The Awesome Chronicles of Manny and Khan; part 4

It brings me great pleasure to present one of our final painted backgrounds. It was painted by Tim Barnes - one of the most talented painters of our time. I am not sure how we got so lucky. Like everyone that has worked on our show Tim has brought something very special and unique to the table. Josh and I could not be happier. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

The Awesome Chronicles of Manny and Khan; part 3

Our Characters; Manny and Khan


Above: A small rough sketch I did a few months ago
Below: Drawings done by our Character Designer Dan Thompson

The Awesome Chronicles of Manny and Khan; part 2

Our Backgrounds

The Art Direction I am trying for is a sort of vignette style background. The idea is that the least important parts of the background will fade off gradually into the surrounding areas of the scene. creating a frame for the characters action in a sort of nonconventional way.

Below: Two rough backgrounds from our show. They were drawn by the amazingly talented Chris Tsiriotis.

The Awesome Chronicles of Manny and Khan; part 1

Recording Our Script

On September 24th 2008 Josh and I recorded our script with the guidance of Kris Zimmerman our Voice Director. We cast Keith Ferguson to play the role of Khan and Adam Paul to play Manny. Both Keith and Adam added so much depth to our characters. Their phenomenal voice work made our silly drawings feel so real.



Above: Keith Ferguson, Me, Josh Lieberman, and Adam Paul in the recording booth at Cartoon Network

Above: Me and Keith eatin' some snacks

Above: Josh with our Voice Director Kris Zimmerman

Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy

A few months back I did a logo design for a production company called Main Street Pictures which is producing a web series called Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy . The web series is a cavalcade of 1 minute short films produced by the creator of Family Guy - Seth MacFarlane. A new short will air every week for the next few months. I designed the title and the movie theater which is on the web page and at the beginning of every short. The shorts can be seen at Sethcomedy.com or on youtube .



Special thanks to the guys over at Main Street Pictures ; Mike Bodkin, Andrew Egiziano , and Aaron Parry. These guys are probably the three hardest working people in animation.

Character Clean-up and Character Layout

This first page of drawings are my Cleanups of Shannon Tindle's character designs for Fosters Home

It turned out we needed 3/4 views as well. These second two pages of drawings are my Rough Character Layouts of the previous characters.

The End is Finally Here :(

Three years, three months, eight days, and fifty-two episodes later and my work here on Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends is done. Not a bad run if I do say so myself.

Goodbye Susy

My friend Susy is leaving Cartoon Network next week to work on the new Cleveland Show on Fox. A few years ago Susy was our intern here on Fosters back when I was working as a PC. She climbed the ranks quickly and when I moved from PC to Clean-up she took over for me. She has done a great job and I will miss her.

I did this drawing for her last night after work. I hope she is ready for the "Family Guy" sense of Humor cause it is just a little bit harsher then Fosters... just a little bit. Don't get me wrong, I think Family Guy is hysterical - Im just sayin'. This reminds me of that time...

The final color

If you were wondering what the castle was going to look like after it had gone to color, wonder no more. The wickedly talented Sue Mondt colored the background below the other day. I think it is absolutely amazing. It is so crazy to see something that I worked on turn out so beautiful. It has been such a wonderful experience for me to work with so many talented artist over the past three years here on Fosters. I have learned more from them then they will ever EVER know.

Rough Design: Dave Dunnet
Cleanup: me
Color: Sue Mondt
Art Drection: Martin Ansolabehere

Fosters Background Clean-up

Hello all, sorry I haven't posted in a long time I have been very busy with the end of Foster's nearing. For the last few weeks I have been cleaning up backgrounds for Foster's, here is one I am particularly proud of. It took almost two full days to complete. Below it you will find the original rough Background designed by the amazing Dave Dunnet.

my cleanup (painted in grayscale - pre color styling - using Adobe Illustrator)


Dave Dunnet's Rough Design

goodbye card

I am nearing the end of a three year journey here on Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. My official last day will be on June 27th. I find it fitting that I recently finished drawing a prop the other day of a good bye card. I had to design all of the signatures for all of the Imaginary friends on the show and put them in a card. It isn't the best piece of art that I've done so far but if you look closely on the left hand side, just below center, and slightly to the right you will see a little shout-out to my home town Buffalo, NY. This isn't the first time I was able to squeeze Buffalo into a show. In the episode "Foster's Goes to Europe" The gang runs through an airport O.J. Simpson style. They run past a coffee shop that has travel posters on the wall and one of them is for Buffalo. It has a picture of chicken wings and blue cheese. I didn't actually draw that one but the background Designer Dave Dunnet knew I was from Buffalo so he put it in for me. I am going to miss this show.

Bigfoot "Glamour Shot" Rough

Im planing on painting this one in the next week so check back soon.

Jackie Khones Private Eye, Case Closed!

So, over a year ago I had the opportunity to pitch ten episode ideas to Craig McCracken, creator and director of "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends". Out of those ten ideas he liked two, and out of those two one was actually made into an episode of Foster's. The title of the episode is "Jackie Khones and The Case of the Over Due Library Crook".

When I pitched it to Craig all I said was; "Jackie Khones Private eye, Case Closed" and that was enough to get the ball rolling. I was invited to temporally join the story crew for the episode (I say temp. because my normal job is just drawing) and we sat in the conference room for half a day until the story was fully figured out. Then the amazingly talented Darrick Bachman wrote the script. After several months of hard work from tons of people the show was finally completed. It aired on Cartoon Network March 13th 2008.

I also did some drawing on the episode. The three screen shots below are from the awesome montage/ song about Jackie Khones.



Aaaand if that isn't cool enough, I found a very nice review of the episode on Firefox News (link below). So long story short, if you get a sec check out the review and the episode. I'm not sure when the next air date is but when I find out I will post another note.

Thanks for stopping by,
Joey

http://firefox.org/news/articles/1309/1/Review-Foster039s-Home-for-Imaginary-PIs-quotJackie-Khones-and-the-Case-of-the-Overdue-Library-Crookquot/Page1.html

Foster's Incidental Characters

As always the original rough drawings on the left were done by my Character Supervisor Ben Balistreri and my Cleaned-up versions are on the right hand side. I cleaned them up using Adobe Illustrator and they are prepared specifically for Flash Animation. They haven't gone to the color stylist yet so they are still in grayscale. enjoy!

thoughts...

I did this a while back on a lunch break. I was stressed out at the time and needed to escape for a few minutes.

Humanzee

digital pen and marker 10x10

some trees

pencil on paper 8.5x11

put 'em up! put up your dukes!

Feisty the Snowman

MY FISH PURPLE

Carl vs. My Autoimmune System

got bug?

So I've had a cold now for several weeks and I just can't seem to shake it. I think this is what is inside me making me sick. his name is Carl.

Fish-eye Camera

I took this over the holiday during the national anthem of a Buffalo Sabres Game.

35mm film camera
fish-eye lens