Schoolism Live In Montreal With Paul Lasaine

Hey gang,
Time is running out to sign up for the Schoolism Live Workshop with Yours Truly on March 14th in beautiful Montreal! That's less than two weeks away!!! What are you waiting for?!?!? Get going! Time is running out!! Sign up now!!!

That's right...Schoolism is coming to Montreal on the weekend of March 14th, and I'm going to be teaching a digital painting workshop. If you're going to be in the neighborhood, come and check it out. There will be four workshops over the course of the weekend, and I'll be teaching one of them. It'll be a 4-hour workshop on digital painting. The cost for a single workshop is $60. A bargain! 

But wait...there's more! In addition to myself, workshops will also be given by Production Designer Christophe Lautrette (a very good friend of mine), Storyboard Artist Alex Woo, and Concept Artist Karla Ortiz. It should be a fantastic weekend with more great artsy info and instruction than you can shake a stick at!

And...if you sign up for an ALL ACCESS PASS, you'll get $50 off the regular price of $200. Use promocode: LASAINE

Click the link below for more info and to sign up!
http://www.schoolism.com/workshop-montreal/

This Year's Holiday Card

To all my friends, old and new, near and far...Happy holidays.
(This one started out simply as painting practice, but it turned into my holiday card.)

New Puss in Boots Post

Hey gang,
I posted a couple new pieces from Puss in Boots on my Portfolio Page the other day. Check it out!

Toy Story 4?

So my wife and daughter were playing Nintendo Wii today, and they had an interesting idea for an upcoming Toy Story installment:

They suggested that they need to update the toys in Toy Story to include some of the new virtual toys...like the "Mii" characters you create on the Wii. Of course those characters would only appear on a TV screen, but they would be able to interact with Woody and the gang.

I took the concept a step further by suggesting it could be a hybrid of Toy Story and Tron, where some of the Toy Story gang end up having an adventure inside the game?

Come on guys...what do you think? Disney owns both properties. It's perfect!

Here's the pitch:
The film opens with Woody and Buzz playing a Wii (or similar) version of Star Command. They create their 'Mii" avatars, which (because this is Toy Story), come to life inside the game!

Cut to: INSIDE THE GAME. Woody and buzz discover that Emperor Zurg is about to hatch his latest diabolical plan: if your Mii dies...you die! Can this be true? Can Woody and Buzz somehow manage to get a message out to their their real world counterparts...before it's too late!?!?

Come on on guys, who's with me?

Oh, and just in case any of the good folks at Pixar are interested in this idea, it's for sale! Unless of course they're already doing it.

NY Skyline Backdrop

Last month, my daughter was in the musical at her elementary school. Due to the school's proximity to several TV and film studios, many of the kids have parents in "the biz". Who am I kidding?!? Many of the kids are in "the biz".

Anyway, not to be out done, here's the backdrop I did for this year's show, Broadway Bound...a musical review that follows three groups of kids, competing to win a trip to Broadway.

I painted it in Photoshop. Then we printed it 10' x 16' (that's about 3m x 5m, for you metric people), and hung it on stage. One of the other parents works at an industrial printing facility. They've got one printer that can print 16' across!

Ahh, the interesting things you get to do when you're a parent.

Page o' Abstract Doodles

Here's a bunch of (mostly) abstract thumbnail sketches. I do tons of these...often on napkins. Usually, they're no bigger than 2 inches across. They're not for anything specific...just composition practice. I like to do them when I'm bored. I can crank out a lot of them during production meetings.

Japan Tsunami/Earthquake Relief

It's hard not to hear about the horrific events unfolding in Japan.

If you've been wondering how you can help, my friend Dice Tsutsumi has set up a relief fund that's really easy to contribute to. Just follow THIS LINK, have a credit card ready, and follow the directions.

If you're not familiar with Dice, he's an amazing artist, and one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. Originally from Japan, he's now an Art Director at Pixar.
Check out his work at: www.simplestroke.com

MOONSHINE: DREAMWORKS ARTISTS...AFTER DARK!

Hey, I have a couple pieces in this book! It's a collection of personal artwork by DreamWorks Animation visual development artists. It was put together by two of our production designers: Christophe Lautrette, and Pierre Olivier Vincent. I always find it fascinating to see what kind of artwork commercial artists do in their off hours.

Check it out. Better yet, buy it. You can order it here on Amazon for $13.57. Such a deal!

Traditional vs. Digital

This was a fun little exercise: two paintings of the same subject ... one traditional; one digital.

I painted the traditional one last week as a demo for the Art Department at PDI (aka, Pacific Data Images, which is DreamWorks Animation's sister facility in the San Francisco Bay-Area.)

I was asked to demonstrate how I paint traditionally...specifically my matte painting/illustration technique. Something I haven't done in almost 10 years! Needless to say I was a little nervous. Let's face it...it's hard enough to make a good looking painting on a good day. But to do it when you're out of practice...in front of an audience... Nerve wracking.

Originally, they asked me do a plien air (outdoor) painting demo. But as my traditional technique is definitely an indoor studio technique, I opted for a compromise: an indoor plein air painting. So I brought up a landscape image on a big plasma screen, and did a plein air painting from that. I figured, if you can't bring the studio to the mountain...bring the mountain to the studio!

I would be lying if I said it went off without a hitch. As I said, it's been almost 10 years since I've painted this way, and it was an uphill slog the entire way. But I'm a professional, so I stuck it out! I actually think it made for a better demo than if it went smoothly.

Anyway, for what it's worth, the paintings below are the result. The top one is the actual acrylic painting I did for the demo. The one below, was a warm-up painting I did digitally on my Cintiq.

Both are based on a beautiful photo I found on the web (I couldn't find the photographer's name, but it came from a flickr page called "Winky in the UK". Thanks Winky...awesome photo!)

Oh...and a big howdy to the PDI Art Dept gang! Thanks for having me up there. I had a great time, and I hope you all enjoyed watching me sweat this one out! (^-^)

Acrylic


Digital

New York City

This painting goes back a few years. OK, it goes back over 20 years. Way back, when I was an apprentice Matte Painter, my mentor Mike Lloyd gave me a training assignment to get me ready for all the cityscape paintings we were going to be doing on Dick Tracy. The assignment: find a bunch of photographs of New York and Chicago, and make painting copies...one a day (8 hours max.)...black and white only. Of course, as this was matte painting training, it went without saying that the paintings needed to look like photos.

Up until this point, I'd never really dealt with architectural rendering on this level, and was pretty lost as to how to include so much detail in such a relatively short period of time. As I progressed from painting to painting however, I discovered that the secret wasn't in the detail you included...but in the detail you left out. The trick was to edit and indicate. Keep it loose, but accurate. Big brushes. Big brush strokes. Practice, practice, practice.

This went on for about a month and culminated in the painting below.

Acrylic

Frank Frazetta 2/9/28 - 5/10/10

Frank Frazetta died today. Never again will the world look so fantastic.
Rest in peace Frank.

Death Valley Sketch

I finally found a couple of my paintings from the Prince of Egypt Background Department painting trip to Death Valley. Here's the best one...

We were painting in the middle of a large patch of sand dunes, when the wind started blowing. It whipped up the sand into a mini sandstorm. The sand went everywhere and got into everything...including our paint. If you run your hand across it, the painting feels like sandpaper. It finally got so bad that we all ended up wearing out sweatshirts around our faces to keep the sand out of our eyes. We looked like Bedouins.

Valentina

I painted this portrait of my wife a few years back to be used as a prop in one of my many Halloween setups at our house. I was a projected ghost painting the portrait. Sadly I don't have any pictures of the final effect. But you can see a similar effect I put together of a ghost playing the piano in our front window. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EntsUMlHAzs

Saturday Morning Sketch #6

I did this one a few weeks back, but never got around to posting it. I was trying out a new Photoshop brush my friend Dominique Louis came up with. Thanks Dominique!

Saturday Morning Sketch #5 - DEATH VALLEY

I know, I know...my original plan was to paint one of these a week. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans......

Anyway, way back when I was co-supervising the Background Painting Dept. on The Prince of Egypt with Ron Lukas, we brought the entire department on a sketching trip to Death Valley. Three days of painting in the desert. For some reason I can't seem to find any of my paintings from that trip. Hmm...

We also shot lots of photo reference. This sketch is based on one of my photos.

Drilling Vehicle

I know...I know...it's been a while since my last post. I've been busy. It comes with having a job...and a family. Also, I haven't been able to post my latest stuff because it's all for films that haven't come out yet. But in the meantime...

...here's a design I just finished for a Victorian-style Drilling Vehicle (a la Journey to the Center of the Earth) for my friend who is going to build this, full size, in his front yard this Halloween. Check out his website www.socalhalloween.com. He's a director and Visual Effects Supervisor, and he builds these rather elaborate set pieces at his house for Halloween ...usually involving some kind of vehicle that's been hijacked by an animatronic skeleton and a crow. Last year he built a train that looked like it smashed through his house!

Saturday Morning Sketch #4

Flowers are really fun to paint. If you've got a good underlying structure, and you make good colors choices, you can be incredibly loose and they'll still read as flowers.

Saturday Morning Sketch #3

My family and I spent a few weeks in Italy last summer. There's so much art there - it's impossible not to be inspired. Of course I shot tons of pictures! Here's a painting based on one of them.

Once again, I painted this using Corel Painter. Though I do most of my work in Photoshop, for getting the look of oil paint, Painter still can't be beat.

(No, I didn't paint the entire thing this morning. Most of it, I painted the other night...but I finished it today.)



Here's my lay in...after about an hour of work. One of the nice things about digital painting, is you can keep the early versions of paintings. Often, the under painting is just as interesting as the final product.

Saturday Morning Sketch #2

Here's another quick Saturday morning painting sketch. This one's based on a photo I took from a helicopter somewhere over New Zealand. Most of you know that I worked as an Art Director on the Lord of the Rings. But I also had the great fortune of being in charge of the Scenic Photography Unit. We did most of our work from a helicopter. Actually, two helicopters (but who's counting?) By far the coolest gig I've ever had! Needless to say, I shot a lot of pictures (sadly, before I got a digital camera.)

Saturday Morning Sketch

Here's a quick sketch I did in Painter yesterday morning while I was waiting for my family to wake up. Painter's insanely overcomplicated, but there's a few things about it that I love - like their "Oil" brushes. Not the new ones from version 10, which are clunky...but the original ones. My favorites are the brushes called "Smeary Round" and "Smeary Flat". What's cool about them is that they can apply color and smear color in the same stroke. No changing tools. Something Photoshop can't do...as far as I know.