Meet the Robinsons: last batch

More Meet the Robinsons (Game) early concepts

Fun, fun, fun.

Meet the Robinsons game

I did some very early concept art for the game, none of which was used. It was fun to kick out some wild ideas of how things should be, though. Lots of this stuff was really quick because I knew it was very likely to be rejected. I'll make a couple more posts with it art for the game in days to come.

All images copyright Disney 2007.

Sea god

Trying to be like Mike Mignola, but not trying very hard.

More funny faces

Been busy this week, so sorry for the lame post. The first one is, in fact, a lady. She's the bus driver in the morning. I don't feel bad making fun of her, because she is the devil.

Rock Star

Did this for the Avalanche Blog. He's scary.

Funny faces

I want to start drawing from life more. It's fun, and feeds my brain with new ideas.


Here's a couple doodles of people from the bus, and a drawing of the model from my work's "drawing session" this morning. She had this funny grimace-smile that I wanted to capture.
The colors on the first one turned out awful because I started out trying to paint him in bluish light, but that failed so I changed it. I need to experiment with other types of lighting, though.

Appeal Rant Redux

Here's an example from my earlier post on Appeal. I talked about three things that influence the appeal of a design: Effective use of design principles, creativity, and attention to audience and purpose. Maybe not all three apply here, but it's still an okay example.
Both of these are the same assignment from the character design class : use a photo pose to create a character based on trees and plant life. I took the class twice, and this was one of the identical assignments (the first design=first time I took the class, second=second time) Which one is more appealing may be arguable to some, but in my mind the second has more appeal to it. I'll explain why below:




















The first one isn't a bad drawing, or even that terrible of a design. But there are multiple reasons why it lacks the appeal that exists in the second one. First of all, I was only minimally conscious of the shapes and lines I was using---I think my major focus was on getting the linework to describe the details and form. Second, the use of space is much better in the second than the first. I think I was afraid to leave any open spaces in the character, because I was trying to describe bark and leaves and I thought I needed detail everywhere to do that.
I think I was also afraid to take some creative license with the photo reference---the proportions and pose are much more interesting in the second one. Turning the head makes a big difference since it's supposed to be a character design and not just an action drawing. That way I could put a little personality and interest into her face.
I think that being a little creative with the style helps the second one also. The first one is so straightforward and everything is presented as literally as possible. This goes into the third point I discussed earlier with appeal---I think with the second one I had a better idea of who my audience was (the teacher and students in the class) and I knew that putting a little style and flow into the lines would appeal to that group.
Looking at both of these drawings, it's clear to me now why I was so frustrated the first time I took the class. There are a lot of good things about the first design---but I think very few of those things were intentional. I can see that something was tickling at the edge of my mind. I had an inkling of what I was trying to accomplish, but I didn't have the tools yet.
Anyway, this is probably a pointless post, but hopefully it might help if there's someone in the same place I was when I was struggling through the character design class for the first time.

Ace in Action design diary: Foxy Loxy

Developing the look for Foxy as the main villain was fun. At first we were exploring all sorts of ideas---Foxy as a dark-helmeted evil warrior, or as a fat Jabba-style criminal, and we even played with various alien versions of her. We just wanted to create a great archetypal villain that was the perfect cheesy-sci-fi counterpart of Ace. Along these lines, the story team started pushing this idea of a beautiful-but-dangerous villain with an eyepatch and who had some kind of vague love-interest history with Ace. I thought this idea was perfect, and her design almost flowed automatically from that point onward.

Note again how the final stage of design was to "Chicken Little-ize" the design, making things more simple and streamlined, and pushing the proportions almost too far for comfort. Oh yeah, and we transferred the idea of the original Foxy's braces to become James-Bond-"Jaws" metal teeth.


















Once again, the art by others on the project contributed substantially to the final look of Foxy. This was a collaborative process, which I think is what helped us reach such successful designs in the end.

Ace in Action Design diary: The Battle Barn

I had fun with this project and I'd like to share a little bit of the process that went into the visual development of it. I won't do this with all of the concept art we did for the project, but maybe for a couple of my favorite designs.
The Battle Barn was one of the hardest designs to get right. The below picture represents only a fraction of the total number of drawings and attempts we made (all of the below drawings were done by me, but lots of artists provided multiple takes that influenced the final design). In fact, I only included the drawings that acted as "steps" toward the final design---we took a lot more directions than this before settling on this design. It was really hard to design something that effectively mixed the idea of a starship with a barn, all the while giving the same flavor as the ships that the Disney artists designed for the movie.
As you can see, there were a lot of sci-fi influences pulling this thing in different directions. However, in the end (and with the help of Todd Harris) we realized that what was missing was the fun, Star-Trek-spoof feel, and that we were maybe straying too far from the "barn-iness" we needed. So I worked a bit with the proportions and the grain silo section, and viola!















(By the way, I am NOT a technically-trained industrial designer or anything, so that's why these drawings have bad form and perspective)
Here's the final concept:

Chicken Little: Ace in Action

One of the games I did concept art for recently came out---a "sequel" of sorts to the Chicken Little movie, based on the buffed-out movie-within-a-movie version of Chicken Little and his buddies. Originally Buena Vista Games wanted us to do a straight up Chicken Little 2 sequel, but we liked the creative freedom and game play possibilities presented by CL's alter-ego. This image was an attempt to "sell" the idea to BVG and the marketing guys.

In the end, they liked the picture well enough to use it on the cover of the game. However, they felt the need to make a few "adjustments" first. Look here to see how they "modified" it for the final game cover. I can understand why they didn't want a pink game box for an action game, but. . .whoa. Compare it with the original:

I guess the point of this post is to clear my name, artistically speaking. The final cover is not my fault! However, the final version of the game is great, and it was a real blast to work on. I'll have more posts covering the visual development of the game later.

All images copyrights Disney 2006.

Eagerly Awaiting His Shadow

Another one for the Avalanche Blog Villain topic.

These villains are a lot of fun. I think I might do yet another one.

Villain for Avalanche Blog

This was fun and quick. I think I'm going to do another villain soon. Or maybe more.

Curse of Zumtar entry

I posted this up on the Avalanche blog a couple of days ago but forgot to put it here. I realized after I posted it that it might be better if there were feathers falling around him, but then I decided it wasn't worth the extra work.

RANT of the Week: APPEAL

Now that I've finished the character design class for the second time, I have a few thoughts I'd like to vent.
The first time I took the class a couple of years ago was the first time I'd ever heard about the concept of "appeal" in character design. I knew that some drawings were appealing to me, and that others were not, but I was sort of surprised when a drawing that I liked a lot was heavily criticized for lack of "appeal." But I think as the semester wore on, I started to see beyond the quality of the drawing itself, and in time I started to be able to perceive when a character had something special that made the design itself appealing. The way Ryan Woodward explained it left me with the impression that appeal is an almost magical quality designers strive for and almost have to just "feel out" in a design. I was frustrated because I didn't have a clue how to infuse my designs with this appeal, even though I recognized that they were lacking in it.

Since then I've done a lot of concept art at work, and I've studied a ton about what other designers are doing and why. I've especially learned a lot from the artists at Disney as we've tried to duplicate the styles they've developed for the movies. The head concept guy here at work has been helpful as well. And finally after taking the class a second time I think I'm starting to get a handle on this "magical" quality called appeal. So here's my three basic conclusions about appeal. Feel free to argue in the comments if you have a disagreement or correction for my theory:

Let me suggest first of all that appeal isn't magical or mystical. It's pretty straightforward, actually. The three ideas that influence appeal are: Effective use of design principles, creativity, and attention to audience and purpose.

Using design principles to increase the appeal in your design is one of the most surefire ways to add appeal. Honestly, I've seen artists take the most generic character idea and turn it into something appealing by playing with the shapes, the proportions, the colors, the lines, the textures, etc. I can post an example of this later. It's a simple solution, but sometimes the most effective one. I'll add one thing to this list that isn't really a design principle but I think it fits under this same idea: personality. It's another one of those easy fixes for adding appeal to a character design---often just giving a character a facial expression or a pose that gives them life or some kind of attitude will do a lot.

Creativity is another thing to add appeal, although this is the tough one that's maybe a little more like magic. But it's helpful if you can make your character different than other characters that people have seen. Some people go way overboard with this---making their character TOO different---and I think it's important to keep designs at least somewhat in the realm of familiarity. But unless you're specifically trying to duplicate something that has been done before (like for the sake of parody), try to be creative and your character will be more appealing.

Finally, I think understanding your audience and purpose is the number one struggle in making your character appealing. Ryan was always critiquing based on whether our designs appealed to him, which is fine, but he never said anything about other audiences and I think a professional character designer needs to think about that. What's the demographic of the intended audience? What kinds of design attributes appeal to an 11-year-old girl? When you start to think about these things, suddenly it gives a context for the principles you need to focus on when designing.
For example, teenage and young adult males tend to find detail/texture and a sort of heightened realism appealing. That's the only reason why Rob Liefeld was ever able to sell comics. On the other hand, very young children are attracted to simple shapes and bold colors---hence the development of the "Cartoon Network" style of art. I don't think there's a simple set of rules and associations we could list out for which groups of people like what, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those factors are socially or environmentally influenced and change with time. In fact, I think we've seen examples of new art styles that take hold of a segment of the populous for a short period of time, but then fade away. So there's no reason why you have to draw everything like Cartoon Network to appeal to kids. But if you want to make something that kids will like, it will help to pay attention to the design ideas that make what kids like so appealing to them.
I think the other thing that ties into audience is purpose. Why are you designing the character? What role are they supposed to play and how should they play to audiences? How will the art style affect the apparent purpose of the characters or the project? Basically, ask yourself which design principles you will focus on in order to reach that audience and fulfill the purpose that the designs are meant to fill. And I strongly suspect that any design that is creative, fulfills its purpose, and uses all the design principles appropriately, will be appealing to its intended audience. And who knows, maybe if you've got that extra touch of magic, you can do just the right things to make that design appealing to everybody else as well.

Well, I'm glad to have gotten that off my chest. I'm sure there's more to it that I've missed though, so I'm open to any other ideas on the subject. Thanks for listening.

The rest of the final project: Environment 2 and Villain

I think I've been dragging this out long enough and need to move on and start something new, so here's the last pieces. I don't have anything else to say about them, so here they are.

Character design final project: Love interest

Since I missed an entire week last week, here's the second one in two days.
This is the love interest for the hero (the boy posted below). She's supposed to be a couple years older than the boy, and I think he's a tiny bit young for there to be a meaningful love interest going on, but she fills the role for the sake of the assignment. I think this is my second favorite character out of the bunch, right next to the elephant.

Character design final project: Environment

Don't ask me why we're doing an environment in a character design class. I guess the class IS called Character Design and Visual Development, but it is strange to have an environment suddenly lumped in there at the end of the semester.
I realize that there are a few design problems with this one (the repetitive shape size being one), but I was rushed to finish these and didn't catch the problems until it was too late to be worth the effort to fix.

Character design final project

It's a relief to be done with everything for the semester! I'm probably going to be taking a break for a little while, so until then I'll trickle a new image from my final project every couple of days.
The assignment was to take one of our characters from earlier in the semester and design three other characters to go with it---so that in the end we would have a hero, a love interest, a comic sidekick, and a villain---all done in the same style. Then we had to do two environments from their world.

So here's the character I picked to design around, fitting him into the role of comic sidekick:
















And here's his buddy, the hero. I'll post the others later, so check back soon!

Random head

Some old scraps to keep visitors from getting too bored while I finish my final project for the character design class. This was loosely based on an earlier design I posted.

Goat + Gorilla

The other parts of the 2nd animal assignment. I was going to spend a bit more time on these before posting them, but I suddenly got very busy and I doubt that I'll get back to them anytime soon. So here goes anyway:

Animal assignment part 2

I'll post up the other ones this week as I put the finishing touches on them.

Chatty Macaw

I like to think about what this Macaw is blabbering about to that poor dragonfly. I can't say how many conversations like this I've sat through. . .

More animal assignment

Even though I'm constantly trying to stretch myself stylistically with drawings, I hardly ever wander outside my norm when putting down color. Here's a partially-successful attempt to do something a tiny bit different.

Animal assignment

Ryan Wood gave the suggestion to spread the posts for these assignments out over the week, so I'm going to try it. This assignment was to design a reptile, flying animal, and oceanic creature (there were more categories, but those were the ones I picked). This is my reptile, and the one I'm happiest with. I think I may make a few adjustments to the others before posting them. Any feedback would be appreciated, since I'm not able to attend the critique session for the class.