It's a hodgepodge from the past. A little of this and a little of that.

Last night, while my wife was on the computer I mentioned to her that I posted some new drawings on the blog, I asked if she would take a look and tell me what she thought. A few minutes later she chastised me for putting such amateurish stuff on the blog. "Listen", I said,"I like to look back occasionally and see where I've come from, is that so bad"? Like I said yesterday, they were at the bottom of the box. Well, This morning my daughter commented on maybe I could post some stuff from the films that I worked on, she would really like to see that stuff. Real subtle, I get the message, but I want them to know that I'm gonna be putting more old stuff up whether they like or not, besides I like some of the old drawings, they just need a little sprucing up that's all. Anyway, here's a hodgepodge of drawings from way back and some not so way back. Are you happy now?

This drawing was the first drawing I did with the idea that I was drawing a layout drawing. When I showed it to the head of layout, Bob Walker, his reply went something like this, "where's your field guide, and your character levels, what is the the aspect ratio for this drawing, where your focal point, etc...? I told him I didn't know what any of those things were, he reply, "look this is a nice illustration but it's a terrible layout background, when you have the answers to all those questions come back and see me." I eventually had the answers and went back to work for Bob, he was one of the best bosses I've ever had, tough as all get out but as fair as the come. He helped me a lot and gave me many opportunities to shine. Thanks Bob, you're a gentleman and a good friend. The rest of graphite drawings below are not layouts either, I was working on my technique, light on dark, dark on light, my mom likes them just fine. 



The drawing below was done on velum, it is an over sized background drawing that I did for a "Lilo and Stitch" workbook. It was very common for me to draw out the entire background even if we didn't need the whole drawing in the shot. This came in handy when we were required to reuse at least 10% of our backgrounds in later productions, to cut costs.




These are value studies and workbook drawings from "Mulan". Sometimes I would work out rough value sketches for my workbooks. Late in the "Mulan" production we were only doing little five by eight value drawings to accompany the full size line renderings of each shot. Normally, you would do a full size value drawings that incorporate the line and that is sent to backgrounds to be painted. It just goes to show you if you have a well oiled crew and everyone is on the same sheet of music things work out very well. Every production is it's own unique monster with it's own demands and solutions.


I worked on "Kingdom of the Sun" for six months before Disney shut the project down. They started over, somewhat, and renamed it the "Emperor's New Groove". I never got credit or even a thank you for working on the project. I'm not bitter! Above are some sketches from that fiasco. I loved the style of the film, it was fun to draw that way. By the way it had one of the best production guides I ever worked with.
This is a drawing of Gantu's ship from "Lilo and Stitch". I did a design pass at what the interior would look like, I didn't do the original design pass (rough drawing) of the interior. I went in and tweaked stuff like the lights and the instruments, etc... I was trying to get a Retro or fifties style to it.
Lastly, this was a drawing done while I was assigned to Animation Services, a department of feature animation developed to do animation projects outside of feature animation but to maintain the integrity and quality of Disney's films. It was challenging to say the least. This was for a "Pocahontas" Computer game. Well, that's it for now, I'll be posting again soon..