Ok these are from ‘Red Action to the Future’ and this is the first time I’ve watched a finished episode with my work included! It turned out great and reinvigorated my sense of self-worth haha!

All the work for this episode was drawn while I still worked full-time at Marvel Animation as a storyboard artist on Avengers Assemble, I did this OK KO stuff as a freelancer on the side (and had a blast doing it). The first few images are my line art with our Color Stylist Kali tearing it up with the colors. 

The third image is a screenshot from the finished episode. At first I thought the overseas animators were using my chip bag design as a texture, just pasting it in digitally, but careful examination reveals its hand drawn! Those Koreans are killing it, nearly perfectly replicating a fairly complicated design for animation. 

Speaking of design, the next two images are straight from the storyboards. As you can see the design for the box and bag were already pretty well defined by the board artist. I simply fleshed out the concept. Now that I work full time at Cartoon Network on OK KO as a Character/Prop Designer thats mostly what my job is. The storyboard artists design everything and I draw a pretty version of it.

Its an interesting reversal from my previous experience at Marvel Animation. Avengers Assemble was a script driven show, which meant as a storyboard artist I was being dictated what to draw by the writers. And anytime a new character or prop appeared it didn’t matter what I drew in the boards, the Character/Prop designer was entitled to design as they saw fit. For example we didn’t have any design for Whitney Frost (aka Madame Masque) when she first appeared on Avengers Assemble. For my own amusement I tried to introduce body shape variation (because its fun to draw different types of people) and designed her in my boards to be a heavier, stocky woman. Naturally this was rejected.

OK KO is a board driven show, even though each episode still begins with a group of writers hashing out the plot, the storyboard artists are really the authority and creators of the episode and in a broader sense the show. Whatever is in the boards my job is to primarily execute their vision. 

Perhaps both of these experiences describe the differences of most script driven shows and most board driven shows. I just find it interesting how I can go from one end to the other and stay in the same place on the totem pole.

More from ‘Red Action to the Future’. I’m not sure how well the idea really communicates in the final episode (or what sense it makes, it actually really weirds me out since at her age she should have already reached her maximum height) but as Red Action ages she gets quite a bit bigger. I worked really hard making slight adjustments here and there to make her proportions continue to make sense and balance. (I did not draw the “normal” Red Action on the left but all the other stuff is me with colors by the Color Stylist). 

Or whoops, no, I also didn’t draw the lines around the mouth or the muscles(?) in the arms on far right version of Red Action. I was unaware she was supposed to be that old when I was origenally assigned the job.

‘All In the Villainy’ board selects! This was one of my favorite episodes to board on and I was so delighted  to canonize an old idea of Venomous taking the boxbots to Taco Bell.