Years ago I spent a lot of time doing storyboards, beat boards, and a bit of design on an animated monster movie that was ultimately cancelled. These images are beat boards which tend to be more realized images showing a broader part of a sequence compared to storyboards which are the moment to moment actions and acting within a sequence.
Done in 2005 as one of the internal cards for Pixar employees. 
When you grow up drawing monsters, sometimes along the way your Mom might ask if you can draw flowers or something "nice." 
This painting is my contribution to Art Blocks for Ghana, a charity of The Picture Book Project Foundation with the goal of building a children's home in Ghana. Artists in the Animation and Illustration communities have donated artwork created on wooden blocks to be auctioned for the cause which you can read more about here. Also check out their blog. There are many amazing pieces, more than a few of which I'll be bidding on myself.
These aren't quite storyboards, more like key frames from an expired development project I was involved in. I still have acres of this kind of stuff in my newly, somewhat organized flat files. I discovered the smudge stick from working with Garett Sheldrew who is a master of it, as well as any other medium he chooses.
Here's the promised second comp with the strange Guybrush and Elaine stand-ins. I guess at the point this sketch was done I had less of a handle on who these characters were supposed to be. There couldn't have been very much time between this drawing and the actual pencil comp for the final cover so some meaningful chatter about how to depict these characters must have taken place along the way.
Wow, I've worked on a lot of canceled projects. But they reap a bounty of unseen material to post at this site. Here's another character from a movie pitch which I thought was pretty cool. I previously posted a couple of robots from the same project. At first glance you might think this guy a villain, and you'd be correct. I liked playing with the metal work like it was fashioned by crafts-monsters in a feeble attempt to dress themselves up. 
Here's a strange find from deep in the strata. A pencil comp for the first Secret of Monkey Island package in which the main characters weirdly appear to be played by Doug McClure and Bette Midler. 
Check out the new Sam & Max blog now open for business. I'll continue to post obscure artwork here and will direct all Sam & Max-related art and links over to the other blog.
Here's a pin-up I did long ago for one of Jill Thompson's charming and popular Scary Godmother comics. Jill is great at populating her own rich worlds with amazingly colorful, funny characters and I had a lot of fun with this piece. And if she wants to send the pin-up back to me I'll add in Scary Godmother's little wings which I somehow managed to overlook and which Jill was way too polite to mention.
I just needed something to post and found this image buried in my hard drive. I feel like I've posted it before. Maybe it's in one of the sketchbooks. 
Here's an image I cobbled together in honor of "Talk Like a Pirate Day." Since I didn't talk like a pirate and nothing requires me to write like a pirate I did this instead. It's painted on a piece of thick cardboard on top of a loose sketch. I didn't want to get bogged down in planning it out too much. Just wanted to make a picture.
Here's a character design from a previously referenced un-produced feature project. I like figuring out color schemes for characters and trying to get the costume to play well with the character. This was loosely washed onto a rough pencil sketch on Bristol Board.
Here is one of the first tasks I was given at Pixar about 9 years ago. George Lucas was accepting what I believe was an AFI award and Pixar wanted to congratulate him on the back cover of the printed program book. The mandate was to mix George's and Pixar's worlds, and as the cloaked Buzz and Woody Jedi idea was going nowhere, and my favorite Lucas movie is American Graffiti, I pitched this "cruisin" concept. 
Here's a second take on the robot character and true to form, I'm often more partial to the first impulse. Though I don't mind this painting and I'm happy with the colors and shapes, I prefer the guy in the last post. This one has more of a C3PO vibe and feels a bit more predictable as the put-upon service-bot in my opinion. 
Here is a character design for an animated feature pitch. I found a stack of designs from this project and will post them over the next few days. I tried to be aware of the very broad volumes for this guy and as robots go he's one of my favorite that I've done. 
Miraculously, I've managed to keep posting here fairly regularly for about two and a half years. I still have loads of material to post as long as people continue to show up and look at it. 
Years ago I used to buy odd tchotchkes from Seattle's Archie McPhee & Company catalog. In those pre-website days you would actually submit a printed form in a stamped, hand-delivered envelope accompanied by something called a personal check which was a voucher of sorts for funds to be transfered from your bank in exchange for goods. It was all very quaint.
Here's a big oil painting of the Edison Family done long ago for a reissued edition of Lucasfilm Games' Maniac Mansion. The back of the box has a photo of an eerie haunted house-type hallway. Originally I was commissioned to do a tiny painting to be hung in a constructed scale model hallway,... until someone realized it would cost more to create a scale hallway than it would to make a full-sized one. At that point the commission was revised to ask for a full size portrait. I thought of it as a Disney Haunted Mansion style piece and painted it in a weekend in oils with a few fairly large brushes. 
Here's a caricature of Dick Swan. Dick had a great comic store in the south San Francisco Bay Area for many years and he shares my love of 60's toys especially Nutty Mads and Weird Ohs models. He still sells rare comic books on ebay. I can't remember the occasion that prompted this drawing but was fun to depict The Big Guy as one of those great old "fink' type toys.
Here's a tattoo design I did for a friend I used to work with. Although a bunch of my images or characters have been made into tattoos I think this was the first time I set out to design a tattoo. I like how simple it is and how the ends hook back on themselves but it doesn't quite look like most tattoos I've seen which is possibly why it was never confirmed to skin. 
Here's a comp I did for Telltale's Sam & Max Season 2. We didn't choose it but I thought without the text it might make a fun print to do in the near future. As far as hyper-over-stated detail it seems to show some potential that hasn't nearly been tapped in this sketch.
I don't do too many pin-up type gals. This one has been seen before. She is the better half of the pair of gangland villains from the un-produced game design "Sam & Max Plunge Through Space." This image started as a super rough pencil sketch. I pulled it together with acrylic washes and was pretty happy that it retains a lot of the roughness that can sometimes get worked away too much in this kind of painting.
Here is my contribution to a local art show that kicked off the infamous Petaluma Butter and Eggs Day weekend which itself is a celebration of debauchery and unleashed id in a David Lynchean vision of quaint parade floats and cute babies in fluffy chickie costumes. The Petaluma River cuts through the western downtown area and the art show at the Heebee Jeebee Boomerang Gallery is called the River Monster Project.
Here, of course, is the comp for the final LeChuck's Revenge painting. Looks like I hadn't yet thought of the idea of the dead bird plume and what is Elaine doing there besides looking like a man? It appears I reversed the values of the clouds and sky for additional eeriness and tried punching up the phoney baloney lighting on the figures. All in all a handy exercise I guess.
