Pen Thumbnail sketches #1

Someone emailed me the other day about my drawings and somehow they got the impression that I never do dirt ruff sketches. After looking at some of my posts over the last couple of years I can see how you might get that impression. Truth is, I will do a lot of exploration with thumbnails to help me get where I'm going. If I can't get with what I'm after with a certain pencil, I'll switch off to some other pencil, marker or even a plain ol bic ball point pen, which is what you see here. Some of these sketches were done looser than normal for me and took no longer than 30 seconds to make. Because you're not investing a ton of time into the sketch, it's easy to discard and move on to the next. Like most people, there are times that I'll hit a brick wall. In those moments, it's best to walk away for a couple of minutes and clear your head. Get some reference, live action video, photos or look at other drawings that are similar. Go back to the board and use the reference to help you get the result you need. Worst case scenario, get another artists opinion and see if they can help solve the problem. Sometimes the solution is very simple and you were complicating it.

It's not a bad idea to look at the drawings you had previously done before becoming frustrated. Sometimes there's a gem in there and you glossed over it because you were caught up in the heat of the moment. BTW, the drawing on the bottom, is also a thumbnail drawn in a bic pen, but sketched a little slower.

The Spooktacular New Adventures Of Casper

When I moved back to NY in early 1995, I had secured freelance work on a show with a new production outfit in Manhattan. It all sounded good in the beginning. Everyone was impressed with my work and credentials and couldn't wait for me to get going on the first storyboards. Then everything came crashing down. Nothing went right. Changes were ordered on almost every single panel; from just about everyone in the studio including assistants. I have no problem with revisions, but some of the changes were absolutely moronic. After a valiant attempt to please everyone, there was a second round of revisions on top of the revisions!
That storyboard which should have taken 3-4 weeks to complete was now taking 8+weeks to complete.
I stopped work on the show and told the production manager I was done. Although I was happy to be off that show, the sudden realization hit me; I had no work and virtually no prospects of future work. I called around to a bunch of studios and there was no work to be had. It was a scary moment. I began to doubt my decision to move back to NY, but miraculously, I soon found myself being offered series work from a good number of studios. First came a series offer from Hanna/Barbera, then another from Universal Cartoon studios and then there were other various freelance jobs. I grabbed all of them; I didn't turn anything down! The longest lasting of these jobs was offered by Alfred Gimeno who was Producer and Director of the new Casper show at Universal. I ended up storyboarding a whole bunch of episodes from 1995 through 1999. When I was young, one of my favorite cartoons was Casper The Friendly Ghost, so I thought it was a real kick to work on the new show!
To say that working on Casper was a breeze would be an understatement. It was a fun show to work on, with lots of opportunities to do a whole lot of funny business. The ghostly trio, with their obnoxious personalities were my favorites; lots of great character business! The problems that I had with the previous studio were practically non-existent on this show. All I remember from the experience was laughing a whole lot at some of the drawings I created. Of course there were changes; a few here and there, but basically what I boarded remained pretty much the same in the finished version on the small screen. The first few boards were really rough in nature and I was asked to draw cleaner. I can rattle off drawings pretty quickly and by slowing down a little bit I can actually get a good amount of info into the drawing. The boards presented here are actually still considered rough storyboards, drawn in Ebony Pencil that look clean. What I did was rough out each panel with a quick gesture of the action, then rubbed that down with a gum eraser and drew over it with a sharpened ebony pencil. That's probably why you don't see a whole lot of construction lines in the board pages posted here from 'Pen and Tell Her' (click on the images then click again to enlarge the pages). This enabled me to save time in clean ups later. One board that I did in this way went through without a single change! Alfred would later leave the show and a new director, Marija Maletic Dail took over. Pretty much it was business as usual although Marija had a few suggestions here and there with her take on the boarding.
Looking back at these drawings, it's definitely not my best work (hard to believe it's been 15 years since I drew them) but it's still better than the drawings done for the finished cartoon!There were lots of shortcuts taken (as the boards had to be done fairly fast) and some of the drawing seems a bit off. However, I think it captured the attitudes pretty well and it's cool to look at. We had a whole bunch of people working on this show from the Animaniacs and Tiny Toons crew including writers, voice people and animation artists. Overall, it was a pretty neat experience but looking at the end product left me a little non plussed. The cartoony expressions and attitudes were basically discarded by the overseas animation studio (obviously not knowing what to do with them!).
As I recall, there was a whole lot of frustration with the production being on a such tight budget.
The finished animation was extremely uneven at times, sometimes downright horrible, but that's what you get sometimes with overseas animation houses!

New Website Address

Finally, after years of people telling me that my old website on AOL was a real piece of crap, I finally registered for my own domain name and will be posting new webpages there over the next couple of weeks. Currently it's under construction. Thanks to Kevin O Neil for pushing me over the finish line.
New site is $#@!#$%@.com, so keep it on your favorites list.

UPDATE!!!! AUGUST 17th, 2011

Actually with this blogger account, there is no need for a separate website anymore.

And BTW,

that other site hasn't existed for a couple of years now....