the boy hero

I digitally painted this one for my brother.

ganon

Click to enlarge.

"His breath can be seen, it is forceful."

I drew the top half of Ganon first, on a pretty big sheet of paper. I decided to add on, so I taped another sheet on below. I do this all the time. I think this take on Ganon gives him a lot longer legs than usual, but I like how this makes him look powerful and giant. I thought of Clayface from Batman: The Animated Series when drawing his upper body, especially in regard to the creases and bumps on his skin, and how light and shadow would show his form through strong, interesting shapes.

I have finally figured out how to adjust the settings of this blog so that I can display images larger in the post. I've gone back and enlarged a lot of images from previous posts. It really helps with the wider compositions. Take a scroll down and check it out.

On an unrelated note, this Russian animated version of Winnie the Pooh is really awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqdiEUp6s4E

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 some award here: http://www.ifaipublications.com/iaa/articles/1401_cuervo.html I wonder where it is now...wouldn't mind having this in my backyard someday.

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. I did draw the one they used for the spot...I don't like my final drawings of it though, so not including those. Didn't scan the thumbnails of it yet, and those quick sketches I actually liked more. This was for theaters, a commercial before the previews, the ones I always complain about while reminiscing of days gone by when their were only previews before films.

Fun fact, ya know why those previews are called trailers? Because they used to be shown after the movie. I remember those days too, my brother and I were always excited to sit through credits to see what kind of cinema magic was to come next. I might be remembering the early days of movies on video tape though, but one way or another, I remember as a kid we'd wait for the trailers at the end of a movie.

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.

wider

I wanted to expand on this and so brought out tape and marker paper scraps. I often work like this. This started as three different little small sketches on the same page in my sketchbook. One at the upper left, then another at the upper right, and the girl below. At first I had no intention of making this one composition. As I kept drawing, it seemed like it could all fit together. And after I completed the page, I felt like it could keep going.

skyway

Train sketch from this week.

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.

a girl and her gorilla

A quick sketch of a couple characters from a story idea I have had brewing for years.

sketchbook page 1

realm of the octobot

Some recent freelance design work.