The Story behind my Christmas Illustrations

Some of my fondest memories from the animation industry revolve around Christmas time. For instance, I remember a DreamWorks Christmas party where one of the layout guys mixed daiquiris using dry ice. After a few drinks, someone had the bright idea of dumping a large brick of dry ice into the DreamWorks central fountain. The fountain was illuminated after dark, so the dry ice created a cool “glowing fog” effect (I suppose you could argue that this was “research” for artists seeking to create believable fog effects in animation).

Ah… but I cherish these memories: studio Christmas parties, artists decorating their workspaces, studio contests to see who could develop the most creative Christmas ornaments, and the general feeling of positive vibes that everyone seems to have during this time of year. One of my contributions to the holiday season was creating illustrations for Christmas cards that were given out to animation folks (this was back in the day before e-cards replaced actual physical cards).  

Most of my card designs began as pencil sketches on animation paper and developed into pen and ink drawings. Sometimes I painted with watercolor or gouache (opaque watercolor) and colored pencils on hot press watercolor paper or illustration board. Usually, I tried to work in a technique and style that was distinctively different from whatever production I was working on at the time. It was an opportunity to hone my skills while celebrating the Christmas season. I did many of these over the years, but I'm posting just a few of my favorites here. 

In recent years, I digitally retouched some of these illustrations and started printing them on coffee mugs. For this year, I added new captions and have been selling them on Etsy. If anyone is interested, I’ll add links to the images below, or you can check out my Etsy shop.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

DreamWorks Memories

Since I’ve been cleaning house and rediscovering old photos, I’ll post a few more. These photos are from my time in the layout department at DreamWorks, circa 2000-2001 (back when DreamWorks still had a layout department), when I worked on Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. The first photo (above) is a layout crew meeting in late spring, 2001. So much incredible talent assembled together in one room! I count it a great honor to have worked with these folks. I learned so much from them and all of my work since has been better for having applied the lessons they taught me.

The next photos (below) are shots of the “DW Breakfast Club” – a group of layout folks who arrived to work bright and early. The DreamWorks cafeteria opened about 7am or so, and we were there each morning for coffee and muffins. I remember this time very fondly; I really enjoyed working with these people!

DreamWorks Spirit was in production for a number of years, although I only worked on it for the production crunch from 2000-2001. I remember this period as an incredibly exciting time for me personally - I was still a relative newcomer to the animation industry, but I was rapidly advancing my layout skills and my career seemed to be on the upswing. However, it was not the best time for DreamWorks: the company was burning through mountains of cash without big box office success. The traditionally animated 2D films were not doing so well, and folks were speculating that DreamWorks might not survive. Then a 3D film called Shrek became a box office smash. On the one hand,  DreamWorks not only survived, but thrived for the next decade. On the other hand, DreamWorks pivoted to 3D CGI animation, and this was more or less the end of hand drawn, pencil-to-paper feature film animation. The next film, Sinbad, was a sort of 2D/3D hybrid (2D animation mixed with CGI) and everything after that as pretty much all 3D CGI.  

Whenever my employment with DreamWorks comes up in discussions, people assume I must do 3D animation. This is not the case. I only worked on the hand drawn 2D films (by the time Spirit wrapped up, I was leaving DW for Rough Draft Studios, where I would draw with pencil on paper for the Futurama show). People forget that DreamWorks began as a 2D pencil-on-paper animation studio. Sadly, that golden era of big budget hand drawn feature animated film is long gone.

If you are interested in what I did in the layout department at DreamWorks, I wrote about my experience here on my website: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Also, Chuck Green wrote an article with some examples of my DreamWorks layout work here: Idea Book 

Special thanks to the amazingly talented Ed Li for taking these photos and sharing them with me!

Miles Gone By (Memories of the Animation Industry)

 

Cleaning the house, I found this old photo of the WDFAF (Walt Disney Feature Animation, Florida) 1997 trainees - except this was a reunion photo taken in 1998, when we had been at Disney for nearly a year. Along with the trainees are some of the personnel from Disney Florida's Artist Development program. The photo is taken inside the new Feature Animation building, which opened in April of 1998 (so this photo had to be taken sometime after that – but I am sure it was before the opening of Disney’s Mulan feature in June of that year). We all looked so young back then; we were mostly 20-something year-olds, but some of us could probably still pass for teenagers. I’m the guy kneeling in front row left, holding the sketchbook (I was rarely seen without one).  

The thing I remember most about that day is the photographer suggested we all “do something funny", and John Cashman, lying on the floor in front of all of us, quipped, "This is as funny as I get!" (maybe you had to be there, but John was a natural comedian with perfect delivery, and this line still cracks me up to this day).

Imagined Light

Many years ago, I created an online class where I covered different types of lighting (e.g.: direct light, diffused light, atmospheric perspective, etc.) For a section on “imagined light”, I asked students to discuss the following question:

Imagine that you are a production designer for a film, or a concept designer for a video game. You are given some text and asked to visualize a scene. What would you do with this bit of description?

“A long tilted valley, a deep gulf of shadow, ran back far into the mountains. Upon the further side, some way within the valley’s arms, high on a rocky seat upon the black knees of the Ephel Duath, stood the walls and tower of Minas Morgul. All was dark about it, earth and sky, but it was lit with a light. Not the imprisoned moonlight welling through the marble walls of Minas Ithil long ago, Tower of the Moon, fair and radiant in the hollow of the hills. Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse light, a light that illuminated nothing.”

How do you illustrate “a corpse light, a light that illuminated nothing”?

This description is from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers. Over the years, various artists have attempted to visualize this part of Middle Earth. The Peter Jackson film Return of the King offers this conception. 

Do you think this successfully captures the spirit of the book? How would you have designed Minas Morgul differently? 

The class discussions were usually enlightening and entertaining, and some students came up with very creative suggestions of their own. As an environment designer, I am very impressed with the work that went into the Peter Jackson films (even if I don’t always agree with Peter Jackson's story telling sensibilities). As I understand it, John Howe created initial drawings for Minas Morgul that were later realized by the sculptors at the WETA Workshop (principally Dave Tremont and Leonard Ellis, working under the art direction of Richard Taylor). I think the WETA artists were in a kind of "catch-22" situation: on the one hand, Tolkien's text calls for "a light that illuminated nothing". On the other hand, illustrators and filmmakers must create contrast somehow. You can't have a picture that is all dark; something must be illuminated one way or another. Overall, I think the solution developed by the WETA artists was pretty successful.

Adventures in Google Adsense

Recently, my blog was approved for monetization with Google Adsense. I was curious how Adsense worked, so I tried it out. What followed was a comedy of errors.

The First Rejection

I didn’t realize that blogs are frequently rejected for Google Adsense. My first application was rejected due to “low value content”. This surprised me because the Perspective Notes page of my blog received a considerable amount of traffic (more than all my other pages combined), and I received many comments from colleagues, students and aspiring artists who found my content helpful. However, it turns out that Google does not actually evaluate the value of your content. Google bots simply check boxes. For example, the Google bots check to see if you have been posting regularly over a length of time. In fact, when I first applied for Adsense, I did not have many posts on the home page of my blog (all my content was on blog pages, which were serving as a make-shift portfolio until I could build a proper portfolio website). So, after a few months of posting on my blog, I reapplied to Adsense and was accepted.

The “Experiment” That Went Too Far

After connecting Adsense to my blog, I saw a notification that recommended running an experiment to find optimal placements for ads, so I clicked “run experiment”. The “experiment” placed ads all over my blog, literally anywhere an ad could be placed, even in the midst of blog posts. I hate visiting websites where I am bombarded with ads, especially pop-up or banner ads that will not allow me to view content without clicking something. Equally offensive are ads that appear in the midst of blog posts, confusing what is post and what is ad. It was a mess, so I switched off the experiment.

Trying to Play Nice with Ads

I tried to compromise: placing ads discreetly on the sides or below my posts, but no matter what I did, they looked obtrusive or distracting. This might just be my inexperience, but I found the user options in both Adsense and Blogger to be rather limited and disappointing. Eventually, I learned how to limit the ads to the bottom of posts – visually cleaner but terrible for Adsense income.

The Final Straw

I decided to remove the ads altogether - but some wouldn’t go away. Some ads stubbornly remained even after turning off everything in Adsense. Eventually, I was able to get even these ads to disappear, but not without leaving a strange empty block at the bottom of posts (presumably this is the widget in which the ad would appear). For a moment, I thought I would not be able to remove the ad widgets without editing the HTML in Blogger (my feeling at that moment prompted the cartoon at the top of this post). Fortunately, disconnecting my blog from Adsense cleared out the widgets, and now my blog is back to its pre-Adsense appearance.  

Moving Forward Without Adsense

Well, it’s been an interesting experience, but I have decided to stay away from Google Adsense for the foreseeable future. Firstly, my blog is an art blog, and its appearance is important to me. I do not wish to clutter it up with unseemly ads. Secondly, I don’t know if it’s possible to control who advertises on your blog (maybe it’s possible to do this, but I just didn’t figure it out), but I am concerned that the appearance of an ad on my blog might be perceived as an endorsement for a product or service that I do not endorse. Also, during this experiment, I saw ads instructing users to download a file or install a browser extension, and I have no idea what these files or extensions do. People come to my blog for inspiration or information about drawing, and I don’t want to compromise their trust. Perhaps others have had better experiences with Adsense, but for now, I prefer my readers see brushstrokes rather than banner ads.

Homage to Drew Struzan (1947-2025)

The above illustration was my homage to the methods of Drew Struzan (1947-2025), who passed away recently. In my illustration, I started with a pencil drawing (see below) on illustration board of a double-wattled cassowary (a great subject for the exploration of textures!). Over the graphite, I applied ink to refine and darken parts of the drawing. Then I airbrushed acrylic paint in layers to slowly build up the color. Over the airbrushing, I applied color pencils, pastel, and acrylic paint with traditional brushes. I used a variety of techniques, such as splatter brush with masking/stencils, and even from razor blades to scratch out texture effects.

It’s difficult to measure the impact of Drew Struzan’s art. Consider that his movie posters for some of Hollywood’s most iconic films  - Star Wars, Indiana Jones, E.T., Back to the Future - were seen by millions around the world, and sparked the imagination of generations of upcoming artists and filmmakers. It’s not a stretch to say that Drew may have had more impact on popular culture than any other illustrator of the 20th century – perhaps even of all time.

I discovered Drew Struzan’s work first in the pages of Airbrush Action magazine, and later through stories shared by my instructors at the Academy of Art (AAU) in San Francisco. Drew taught only very briefly at AAU (back when it was still Academy of Art College), but he left behind a treasure trove of signed prints and posters. I spent a good deal of time feverishly poring over these signed prints, studying every detail in a state of transfixed rapture.   

Drew’s work appealed to me for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest was his emphasis on drawing. I love to draw even more than I love to paint, and in Drew’s approach, the drawing carries the weight of the illustration. Design, composition, anatomy, value structure, and lighting are all resolved in the drawing stage. This frees the illustrator to focus purely on color and finishing touches during painting. It’s a method that resonates with me: I can leverage my strengths as a draftsman, and when it’s time to paint, I can relax, knowing I have a solid foundation of composition and lighting. At that point, I just turn up the music and get lost in the flow of painting.

In an interview, Drew mentioned that once you have a solid drawing, you can get very loose and painterly, splashing paint around the studio like an abstract expressionist. You don’t need to worry too much about screwing it up, because you have that solid drawing underneath, guiding you towards the finish. Well, I can tell you that I screwed up a lot of finishes due to my own lack of expertise in handling color, but I am forever grateful to Drew Struzan for developing this technique and utilizing it so well. Of course, Drew Struzan’s impact goes far beyond developing a technique that I love, but I just wanted to add my own 2 cents of gratitude to the man and his work.

Eye Update: Seeing Faces

“How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” 

- C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Since my last update, vision is my left eye is slightly improved (I can almost read the 20/30 line on the Snellen chart), but vision in right eye has become worse (double vision effect most likely due to the cataract).

But the most startling development since my cornea transplants is that I can see faces again, especially the subtleties of facial expressions. As my Fuchs Dystrophy progressed, I stopped seeing faces – all I could see were blurry spots where eyes, noses and mouths should be. Subtleties of facial expression were completely lost on me. Then, about a month or so after the first cornea transplant, I was startled by faces at the grocery store, coffee shop, and around town. Seeing a furrowed brow, an eyeroll, a quizzical look, or a smile – something most of us take for granted – was a novelty to me, a pleasant, and much welcome, surprise. I feel as though I’ve been missing out on a vital dimension of life.

In spite of the progress, my vision is still not good enough to resume my old practice of café sketching (I’ve tried but I need to see at least a certain level of detail in order to capture a likeness or personality in a café setting), so I have resorted to sketching from photographs. The above page was sketched from photos taken years ago of neighborhood kids (back when I was an illustration student trying to build a reference library of poses). I haven’t drawn faces in a while, and certainly not in a sketchbook like this. I am struggling to draw hands, and I don’t feel this page has the energy of café sketches executed on location, but I need to start somewhere. This page was sketched with a BLACKWING 602, a pencil I started using while working at DreamWorks long ago. Drawing with pencil on paper again takes me back to my childhood, and remembering why I wanted to be an artist in the first place.