A big milestone in my animation career, was being able to work on Dragon Prince along side Wonderstorm, and a super talented all start team at Bardel Entertainment. Congrats to everyone who’s contributed to Dragon Prince’s success!
What a year!! Soooo many ups and downs and lots to reflect on and be thankful for, despite the pandemic. Wishing everyone a happy holidays and a safe and healthy new year!
I’m happy and excited to share that Drawn to life : Two Realms for the Nintendo Switch was announced recently. I was fortunate enough to have contributed some art to this game and still can’t believe it’s actually happening! This game brings back many fond memories of my early days of doing art for 5th Cell, which gave me my start in the gaming industry. So thankful to Jeremiah Slaczka and Joe Tringali for believing in me. To this day, Drawn to life is still one of my favourite projects ever. Although this iteration is not by “5th cell Media”, you’ll notice quite a few familiar names on this project :)
You can watch the trailer here ( there are a handful of still images done by yours truly in the trailer) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIUITTe-nLk
Image from the trailer
The Nintendo Switch Box Art
I’ve been fascinated with cottages for awhile.. and fantasized living in one for ages. This cottage is not for any project in particular… Just feeding my obsession :)
The Dragon Prince Art book is finally out! Truly, It’s been a magical experience, and a highlight in my animation career to be able to be part of something so special. The icing on the cake was that I got to work with so many talented artists to help bring the characters, creatures, and environments to life! Huge shoutout to my super talented design team at Bardel who helped create a lot of the artwork shown in the book!!! Andy Poon, Chad Weatherford, Matty Rodgers, Hanna Hofer, Dorothy Yang, Rockey Chen, Michael Macrae, Sunny Shah, Eelis Kyttänen, Jason Lum, April Hung, Devin Rosychuk, Maurice Tanudarta, Philip Gerlitz, Ginny Ivanicki, Cagatay Ugurlu, Aaron Bonkowski. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for the upcoming seasons!!!
Fun Facts about the design team:
Andy Poon was the first to work on the development of The Dragon Prince at Bardel early on. He worked on nailing down the toon-shading and design of Ralya before I got to help figure out how the BG’s looked, with the help of Matty Rodgers and Boris Andreev.
Both Andy Poon & Chad Weatherford, are super Art Directors that have art directed other shows at Bardel. (Chad won an Emmy for his character design on Dinotrux).
Matty Rodgers, Rockey Chen, and Devin Rosychuk were part of my original team from my other show, The Adventure of Puss-in-Boots (Dreamworks Animation for Netflix).
Rockey Chen, Sunny Shah, Eelis Kyattanen, Michael Macrae, Devin Rosychuk, and I, all went to Emily Carr University.
Catagay Urgurlu, Ginny Ivanicki, Sunny Shah, Philip Gerlitz, were originally on Chad’s Dinotrux Design Team.
Long overdue post, but I’m super excited and super proud to announce that the Dragon Prince (Art Directed by yours truly) recently got nominated for 2 Emmys, and won for Outstanding Children’s Animated Series category. Big shout out and congrats to the guys at Wonderstorm (Aaron & Justin) for letting me be part of this journey and creating such an immersive, engaging, and fantastical world for us to create art for. Huge props to the group of artists at Bardel, especially the Design team that I worked closely with to create the characters, the backgrounds, the props, the creatures, the FX, etc. So much talent and creativity was put on this show, it’s amazing to see everything come together and have it so well received. Congrats to everyone that worked on this, and thanks for everyone that watched it!
It’s been a while since I updated. So much has happened since. Looking forward to 2020 and can’t wait to post more art. This was our christmas card this year. Happy Holidays everybody!
I was fortunate enough to be part of a project with Workman Publishing house, to help illustrate on their new series of Brain Quest books, called Summer Brain Quest! It was a super fun project to work on and the books are jam packed with puzzles and activities, encouraging children to reconnect with the outdoors and earning sticker achievements along the way. They're available for purchase at Workman Publishing's website, as well as Amazon.
Each grade book, I got to work on the achievement map and book cover for. The grade 3-4 one is the book where I got to spot illustration for as well.
Workman Publishing Website : https://www.workman.com/brands/brain-quest
Amazon : https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=summer+brain+quest