curious mermaids come to greet our four-legged friends.

“Under the dappled canopies, they traversed the ancient forest, and crossed mystic waters. “

This is one of probably several forest pieces. I wanted the feeling of the forest to be a vast expanse..I wanted to sprinkle some ruins here and there into the landscape as well. Might be hard to notice at first, but there is a lower half of centaur statue on the upper right, to tie into fallen piece of ruin that’s like a ramp down to the crossing. And I threw in some birds last minute…because I like birds :)

Finished piece with the character colors.

Initial sketch. I really love forest setups and love drawing trees. There’s so much movement that can be expressed with them. Also something about overcoming a simple obstacle like crossing the river under the warm dappled canopy is really comforting.

First block in. It’s really hard to try and capture what I imagined, but I was wanting some kind of warm dappled lighting shining through into the cool shaded canopy.

My second attempt at trying to achieve it.. and I like it a lot more. it’s a much cooler palette overall, but missing the dappled lighting. Fleshed out some more of the elements.

“The earth shook in their wake as these four-winged giants soared through the skies and disappeared into the horizon…”

Our little centaur friends were chilling by a shaded outcrop, and stumbled upon this magical procession of dragons flying through the skies before them.

Finished piece, with our heroes and some finishing touches.

initial sketch

first blockin of the landscape

they refined the landscape a bit, and added the dragons..

Coming off of the previous piece, I wanted to show the centaurs going on a journey. This one as they leave their homeland and venture beyond home pastures.

Try to do some personal pieces to add to the site. Been toying with the idea of some key images of themes that I like, and maybe finding a narrative within that to string them all together. Here’s a scene of a brother and sister centaur discovering an ancient portal in the middle of a forest.

It’s been a real struggle to keep up with postings and doing personal art these days. I recently watched the Mario Bros movie and really enjoyed it. Loved how the characters translated into a feature length film format. It also just happens to be Merymay month and the character design challenge this time couldn’t be more timely:) Here’s CheepCheep, DeepCheep, and CheepChomp from the MarioBro’s Character Design Challenge.

My first time part-taking in the #characterdesignchallenge on FB. I entered with my U-leek-corn, but then decided to come up with a few friends for him. Rhuba-corn, Lettuce-sus, and Uni-corn.

Another cool recent project that I was fortunate to have art directed was Invincible, for Amazon Prime. If you haven’t already, please check it out!!

This is, by far, one of the most challenging projects I’ve worked on to date, but also learned so much from. I’ve worked mostly in 3D pipelines in animation and was curious about 2D animation and how it’s done overseas in Japan and Korea. I finally got to see how it’s made, and was part of a stellar team to boot. Huge thanks to Justin and Chris Copeland for bringing me on. Your guys’s passion and positivity for the project was so infectious and I feel so blessed our paths crossed.

Congrats to everyone who’s contributed to Invincible and saw it through to the finish line. This was not an easy show to do and it looks amazing! Extra love and shoutout to my design team! #proudAD

(*images are not mine)