Category: Animation Archives

The first thing to do when beginning any animated scene is to thumbnail. Thumbnailing is to do little drawings exploring the posing and acting of a character in a scene. Here are some from early in my career.

In the movie Beauty and the Beast one of the sequences I animated was Beast in front of the fireplace having been wounded by the wolves. Belle is trying to clean his wounds and they get into a fight. I spent three weeks figuring out the sequence before doing any animation. I did piles and piles of thumbnails working closely with Glen Keane.

Continue reading The first thing to do when beginning any animated scene is to thumbnail. Thumbnailing is to do little drawings exploring the posing and acting of a character in a scene. Here are some from early in my career.

Old Animation Design Drawings

In packing my home, I’ve come across some old animation design drawings I’ve done over the years. These particular drawings are from Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan, and Brother Bear

These are a few life drawings I did of tigers in preparation for creating Rajah from Aladdin

The next few were from early in the design process

Here is where I finally hit the design that ended up in the film.

These are few life drawings I did from lions that were brought into the studio at the beginning of production on The Lion King

These next few sets of drawings I did were from the design process of creating Young Nala

These drawings are from creating the Ancestral Ghosts from Mulan

These were little pen and marker thumb-nails I created in trying to find different compositions for a mountain climbing scene in Brother Bear.

Legend of Tembo Pencil Test

Here is a pencil test I did early in the development of “The Legend of Tembo”. I wanted the riggers and animators to see what I had in my head as far as movement and personality for young Tembo:

 

Here are a few old Mulan designs I found…

Here are a few drawings from when I was doing some design work at that beginning of Mulan. I ultimately was the supervising animator for Yao and the Ancestors but I helped on a number of different things in the beginning. These were a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed the charcoal. This is not even a fraction of the hundreds of drawings I did.