L.A. ZOO (and link update!)

Great place to draw and not only animals, the greenery around is fantastic too, some groups of people and/or individuals are also worth a shot.
Anyway, a great few hours scattered here and there with the inevitable thought of 'some of these animals look really out of place...'. Fantastic opportunity to see them live and in motion otherwise.

Btw I just read at 'Lines and Colors' about the 'Freelancers Union' (see links). -Very- interesting.

Bots!

These are some 'robot sketches' from a few years ago. Sharpies and photoshop, my favorite tools by now, aiming for something not too complicated (we all know how detailed these things can get to be otherwise!)

Two drawings

The guy in the square pattern shirt I drew in Culver City over lunch break while working at Sony, about ...two years ago now? something like that. It was one of these beautiful early spring days in So Cal, perfect for lunch outside!
The other one is a self portrait attempt while in line at the dentist's (a clear art-pain connection).

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.