OBSESSIVE MIMICRY

Welcome to Obsessive Mimicry, a showcase of my work in storyboarding, character design, and sequential art. With years of experience working at animation studios, I have had the opportunity to bring some of the coolest characters to life, including The Simpsons, Family Guy, Men in Black, and Godzilla.

As a professional artist, I have honed my skills in creating maquettes, character design, and concept art for animation projects. While I may not have designed these characters from scratch, I have expertly adapted my drawing style to match their established model sheets and brought them to life with my own unique touch.

Take a look at my practice runs and see the result of my passion for refining and perfecting character designs and lines. I'm not the only one responsible for these beloved characters, I am proud to have been a part of the talented teams that brought them to life.

 


These character sketches in blue pencil are warm-up drawings created for a neo-noir graphic novel I have been working on for years titled Prisoner of the Mind.




 

As an artist, I understand the importance of refining my life drawing skills. That's why I make a point to go to busy places and observe people, or even visit the zoo to draw animals. It's all about practicing observation and capturing the essence of a subject.

But my passion really lies in character design. I've had the opportunity to work with various studios and bring written concepts to life through my interpretation and design skills. These characters often start out as simple words on a page, but it's my job to make them truly come alive on the page. It's a thrilling process and I'm grateful for the opportunity to bring these stories and ideas to life through my art.



As an artist, I thrive on the challenge of bringing existing characters to life through my illustrations. It's always a fun process to adapt my style and skills to suit the needs of the project and make each character look just as they should.

These illustrations showcase my journey of becoming familiar with each character's unique traits and quirks. It's a process of obsessive mimicry, as I strive to capture the essence of each character and bring them to life on the page. I hope you enjoy these older drawings as I continue to perfect my craft and bring beloved characters to life.

Fortunately, I have worked with some amazingly talented artists during the 90s, but many of them weren't doing storyboards, so I sought out the artists that were so I could learn from them.



I found my niche in storyboards and liked the idea because they were much looser and less polished than character design. Before I get started, I usually do several warm-up pages of different types of characters.




I've done storyboards for feature films, animation, television, multimedia projects, comic books, and presentations. I have drawn thousands of individual frames over the past twenty years, but each project was always different.


These storyboards are for Quantum Enigma, A sci-fi film and comic book project. The boards are very loose and rough which is what this script called for.

.



Storyboard design is very specialized, it involves telling a story with sequential images, interpreted from the written word such as a film script.



A storyboard is exactly how it sounds. It is a way to convey an idea to a group of people through pictures. Usually, it is the action that needs to be shown this way, instead of two people sitting at a table conversing.


Family Guy, Film Roman


A director relies on my ability to show the film crew camera angles, scene detail, character continuity, special effects, and more before it was done on screen. With storyboards, everyone that works on the project understands what is going on.




The Incredible Hulk: Animated Series, Marvel Films. 
This TV show was a crossover with the Fantastic Four on the Marvel Action Hour. 











Fantastic Four: The Animated Series, Marvel Films 






Godzilla: The Animated Series











Rugrats, Klasky Csupo: Animated Series






Silver Lining: Live Action Film


































True Vinyl: Live Action Film
True Vinyl Trailer






I’ve done many different types of storyboards and generally it depended on time and budget. Sometimes, I did a series of pencil sketches or stick figures which worked perfectly. Occasionally, highly detailed character sketches were the solution. It taught me to be flexible, creative and fast.