Ron Lukas' Blog

My good friend Ron Lukas has a blog now! Ron is an amazing painter and art directed several animated feature films both for Sony and Dreamworks. Check his blog out and enjoy.

http://www.ronlukas.blogspot.com/

Late Nights...

©Armand Serrano.

Backyard

Compared to the epic, fantastic and fictional grand vistas, the simple and ordinary locations become more challenging to design. The battle is taking the ordinary and common and transform them into something fresh and interesting. Its a balance of shapes, composition, amount of stylization, and lighting. In laying out the location shot, its very crucial to do it and solve all the issues in values to establish the foundation for proper lighting and color. Here's an exercise I did and I want to share including the step by step. Both were done using only two preset brushes in PS - a hard brush for the sketch and my favorite no. 19 brush for wash. Enjoy. 

Backyard-1

Backyard-2

All images ©Armand Serrano.

Bayer TV Ad

A beagle made up of fleas! a design I did a while back for a Bayer TV commercial. Goal is how to make this concept not so disgusting...  ^_^

All images ©Armand Serrano.

Harmony Procedural Drawing Tool

A few years ago, I was introduced to this procedural drawing tool called Harmony by mrdoob.com. Like any other tools, it was difficult to begin with. No undo button. But once I got used to the behavior, it's fun. Here are some of my early doodles. I even used this tool for some design work at the studio. Enjoy.

All images, ©Armand Serrano.

Disney Visit

With good friends I used to work with at the Disney Animation Studios during a recent visit before the holidays. So much memories I have with Disney after working on four feature films between 1997-2004. (l-r) Andy Harkness, Ruben Aquino, Bing Deogracias-Serrano, me, James Finch and Jim Finn.

Arthur Christmas 3: The Hangar and Mission Control

All images©Sony Pictures Animation.

Arthur Christmas 2: The S-1

My concept on the S-1 stemmed from the TV show Battleship Yamato which I love when I was a kid. But instead of a flying battleship, S-1's an aircraft carrier. Below was my first stab on the concept.

Then we went for something slicker, streamlined and organic like a race car.

An idea that I had was the huge S-1 is being stirred by a tiny control rudder mounted on an arcade-type ride just to be playful and fun for the elves.

The concept below is when Grand Santa goes back to find his old sleigh and reindeer, he passes by museum type rooms where the old sleighs through generations are kept:

This could be his old sleigh used around late 1800's to 1920's

This was used around 1930's till mistaken for a German bomber eventually shot down during Battle of Britain in 1941 :)

Now this one was used during the Cold War in the 80's. Fun.

More to come...

All images ©Sony Pictures Animation.

Arthur Christmas 1: Neighborhood/Bedroom

 THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Above is a rendered concept design for the neighborhood/cul de sac. To achieve this shot, I "cheated" a bit by building the basic architectural elements in 3D using Google Sketch Up and placed the camera on the composition I wanted. Below is the step by step painting process in Photoshop.

Here are some of the preliminary pencil sketches before building the 3D sketch up model.

THE BEDROOM

The bedroom concept art above is based from the idea that Gwen checks her stocking in the middle of the night only to find out its still empty. Below are the thumbnails for the shot. Somehow, I felt like going symmetrical composition on this one.

More to come...

All images ©Sony Pictures Animation.

Arthur Christmas Opens Nov. 23, 2011!

When Sony Pictures Animation partnered with Aardman Animations to work on Arthur Christmas more than three years ago,  the studio assigned me to work with director Sarah Smith for a couple of months and had the privilege of working with Scott Caple, George Hull and Francois Audouy to develop the early concept designs for the film. Above is the earliest drawing I did having Santa and his elves in the mission control. I had a concept where elves come in different breeds, short and tall. More to come next week...

By the way, the art of book is out, too:

Click for Amazon Books.

©Sony Pictures Animation

Veterans Day 11-11-11

A salute to all who served! 

©Armand Serrano. 

iPad/iPhone Paintings Exhibit Recap

On top are the iPad paintings I did for exhibit at the iPOP Culture Fest in Hong Kong two weeks ago. The theme was halloween. Then above is the Steve Jobs portrait I used for the press demo as tribute to him. The exhibit floor (below) was so cool. They played the stroke by stroke videos (from Brushes app) on five big LED screens and framed them to look like giant iPhones.

Had to visit HK Disneyland.

Beautiful view of Hong Kong skyline, shot from the Peak.

Then a visit in Metro Manila, Philippines...

All images ©Armand Serrano.