Character designs for animation project... (maybe)

visit stevensalerno.com to view more character samples

See all my portfolio samples at stevensalerno.com
This project is currently being pitched to an animation company's corporate client. So, for the moment I will hold off on naming names... 

An NYC animation company recently stumbled across my illustration web site and one of the directors really liked my samples shown in the "simply done" section of my site... He called to explain they were creating a presentation to a client for the possibility of obtaining the project of several short animated segments involving the client's product/services promotions, and they needed a specific "look." The director thought my illustration style fit the look they needed. Based on his direction, and on a very short deadline, I provided several "key frame" illustration scenes involving a main character and many peripheral characters.... Posted here are a handful of the specific character types I created. These are considered sketches, though the final images will also be just simple black line and one wash of color as well... so these sketches look quite close to what the "final" art will look like. These sketches were created using just a black marker and black gouache with brush, then scanned and the color added digitally in Photoshop. 

So, now it is just wait and see if the client hires the animation company to produce the animated segments, and in turn I will be additionally engaged by the animation company to fine tune the character designs, involvement in the story boarding phase, and to create key action scene images etc...  I am busy with other children's book projects, but this potential animation character design project seems like a fun one, so if it becomes a reality, it would be fun to take some time to away from my current projects to work on it with the producer and the animation company.

Another web commercial project with Voicewalk in LA

To see all my illustration portfolio samples, visit my web site. 

Last year I worked with the web animation production studio in Los Angeles named Voicewalk, on a web commercial for client InSight Direct's launch of their new product: VaZing. (see previous post on this project) 

These past few weeks I teamed up with Voicewalk again on another animatic web commercial, this time for client PureSafety. Working with Voicewalk's team of creative director Saul Ives, writer Monica Bowers and animation director Martin Guitar. We moved through the storyboard stages quickly, in part due to now all having worked together before it allowed me to execute a bit more efficiently by having a better understanding how Voicewalk will manipulate my images in the animation process. 

With my "regular" work for print illustration: magazines, advertising, children's books... I usually work with inks, paints etc... and (most of the time) then scan it all into Adobe Photoshop wherein I add digital effects in layers to come up with the final image result. But with these web commercial projects, it requires that I create all the final images as digital vector images, so I create them entirely in Adobe Illustrator. 

My process is this: I take the final storyboard sketch of a scene (in an Adobe Photoshop jpeg format) and open it in Adobe Illustrator, making it a bottom layer named "sketch." Then I stack new layers on top of the locked sketch layer and begin drawing the final image directly on my Wacom 12 x 12 digital drawing tablet. Usually the layers are set up knowing ahead what elements within the image scene that are to be animated, and therefore need to be on a separate layer. The final image is closely based on the sketch layer underneath... and is executed very simply, using various brush tools, shape fills, shape merges, and the only effect I use are gradations between two or three colors. 

Posted above are a few examples of some of the very rough thumbnail storyboards, revised storyboards, and their corresponding final vector images. You can view the final animated web commercial by clicking here.