Two character design bits from the time I started drawing ducks ...

Little John

more of the same

Sketching Away ...

Sketching away ...

Visual Development

These are the early development sketches for John Starduck's rocket ship. The final design changed a bit since these were made but to this later ... I just wanted to share some rough concept stuff.

Frequently Hijacking Albert Bierstadt

I love to hijack Albert Bierstadt's sugary landscape paintings of the American West because of the excessive use of light and exuberant romanticism in them. These features work so well with my animation design work.

Original painting: "Indians Spear Fishing" by Albert Bierstadt (1862).

Ducks in my head, again

Ducks In My Head

My brain kind of automatically produces certain shapes and colours which helps me a lot to save time and energy in visual development processes. On the contrary, working with intuition only easily can lead one to lack variety. So it became extremely important to me to constantly influence or inform my visual development work by adopting ideas from all kinds of references from the fields of industrial design, architecture, fine arts, photography, engineering etc.
Reference materials: Albert Bierstadt (painting), Paul Arzens (car)

Ducks in my head

Don't!

"If you shampoo a duck, you'll strip away its oils, causing it to sink. Please don't shampoo a duck." (via)

Don't shampoo a duck ...

Electra

‘L'oeuf Electrique’, an electric car from 1942, designed by Paul Arzens, France.
Here is another beauty by Paul Arzens, ‘La Baleine’ (the whale), from 1938.

I Drive The Car I Want To Drive

Here, I built one of my characters directly into the mood/style reference, just to get a taste for how it works in direct interplay.

Detail ...