Concept Art and Illustration

Between gigs in the Los Angeles animation scene, I stumbled into the world of "pre-production art" which entails things like movie poster comps, storyboard-type drawings or illustrations that suggest the visual look/style for a proposed film, TV series, or video game project. A lot of illustration work in Los Angeles turned out to be "concept art" or "visual development" for proposed TV/film/game projects. Today, all of this type of work is done in digital media, but I did these at a time when the industry was transitioning from pencils and paint brushes to pixels and digital tablets.

I hesitate to include this work (since some of it is embarrassingly bad), but I decided to show these as evidence of: (1) the variety of media/techniques/styles in which I have worked (including gouache, watercolor, acrylic, color pencil, airbrush), and (2) the random twists and turns of my art career. The animation industry experienced downturns where work became hard to find, and I took whatever jobs I could; everything from music album covers, to logo designs, to children's book illustration, even caricature work. Those days were a caffeine fueled haze of sleepless nights and overnight deadlines, and much of that work I only vaguely remember (some jobs I had completely forgotten until cleaning out the garage and finding old drawings or Xeroxes). You can read a little more about the random twists and turns of my art career below.

The drawings in this section were not illustration work, but I offer these as "Exhibit A" in the case for how unpredictable the art field can be. These drawings are samples of my animation "cleanup" work (or "final line" work). Animators typically work rough, and a cleanup artist goes over the rough drawings to refine and add the final line that the audience will see on the movie screen. I was recruited right out of art school by Walt Disney Feature Animation on the promise of becoming a layout artist, but I was placed as an "in-betweener" in animation cleanup, where I drew "in-betweens" on Disney's "Mulan" film (see slide carousel below). 

It would take too long to explain the many twists and turns which my life took from there, but the gist of it is this: I enrolled in art school with dreams of becoming an illustrator of books and magazines. Upon graduation, I was drawing animated cartoons. From there I went on to do all the varieties of artwork that you find on this website (and many more that were not included here). I majored in illustration on the premise that I did not want to be a "starving artist", but the illustration work that I thought would be most profitable turned out to be least profitable, while most of my income came from gigs I stumbled into accidently (like animation and video game art).

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans". 

The above quote certainly resonates with me, as does this passage from Ecclesiastes 9:11, which could very well be the credo for my life:

"The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all."  

I've learned to live with the fact that an art career is just going to be very unpredictable, and there really is no way to prepare for outcomes you cannot foresee. Perhaps the illustration career path has worked out better for others, but in my case, it was a very random roller coaster ride. In my online classes, I have shared anecdotes from "the roller coaster ride known as 'My Career in Art'", not to scare students away from an art career, but rather to prepare them for "the roller coaster ride that just might become 'Your Career in Art'".

I worked on this scene of "1st Ancestor". Animation was by Aaron Blaise, and a team of artists worked on the cleanup. I saved only a few of my drawings, but the full scene had many more drawings like these. A Disney film may require over 12 drawings per second of animation (you can work all day to do less than 1 second of animated film). One of my students asked, "what is an in-between artist?", and so I show these drawings as an example of "in-between" work I did at Disney. In layman's terms, the animator does all the key drawings, and assistants do all the drawings that go between the key drawings.