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A location sketch for How to Train Your Dragon, photoshop.
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A scene painted for The Prince of Egypt, 1998.
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Comicon Portrait Demo

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Here's my charcoal portrait demo from Comicon, it was great to see all of you who stopped by.

And much thanks to the Laafa folks for hosting.

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These are digital landscapes painted in photoshop. They're meant to serve a very different purpose than the plein air gouache paintings over on Landsketch. These are exercises to improve my digital chops for my day job in entertainment art.

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In my class we've been studying painting with theatrical light sources. Here are a couple of my demo sketches. Watercolor and gouache on heavyweight craft paper.

How to Train Your Dragon: Location Design

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I very much enjoyed doing rockwork for How to Train Your Dragon. My Dad is a geologist and he passed on a strong interest in it to me. This area is meant to be a granite mountaintop carved out by man and nature and it was important to describe a sense of the overall structure to the digital modelers.
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Composition Workshop! Saturday July 10

The skills of drawing and color are critically important and yet they don't find their full expression until they're teamed with a strong composition. If you're going to make a great picture you have to have a great composition.
That will be our topic of study for this years composition workshop on Saturday, July 10, 12-8pm. So whether you're a landscape painter, figurative or entertainment artist, if you're in the LA area I'd love to see you there.


Composition: design for dynamic picture making:

• Slideshow presentation and lecture, 12-3pm: Lectures on the fundamentals of effective picture making. Discussions on the creation of mood and environment. Principles for organizing complex scenes into pleasing arrangements. Strategies for solving compositional problems quickly and effectively. Studies of Composition in history and the modern day
  

• Painting demonstration, 3:30-5
• Compositional exercises, 6-7pm
• Student painting time with instructor feedback, 7-8pm

To enroll contact the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art at 877-695-2232. Their site is www.laafa.org.

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Compressed charcoal on Rives paper.
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Here's another idea piece for the ogre encampment from Shrek Forever After.
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Shrek Forever After: evolution of a sketch

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The ogre resistance encampment was an interesting challenge, here's one of many passes we took at it:

Moleskine sketch

Color rough

"Ogreifying" the location in photoshop



Establishing the scene as an ogre encampment and finishing in photoshop.

I prefer the previous image over this one, I'm a location guy more than a character painter but they asked me to populate the scene with characters. This is what I came up with.

Shrek Forever After: mood roughs

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Black prismacolor in a moleskine.

At the very beginning of Shrek Forever After I had the opportunity to do lots of mood roughs for some spooky new locations. I was the only artist on the show and was experimenting so I had the leeway to do these in acrylic (the last acrylic painting I had done for animation was in 2000). Some of the roughs led to finished photoshop paintings (which I'll show in a later post) and you can see their influence in the ogre camp location in the finished cut of the show.

Shrek Forever After

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Our final chapter in the Shrek series comes out this Friday. I did some early work on the show, tackling emotional color beats and sketches for new locations. I'll post some of those in upcoming weeks. This scene is a version of Shrek's house grown over and abandoned. We ended up going with something more barren but this swampy scene was a great subject to paint. (photoshop)

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How to Train Your Dragon: location design for the Cove.
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How to Train Your Dragon: concept piece for the shoreline of Dragon Island.
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DreamWorlds at Art Center College of Design

I haven't yet mentioned our show entitled "DreamWorlds" at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena Ca. It's a collection of concept and visual development artwork from all of DreamWorks Animation films and is displayed at Art Center's Williamson gallery until May 7 (open to the public). I'm pleased to have a handful of pieces in the show but it's all about the collaborative effort to figure out what these films should look like. I'm aware of no other place where you can see a collection of artwork like this and it's only up for another week. If you're local and interested in such things or are an animation student I encourage you to come out and have a look.

















Photos by Brad Herman.

How to Train Your Dragon

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How to Train Your Dragon is showing real staying power in theaters, here are a few location design pieces. This is the interior of Dragon Island. I did them in photoshop, they're based on a look created by our Art Director extraordinaire, Pierre Olivier Vincent.
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Charcoal Portrait Show at LAAFA!

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I currently have an 18 piece show up at LAAFA of my charcoal drawings, if you've ever been curious about what the originals look like, stop on by. It will be up through the end of May.
We're doing this show in conjunction with the portrait drawing workshop I have coming up on Saturday May 1st where I'll attempt to show and tell everything I know about charcoal drawing. More info in the sidebar to the upper right.

Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art
16926 Saticoy Street
Van Nuys, CA 91406

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Color keys from How to Train Your Dragon.

The story evolved away from the events depicted in these early color keys but the Dragon Island Caves were a great location to work in regardless. These were done in photoshop and art rage.
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We had originally planned to show a step by step demo of the front page painting in my Watercolor Magazine article (see last weeks post). It was decided to show a greater variety of artwork instead, so I thought I'd share it with you here.

















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