My final Story Auction piece

"Nina Light Reading" was done in Gouache on pastel board. My thanks to Ted Mathot for giving her a good home and that very generous contribution.

I love a nap. The auction was held last Friday and it was a roaring success. I've been very busy of late and yet it's a good busy--the only kind I welcome. Somehow with even less time than usual I managed to help out in the Story Auction and make pieces for it. Of course I drove Shannon Ryan mad (she's our Story manager on UP and shoots lazers from her red haired head). But that's part of the fun I was talking about. She's gonna kill me next week.



It was a blast. So much fun. It was like a fiesta and people attending were having such a great time, some even remarked that we should do this more often. If it wasn't so hard to organize alongside work we probably would. At the night of the auction this piece had the single highest bid during silent auction.



My thanks to all of Pixar Story for being the stars of the show. You guys and gals ROCK! All of the volunteers who traded in more extra hours of their free time to organize and run all the details of the show. You are all rock stars. To all who participated by buying art, appreciating it and making the event a grand success, thank you, thank you!

More details and pictures to come.

Goodbye, Ollie Johnston

Unending Inspiration. Ollie has passed away leaving us with none of the nine. He's an inspiration to many animators today and will be forever to thousands more to come. "The Illusion of Life" was a book I could not believe even existed when I backed into a career in animation. All the secrets of the trade and the finest examples of it for all time were there--to top it off, it was written by Frank and Ollie. An authoritative source you could not find better, ever.



Goodbye and thank you, Ollie Johnston.


Ollie Johnston
Disney Legend
Ollie Johnston on Cartoon Brew 1 2 3 4

Nina Flying

I'm musing on the graphic design of a card or a cover here. A last minute impulse to try. Watercolor and pen on Arches paper

A second auction piece. I've not been making artwork to show for a while and, just like anything I do, it takes some time for me to warm up. As a story artist my work is done in intense bursts yet I must also regard it as disposable. A conundrum about the job. You have to invest in it for it to be any good but detach from it soon as it's had it's day in the sunlight. Either half isn't easy to do (I don't even think about that, the job's a blast).

So, switching from "Nobody will see this" to "I'm putting this on the wall for all to see" can strip the gears some. It doesn't help that we draw digitally on a screen. No actual paint, graphite or ink. This auction keeps me in shape for a larger piece I have to work on. There's a project we're working on for this year that I have to have done in a month. More on that later.

Barefoot Medusa

Watercolor, gouache and pencil on watercolor board. Image links to a larger view.

An Auction Piece. I tried many studies of what to do after Ted Mathot suggested I try a companion piece to the Crystal one I did for the Emergency auction at Maverix. I had two false starts and this one was a study I had come back to after the rather tepid first tries.

Medusa, she of the Inhumans (careful of the hair, can give Reed Richards a run for his money, prehensile wise),queen to Black Bolt. Hey, I just remembered that I did a black bolt a while back for something...Oh, yeah, it was someone's sketchbook. I colored it on Photoshop. I did post it on the Drawing Board.

Anyway, this is a piece for an internal art auction to benefit our about to be born Story Pod. We're generating funds to furnish a corner of the building we can call our own. We've a name suggested by Brenda Chapman: Joe's Place, after Joe Ranft.

We've got the whole membership of the Pixar Story department generating art. I'll ask permission to post some as we progress.

Medusa
Black Bolt
Crystal

Sketchcrawl 18

Pencil and watercolor on Moleskine cahier. Both images link to full spread pics.

Ghirardelli Square. It started out a gloomy morning last Saturday, March 29. The night before it rained. Enrico and I always remark, tempting fate, that it's never rained on a Sketchcrawl. Well, a sketchcrawler's luck is hard to beat--no rain. It was cold, but no rain.

Parked at Fort Mason, a ways from the square but the parking was free. I wandered back to that side past noon and had a serene couple of hours of sketching these two pages shown here.

The afternoon got colder but then the sun came out to warm us. Don't move into the shade if you're getting too hot 'cause it's still cold in there.



My thanks to all who stuck it out for our favorite sketchbook sharing ritual at the end of the day. There were a good number of new faces who were uncertain about handing over their drawing books over to these well-meaning strangers to peruse. But they all broke through and had a grand time with it all. You just gotta jump in. We're there for ya, you'll survive.

Thanks for all the wonderful positive energy, folks. I'll see you in two months!


Sketchcrawl 18 forum
My Flickr photos of SC18

Justin Wright 1981-2008

Justin with girlfriend, Ashlee

It was a shock. I read the mail late last night and it kept me up. This morning we gathered in a small screening room as a Story department for the formal announcement before the news goes out to the studio. Justing Wright passed away last night.

Justin was a very enthusiastic person and full of energy. You'd never guess that he had already gone through so much in life.

Justin’s journey to Pixar has another plot twist. He got introduced to the famous studio because of a heart transplant. When Justin was born, his heart had all sorts of complications: cardiomyopathy, a complete block, a hole between the upper two chambers, a hole in the mitral valve —the list goes on. Finally, when Justin was 12, his heart had been through too many surgeries and procedures to be of much use, not to mention that it was the size of a deflated soccer ball inside his slight 70-pound body. It was time for a transplant.

With a lot of time spent in hospital beds recovering, Justin drew pictures (a hobby he says he started as a kid when he got bored in church). His doctor at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children's Hospital noticed Justin’s interest, and one day, after Justin was fully recovered, took him on a tour at Pixar, where he had some connections. Justin was enthralled—this was what he wanted to do.

I didnt get to work alongside Justin and my memories with him are few. I do remember the day we, the Story Supes, met to decide on accepting Justin to the Pixar story crew as a full story person, no longer an intern. We put on long faces to fake him out and Mark Andrews said that it wasn't going to work out but we couldn't really continue with it and we just said, "Welcome to Story!"

He was so happy. He could hardly contain the energy in his lanky body and even promised that he would work hard and prove us right. He didn't really need to say all those things, we knew he had it in him and the months since then proved it all. I wish we had more time with him.

Our sincerest condolences to his family, our thoughts and prayers are with them.

I'll post more details on this post as I receive them.


Justin Wright's blog Charlie, a deck hand

Pacific Union College Alumni: Justin Wright


Remembrance Blog Roll

Think Radical

Ted Mathot

Yarn and Coffee: Justin

Jeff Pidgeon

John Sanford

James Robertson

Bill Cone

Enrico Casarosa

Alex Woo

Nick Sung

Scott Morse

Cartoon Brew

Austin Madison

Kyle Shockley

Kelly Matten

Rainbow Zookeeper

Phil Rynda

Lindsay

The Animation Blog

The Pixar Blog


Update March 24, 2008

A drawing I contributed to honor Justin last Friday when his family came to Pixar to visit with us. There were boards of his drawings, a sequence he did and caricatures of Justin. A Dave Matthews song (Justin was a huge fan) rendered by Plot Device, the Story band. Family, friends and co-workers spoke--Andrew Stanton spoke as well as John Lasseter himself--about the best of what Justin left us--his optimism, disposition to have fun and willingness to engage in all manner of debates (who will win, Superman or a Jedi?). We were his work family and we miss him.

Coffee boots drawing

This scan's color is a bit off. It's warmer than this, I swear. Too lazy to color correct. Sigh

Happy Birthday. It was Don Shank's birthday (an old man. I'll let him disclose it hisself). Raquel, his beautiful wife (and expecting a little bundle soon), invited a bunch of us over at the Emeryvillle Trader Vic's for some Mai Tai's and good company.

I've been meaning to give the Shanks a gift and this is a good opportunity. I used a gray pastel board for its tooth and then leafed through a design mag for color.



I knew she had to be framed by the chair (value call) and then I got the blue (a Herbert Leupin poster) first. I remember a Van Gogh painting of his mother I saw at the Norton Simon years ago that still haunts me. It was a study in green.

I didn't look the image up, not wanting to get sidetracked but went with the green for her big skirt. All the rest was just feeling it through. It could all have fallen flat but somehow it kept together. I really like how this turned out and I had a good time making it.


You know, I came really close to that green, just from memory. I just looked that image, "Portrait of Mother," up for this post tonight and that green...man, I love how this mystical stuff works.

I handed it to an appreciative birthday celebrant knowing it's going to a good home. Some days a drawing just comes off nice and smooth. Wish I could have more of those.

Shank Pile
World of Kane on Herbert Leupin