!! Best wishes to all of you.

This is something I painted for "Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron". Copyright DreamWorks Animation SKG.

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Some photoshop production work this week.

After creating several traditionally animated films at the DreamWorks Glendale campus, Shark Tale was our first effort at cg animation. Our goal was to create underwater environments rich with color and light. These are three of my paintings for the "whalewash" location.

Acknowledgements to the outstanding Art directors and artists who set the stage: Sam Michlap, Seth Engstrom, Armand Baltazar, Teng Heng, Zhaoping Wei and many others.

Copyright DreamWorks Animation SKG.

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Mark Snyder. Compressed charcoal on rives lightweight paper.

We've been drawing Mark in head drawing class. As you can see, he has great features to study from.
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These are a few of many "color keys" I did for Shrek the Halls. Their purpose is to establish the mood and lighting of each location in the show.
Copyright Dreamworks animation SKG.
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Happy Thanksgiving from me and the "Shrek the Halls" crew. Shrek the Halls is a half hour TV special about Shrek's first Christmas with his family. It's an absolute gem and I think people will watch it with their kids year after year just like the Grinch or Charlie Brown's Christmas. It will be on the abc network on Nov. 28 and again on Dec. 11. Check your listings for local times. We developed the show here in Glendale and I followed it through production at our Bay area campus in Redwood city.
Here's an image of Shrek out chopping wood as the seasons change and head toward the Holidays. It's painted in photoshop. The image is copyrighted by DreamWorks animation SKG.

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.Mark, demonstration with charcoal.

A note about the process here. I show these elaborate line drawings that end up getting completely covered over by the tonal work. This is done intentionally as an exercise for students. Invariably, beginners carefully render parts of the anatomy but are far less careful about relating those parts to each other. (You've seen those drawings that look like a bumpy sack of walnuts.) In class we start with careful construction drawings that force students to properly fit each part of the anatomy into the whole head. Having done plenty of the bumpy, poorly constructed heads myself, I forced myself to use this method and got much improved results. That being said, for my current tonal drawings I do the line drawing quickly and lightly. Not nearly as refined as you see here but with the idea in mind. I hope these drawings make clear how the construction lines can help wrap the light and shadow around the whole head for a solid three dimensional effect.

You can see more demos if you scroll down to August of 2006.
Happy drawing!

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I've just started teaching my head drawing class so here's a new charcoal drawing for this week. I'll also be posting a few demos in upcoming weeks among other things.
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HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

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This is something I did for my head painting class way back when I was studying at Art Center in Pasadena. I remember this one fondly because after several completely disastrous paintings, I finally started to understand how to control color and value.
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This is a place I visited last Christmas, north of the Great Salt Lake. As always, more travel sketches can be seen at the land sketch link.
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Nightscape
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Another watercolor demo for my sketching class to reference. This one doesn't use any gouache, just some masking fluid to protect the white paper for the flower.
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.This is my demo from this weeks class. Posted as a reference for the students but I hope the rest of you like it too.
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Susan, watercolor sketch.
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Upcoming classes and workshops

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If you're in the LA area and would like to join me for a class or workshop, we have three events coming up.
My next 10 week course is head drawing, starting on Monday, October 22, 7-10 pm.
I'm doing an all day color workshop with lectures, slide shows and painting from a costumed model on Saturday, Oct 27, 10am-6pm.
And Soonest, I'm giving a talk we're calling "From Student to Professional and Beyond" on Monday, Oct 15, 7-9:30 pm. It's for any student or professional artist seeking improvement and will cover the skills, tools, workspace, attitudes and habits of of the successful working artist. I've been working hard on this presentation so I'm gunna go out on a limb and guarantee there'll be at least one thing in it that will make it worth your time and effort. Contact the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art at (877) MY-LAAFA, www.laafa.org. Hope to see you soon.

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Fun with gouache.
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Adrienne. Watercolor on arches cold pressed paper.
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.Stag beetle
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Plaster cast. Watercolor on arches cold press paper.
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Warthan Canyon tree on highway 198 in central California. Watercolor.

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My time at PDI/Dreamworks in Redwood City has come to a close. It's back to LA for my wife and I. We loved the area and the studio, especially the PDI art department. You'll never meet a more solid group of artists. These are the people who designed the Shrek world and Madagascar and I got alot out of my time with them.
This gouache sketch was done from the back parking lot of the studio building at sunset. To see more sketches from around the studio at lunch breaks and such, click the Land Sketch link.
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I continue to sketch the waterfowl here in the bay area. I'll post more of those later. This one was done in the studio.
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Here's another acrylic painting from a life drawing session. This was done during the same time and circumstances mentioned in the the last post.
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Wanda. Acrylic on cold press illustration board.

This image is from what feels like a lifetime ago; a life drawing session while we were working on The Prince of Egypt at Dreamworks. Acrylics flowed more easily off my brush in those days; we were working with it 9 or 10 hours a day. Though I do like photoshop for production work, you can see from this blog that it still feels good to splash paint around.

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Some friends let me stay in their beautiful home on a painting trip to Hawaii. I did this gouache painting of the place for them as a thank you. To see more click the Land Sketch link.

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Here's another sketch of the iguana at the LA Zoo.

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Iguana.

The sketch was painted at the LA Zoo and the finish was done from photos. For another view of this guy scroll down to the first post on this blog.

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Lara

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These 3" x 4" sketches are from a recent weekend trip on Highway One North of San Francisco. This particular stretch of road runs along the coast from Muir Woods to Fort Bragg and is a stunning drive if you ever have a chance to take it.
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Brandt. This is oil on canvas.

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I recently moved to Redwood Shores in the Bay Area and have been amazed at the abundance of waterfowl here. This weekend I got out the watercolors with the birds in mind. They don't stay still so you have to be quick but I did coax the swan to hang around with a handful of crackers.

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Redwood City street corner

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Jenny
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Sketches at the Natural History Museum.
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Neighborhood flowers. I've included some pictures to show the painting process. This is watercolor on hot press illustration board.