the boy hero

I digitally painted this one for my brother.

kaboom and friends

More of the bug designs...these were all the initial exploration drawings, before I did the final character design and turn around posted below.

kaboom

I named this guy Kaboom, as he's a bug whose endgame is maximum carnage in your kitchen at night. I designed this guy for Protokulture in Chicago. They made the 3D model based on my designs and are planning on animating him. www.protokulture.com

I purposely did not make him symmetrical. I don't like how a lot of 3D models are perfectly symmetrical. I doubt any living creatures are perfectly symmetrical. I tried to play it up a bit with this guy.

agave

I drew these for Digital Kitchen, Chicago. They ended up making a 20+ foot high installation piece. It's inspired by an agave plant. It was lit up from the inside and changed colors. This was for Jose Cuervo. They took it around the country on a tour.

The drawings above I drew really big with marker. My job was to come up with the initial visual direction for this installation.

First off a I drew a bunch of thumbnail sketches, four of which are here. The art director liked the ones on the right, so that's what I based the top and front view drawings on.

I even made a little model out of wire, plastic, and wooden rods to help visualize how each petal would intersect the base. For the final design, I had the nine petals protrude from the base/core in a spiral pattern upwards. When I looked at photos of the core of a real agave, this is how they grow out, in a spiral pattern around the core. I had about two days to come up with this stuff(there were a lot more exploratory sketches involved also...the ones in this post were the selects).

Digital Kitchen had a 3D modeler make a cg model based on my designs. They took this out to tequila headquarters, along with my drawings and the little model, and Cuervo liked it. DK then went to work modeling a version that would be able to be easily put together and taken apart, have visuals projected from the inside. as well as withstand storm force winds.

This is how it finally turned out. They ended up adding a few extra petals. It's not exactly what I drew, but I really dig how it turned out. It won an award here: http://www.ifaipublications.com/iaa/articles/1401_cuervo.html

www.d-kitchen.com

cartoon network

Cartoon Network Cinemedia from Chris Green on Vimeo.

Here's something I did some initial concept sketching for earlier in the year. This was for DK in Chicago. I had a day to sketch designs of how the interior of this storefront could change shapes to include in their pitch to the client to try to get this job. I first did a bunch of small thumbnail drawings. Then Chad, their cg art director, picked which ones he liked and I drew the three key frames bigger, that's the first image at top.
DK got the job, and so the next day I came in and in the morning they asked me to kick out a few designs for the exterior of the storefront.

the dead city at night

Messin around with gouache tonight. Had fun with this one. Expanding more on the world I've drawn some of in some earlier posts. This is supposed to be Denver in the future.

neon fireball guitar solos

click images to see super-mega-ultra-up-sized versions...

Earlier this year did some preliminary character design work on a project at Calabash Animation called Eternal Descent. These guitar god characters battle each other with guitar solos and lightning bolts and neon pink atom bomb feedback.

02/03/11...added some more development sketches to this batch.

kaleidoscope street

Here is another page in my sketchbook that started as a couple different thumbnail drawings next to each other. As I looked at them, I thought they might blend well together, and then I just kept adding on. Did not at all plan on the trippy multi-dimensional intersection. But I dig how it turned out.

girl in gloves and the red robot

Some recent stuff fresh outta my sketchbook.

Squid vs. Whale

The colossal squid vs. the sperm whale.

daniel jones

This is a brush and ink drawing I made recently for the surf film I'm working on, hangs upon nothing. This one got published in the last Surfer's Journal overlayed on a photo sequence of Daniel's brother, Mikala. I just made the mat this weekend.

Imperious Rex

Here is a portrait of Namor I kicked out over the last couple days. Inspired by some of the really impressive portraits I've seen over at conceptart.org recently, I decided to try and dip back into a type of more realitic drawing I really haven't attempted in over ten years. Trying to go back to the basics, and relearn or learn for the first time the foundations of drawing and painting.

I did most of this from imagination and looking at some previous sketches I've done of Namor. I also used a WWII US Army portrait of my grandfather as reference. He was seventeen or eighteen in the photo(he lied about his age to get into the Army to serve in the war), and had the looks of a movie star. In the photo he's turned the other way, and its a happy, proud looking portrait. I just used it for a bit of reference in regard to the nose, cheeks, eyes, and neck. This drawing doesn't look like him, and I didn't try to make it look like him. But the nose is pretty similar. I find that there is something timeless and magical about old photographic portraits. Hard to describe, but they just often have such a strong prescence.

In other news, my grandpa, still alive and full of kick, is now on facebook. He's beat me to it. I guess that means my grandpa is hipper than me.

Namor

silos

Exploring color ideas on translucent yupo. This translucent yupo stuff is pretty interesting as you can lay it over an existing drawing and do an overlay without using a lightbox. And it will also take watercolor without warping. It is tricky to use though! Ink does not dry quickly on yupo as it does not absorb. And going over an area with a wet brush that already has dried paint on it can lift that paint right off, depending on how you hit it with a brush.

the great stairway pt. 3

I'm trying out doing a watercolor wash over the drawing on translucent yupo. This is my first thumbnail color sketch.

the great stairway pt. 2

Here is the finished drawing. I blew up my thumbnail, transferred to marker paper. And did this with prismacolor greyscale markers and a .25 pilot hi-tec c pen. Also a little bit of pencil to help lay out a few of the tighter details. Pilot hi-tec c pens are my new favorites. I stumbled upon some in Indonesia this year. They are made in Japan, and hard to find here in the US. There are a few websites that carry them, and a few stores here and there it seems. Mainly in Japanese stores.

The image above is about screen size when clicked on. The lower image is 2x the size when clicked on to show more details. I drew this at about 24 inches wide.

the great stairway

Paper, marker, pen, and tape. And vanishing points. This is the rough thumbnail drawing of the current piece I'm working on.

gold dreams

This is the town I grew up in, a hundred years or more into the future. Kids still skate in the future. Some cops still get upset about it. Some kids get upset back at them. Yes, there's some Akira inspiration in this one.

corwin schrader, cousin of vader

Recently I've been looking at a lot of old Ralph McQuarrie conceptual sketches and paintings from the original Star Wars trilogy. Probably my favorite art of all time. Didn't know this before...he was born in Gary, Indiana. A few miles from where I'm from.

Double D Surf School in Bali

I want to put up a few good words on the world wide web about the surf school in Seminyak, Bali, locally owned and operated by my good friends, Dedik and Deduk. Its called Double D, as in Dedik and Deduk. If anyone out there wandering the web is looking for somewhere to learn to surf in Bali, check out: http://surfschoolbali.com/

There are many surf schools in Bali, and almost all of them are owned by foreigners. Double D however is owned by these two Balinese twin brothers, born and raised in the same town that their surf school is in, Seminyak. Its close by Kuta, just to the north. Everyone working at the school is local. And the instruction and attention you will get is top notch. Deduk and Dedik have been surfing their whole lives at this beach, and they absolutely rip. Everyone at the school speaks excellent English as well. And the equipment and surfboards are excellent too. Not too mention they are all a friendly and welcoming bunch.

You can often find one of Indonesia's best young female surfers, Dia, hanging out at the school, too, or surfing out front. She's a cousin of Deduk and Dedik, and she's been winning competition after competition here in Bali recently. I remember being out in the water three years ago watching Dedik teaching her how to surf on a longboard, pushing her into waves.

If you are visiting Bali, the school is located right on 66 Beach, also known as Double Six Beach. Where Jalan 66 meets the beach, its right there, a quaint two story blue building with a thatched roof. When you contact the school, you will likely be corresponding with Ayu, Dedik's lovely girlfriend who coordinates scheduling and helps direct business at the school daily.

The school offers very personalized lessons, unlike say, the Australian owned major surfing brand school just down the beach where they seem to put 50 students out in the water at once. You can also rent boards at Double D.

So if you come to Bali and are going to take surf lessons, try out this local surf school. You will leave smiling! The photo above is a shot I took of Deduk three years ago paddling out at Turtle Island.

2B

The gal at the sandwich shop forgot about the sandwich I ordered, so I had some extra time to draw at lunch today. Didn't bother me. My friend George and I have been drawing a lot during lunch breaks recently. Kinda feels like back in the art school days. George is one of these cats who if the option of a bigger table is available, will always choose to sit diagonally across the table. The killer crossover. Heads down, scribbling away before and after the food, a few words diagonally tossed back and forth. George is on a mission, and I'm trying to keep up. I've been quick sketching with pens a lot, because you can't second guess with a pen, once a line is down, its there for good. And so that helps me draw quickly.

Decided to switch things up today so I loaded my pencil up with some good ol 2B lead. This started as a quick sketch at lunch, then morphed into a train sketch, then I added to it some more at home after work. Here's what it looks like so far. You ever just stop and stare at your city? Namor in Atlantis.

teeth

A closer look at the jaws.

pillar

ruins

When I'm working on something I'm enjoying, I'll have visuals just come to me. And if I don't get my ideas down on paper really quickly, in some form, they sometimes vanish. I liked the way this one was looking in my head, so I grabbed my brush and jotted it down in that same old sketchbook. Here's a quick sketch of Namor cruising above some ruins of ancient Atlantis.

roar

How would this sound underwater? I'm trying to approach these drawings in terms of shapes, and not really lines. I usually draw thinking of lines. Its how almost any drawing starts. And working as a traditional animator, you work almost completely with line drawings. I feel that drawings indicating blocks of light and shadow are stronger. And that's how I want to approach this. So I really have to unlearn a lot of what I am used to doing. This drawing is halfway there. But I still fell back on using lines to define some areas, as opposed to relying solely on shadow and light. And since there's no background, its hard to not throw in some outlines.

And yes, I think Namor will encounter a sea beast of some kind in this story. This was my second try at the beast. The first one looked more like a big carp. Started this on the train yesterday with a refillable brush, and then at home taped some other pages of my sketchbook to it and added the rest.

Namor

For quite a while now I have been thinking of trying to make a Namor comic. Just for the fun of it. On the train home yesterday, I got an idea of what I want him to look like. And so I went home and drew and painted this. Its pretty much what I was envisioning. More to follow...