WDW bus wraps

It was an honor to get to concept and illustrate 13 of the WDW bus wraps - you can see them cruising all over the property bringing Guests to parks and resorts! I especially love seeing the buses and Skyliner gondolas all meeting at the Art of Animation Resort. All of them were wonderful projects to work on, and such great teams were involved!

The themes included:

Moana, Aladdin, Toy Story, Lion King, Dumbo, Peter Pan, Incredibles, Cinderella, Monsters, Inc., Frozen, Cars, Figment, and Galaxy's Edge.

WDW Skyliner

Can't begin to tell you how incredibly excited I am to finally see and ride these wonderful Skyliner gondolas! It was so much fun to illustrate the wraps for ten of them: 

Stitch, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, Winnie the Pooh, and the five based on the new Mickey cartoon shorts.

Bobsleddin'

This is an illustration I did for fun back in 2001, probably during or right after work on "Lilo and Stitch". The Matterhorn's always been my favorite thrill ride. I was actually doing a 3D drawing (the old red/blue glasses thing), and decided to just color it in with Prismacolor pencils. I had no clue at the time that, in about six years, I'd get the chance to draw characters for theme park merchandise, with some of the best artists and designers in the business.

Cover of DisneyFiles

I just saw "Saving Mr. Banks" today with my family. I have always considered "Mary Poppins" to be possibly the quintessential Disney classic, and its creation was beautifully dramatized by this wonderful film. 

For the Fall issue of "DisneyFiles", the magazine of the Disney Vacation Club, I had the honor of illustrating the cover art. This issue celebrates the new addition to Disney's Grand Floridian Resort, much of which is themed to "Mary Poppins". 

AquaDuck

This postcard shows the panels I illustrated for the AquaDuck's queue back in 2010.

Water Parks bus wrap

Here's a Goofy I illustrated a few years ago for a WDW bus wrap. The mat he's riding is based on the ones at Blizzard Beach, with handles on the inside. 

Goofy and Max illustration

This is an illustration I made for the Goofy mini-golf area on the new Disney Dream cruise ship.

Matterhorn monster

Just for fun - here's the yeti in Disneyland's Matterhorn, also known to cast members as Harold. That attraction has always been one of my all-time favorites at Disneyland, if not my absolute favorite thrill ride. I really miss how the Skyway buckets would glide right through the mountain (once I actually reached up and touched the bottom of one as it passed over my ascending bobsled!). I was such a geek, I had actually painted a Matterhorn jacket, made three flipbooks about it, and made my second animated student film at CalArts about Harold getting laid off, finding work in the park's other attractions. Life imitates art, in certain respects....

Van Wrap

This is some art for one of the vans that advertises the Disney Water Parks. I inked the final art digitally with Adobe Illustrator and painted with Photoshop. This particular Ariel is a revised version of one of her standard poses, adjusted and freshly illustrated for better placement in the seat (though the vehicle is not exactly 18th century).

Water Parks Billboard

Here is some of my art for another new billboard for Disney's Water Parks, along with some of the concept sketches.

Billboard for Water Parks

This is an illustration that I sketched, inked and rendered (digitally) for Disney's Yellow Shoes creative group, promoting Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon. Just saw the final version today on a billboard!

Hitchhiking Ghosts lanyard pin

I had a lot of fun with this lanyard pin. We so often see the Hitchhiking Ghosts (unofficially named Phineas, Ezra and Gus) represented just as they are in the Haunted Mansion, it's fun to give them a different pose once in a while... as long as they continue to thumb a ride to fill their quotas!

If you look closely at the art, I included their initials. See if you can find plump Phineas' "P", eerie Ezra's "E" and grandpa Gus' "G"!

The Beast

I drew this for a friend several years ago. If you look closely, you can see a small reflection of Belle in the glass. I still remember enjoying "Beauty and the Beast" at its Hollywood premiere in 1991, at the freshly restored El Capitan theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

Florida wildlife

This was for the press page of Project Firefly's website. Aside from the actual firefly, I designed all the Floridian reporters and painted everything on Photoshop.

"Sistine Bears"

This was just something I drew in a friend's sketchbook, which was being passed around the studio during "Lilo and Stitch" to be drawn in for fun - sort of like a yearbook. I photocopied it and colored it with colored pencil. At the time, we were looking forward to working on "Brother Bear", and my wife and I had recently gone to Italy for our honeymoon (our "luna di miele") -so there were a couple of mixing influences!

WDW Christmas composition 2008

This was for WDW's 2008 Holiday season, when the sparkling winter castle lights were introduced to the world. I drew Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Pluto; the rest of the art was pulled together from pre-existing style guides. Composing the image was certainly a blast, but it was really exciting to see the final art (rendered by Jose Pardo) all over the theme parks that year. This was one of my earlier projects at the Disney Design Group.

Haunted Mansion "Welcome to the After-LIFE" game

While working at the Disney Design Group, I was given the opportunity to create the line art for the cover of the new Game of Life "Haunted Mansion" version (exclusive to the theme parks), as well as for the twelve "Career" cards in the game. Garret Webb, Casey Jones and Quynh Kimball designed and "brought to life" all the art on the game board, game pieces and "Residence" cards within; Jose Pardo did an incredible job of painting the final art - giving everyone a ghastly pallor, betraying a feeling of foreboding... (to quote the attraction). This was a lot of fun.

This sequence of images were for the lenticular Madame Leota on the game cover; I animated her face traditionally and painted her digitally. It was a great feeling, even if only for seven frames, to be flipping drawings again on an animation desk in the animation building. I hope the effect works as a lenticular image - I haven't seen the final product yet.

Disneyland Official Album Cover Art

It was a personal joy to get to design this cover. Disneyland is the park I grew up with, and where so many memories were made. After designing the composition, I scanned in my drawings of Mickey and Minnie and digitally inked them in Illustrator, then painted them in Photoshop. The background was a combination of new and pre-existing art, with plenty of embellishment and manipulation.

Haunted Mansion 40th Anniversary pins

Constance Hatchaway, the "Black Widow Bride", is a fairly recent update to the Haunted Mansions at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World. There has always been a spectral bride floating around in the attic, but the Imagineers cleverly expanded her story - basically, she has a history of ill-fated matrimony. I got the opportunity while at the Disney Design Group to design some lenticular illustrations for the Mansion's 40th Anniversary pin collection. These are my stylized versions of five creepy wedding portraits that are displayed with her in the attic. Each husband was wealthier than the last, as seen by her pearl necklaces, which gain one strand for each marriage. This is the kind of crazy research I would get into for these pins - but that's so much a part of what I loved about working for Disney (as dark as this particular subject was). I designed the borders of the pins as wedding rings; the number of rubies on each corresponds with the consecutive husband shown. (Click on the images to see them larger)

Below is the jumbo pin that goes with the set; I designed it so that as one pulls down the spider at the bottom, the grooms' heads "disappear" from their portraits. Also pictured is the framed set of five wedding ring lenticular pins, sold with a signed lithograph of my concept drawing for the jumbo. The process of designing the pins involves drawing them by hand, scanning them into a computer, digitally inking them using a tablet and stylus and calling out all the metals and color fills to be used at the factory.

Enchanted Tiki Room 45th anniversary cel