Fantastic Day

And so we all headed for the Huntington Gardens... chinese new year festival awaiting for us.
Perfect day!, great light, great temperature. Following Craig's suggestion I brought marker and sketchpad. We both stopped right opposite the japanese garden area which we drew from there.

More Chariot Race

Two more workbook sketches for the same sequence.

'The Prince of Egypt' and 'Asterix'

I don't recall ever posting up, neither on my blog nor on my website, any POE work. Not that I have many copies left, but here is one of them. A pencil sketch for the chariot race sequence at the beginning of the movie introducing the two brothers together.
As I didn't use any computer technique back then the color effect was achieved by playing around with the original on the color copy machine. (© Dreamworks)

The Asterix design was for the bad guy's lair, which never made it to the screen.(© M6 - AFilm)

Creepy locations

These are two locations I designed for two different films while in Europe.
The 'bird cage' was part of the Asterix project, although I don't believe it ever made it to the film.
I usually had a few standard viking figures to plug into any design for scale, this was one of the fellows.

Although the roman guys might look like they also come from an Asterix story these are actually from 'The Three Wise Men', produced in Madrid by Animagic Studios and directed by Antonio Navarro.
The location is Herod's palace, therefore the whole thing looks mean... and dark...

CA 92328

From the old days.
(do the 90's qualify as old already?)

Yes it was (...and here is the first for 2009)

Happy New year everybody.
And here are some more Viking environments that come with it. The longship in the middle of a storm belongs to a storyboard piece for the intro of the film, while the mean looking guy on the top deck is purely inspirational, as I was trying to get into the subject.
The layout belongs to the typical scene of a grand dinner with the men of the Village as they decide what evil deed to do next.

Last of the Year?

Maybe.
We just went sketchclubbing again today after (for me) a very long long time: Marcelo Vignali and his two daughters Grace and Gloria, Craig Harris and Sean Galloway (Cheeks), whom I had the pleasure of finally meeting today!
We set camp in the food court of the Westside Pavillion, pulled out our pencils and markers, and went for it!
Here are some interesting characters I saw around.
It was great fun and I realized how much I missed it. Let's definitely do it again.

More Asterix (© M6 & A-Film) ...and "The Prince of Egypt" 10th Anniversary.

It is going back down memory lane with yet another 'Asterix' post.
And talking memories, yesterday it was the 10th anniversary of the release of 'Prince of Egypt'.
So many things coincided in time for me back then, just arrived in the U.S., getting started with a big, big, brand new Company, an amazing, larger than life, project... it was an epic movie created by an epic collaborative effort. An opportunity to learn from so many passionate and talented people.

Anyway, these two designs today correspond to the end of a 'chase on ice', and a shot from the very beginning of the movie, with vikings attacking a fishing village that has just been abandoned by its terrified inhabitants.

It's the Gauls turn (© M6 & A-Film) + Tagging update

Like I mentioned, 85% of the work I did for this Film was design around the Vikings and their locations, although I also got to do a lot of key layout for the whole movie, that included both viking -and- gaul locations.
So her are two "village" shots and a "surrounding forest" one.

-BTW,
I was tagged by 'Shuku' (http://shukuen.blogspot.com/) recently.
I'm supposed to list 7 random facts about me and tag another 7 people along (I'll only comply to the first part, I'm way too shy for the second!)
-Born in an Island.
-gimme summer time, any time.
-First life action movie I ever saw; "20.000 leagues under the sea"
-Love snorkeling
-'Paris, Texas', what a movie (and let's not forget about 'Stranger than Paradise"!).
-Blessed by being passionate at the healthy activity of drawing and telling stories.
....and
-It was good to be raised bilingual, makes you see there is always more than one view on the same issue.

(thanks Shuku)

Asterix and the Vikings (© M6 & A-Film)

Exceptionally, and since I don't have much time to produce 'blog-sketches' these days (busy at the studio and busy at home with my own project), here is some artwork that I have done in the past for movies.
In this case it's "Asterix and the Vikings", a film for which I designed all about the "Viking world".
It was produced by M6 in France and A-Film in Copenhagen (just in case it wasn't clear enough). A year and a half of fun and one of the major projects I worked for in my studio in Spain.

So rough it's not even funny (updated)

This is a real sketchy one (plural, after update) , one can tell I didn't spent more than two weeks on it.
Anyways, I hope all is well with everyone at the 'blog world'. Things here seem to be good and I'm enjoying posting something up after that long, even if it's this simple.

Ps. Since I hadn't posted a thing for the last 3 years and 7 days, I thought I would at least add another one to the post. So, for the same price, here goes the lady in red, plus 'swordman guy'.

Hello!

Well, it certainly has been a while, so I won't say much and will go straight to the thing!
I hope all is well with everyone.

Thoughts and sketches.

And to add up a little more light to this last 'drawing-less' posts, a couple of life drawing sketches.

Not too long ago, before the 'Orphan' news broke, I was talking to someone comparing the times in which I grew up (60's 70's), when one only had access to artwork produced by the 'official big guys' (from which sure enough we learnt so much), to these times we are living now in which with full access to internet and therefore pretty much any creative blog on earth, the scope of art, artists, talent, styles, points of view, options, opinions and ideas we could learn from and be inspired by, just enhanced everything we ever experienced at this level to a point never imagined before.
The speed at which things happened, the interchange of sources of inspiration -and- ideas, the creation of a global community of artists that were -constantly and in real time- sharing the best they had to offer in terms of art and opinion, seems it might as well be in the way out. If things go in a certain way, no 'real time' art, no fresh and spontaneous feedback there. This window to the world which I particularly appreciate very much seems to be going through very difficult times right now.
Anyhow a friend was telling me recently that the more obstacles we find in our way the more we, as the creative people we are, are going to find ways to even improve what we had before. I'm with him.



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http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/