TEACH YOUR MONSTER TO READ!!!

Here's a job I did towards the end of last year through my illustration agent, Arena for the Usborne Foundation in the UK. It's a bunch of concept designs for an online educational game to help kids to read using the principles of synthetic phonics.

I designed LOADS of monsters as the game allows you to have your own monster avatar and collect rewards/items/points for it as you successfully progress through the game. I also gave them a bunch of ideas for environments.

Unfortunately this job coincided with me moving to the US, so I couldn't follow the job through to completion, but they got the very talented Rich Wake to pick up where I left off and he did a fantastic job!

Check out the game here and also watch the little trailer they made to promote the game.

Congratulations to Antonio, Berbank and Jon for a brilliant job. And many thanks to Michelle at Arena for helping me through all the doodles!

All these images are copyright to the Usborne Foundation.

 Below are the environment designs. The first one is from the original prototype game, and the rest were produced once the project jumped into full production.
I only got a chance to colour up one of the finished BGs unfortunately, but Rich did an awesome job with the rest!

NEW STUFF!

Hello! Above is a new short written and directed by the wonderful Rikke Asbjoern! Check out Rikke's Vimeo page here for a bigger and better quality video and give her a high five!
I was lucky enough to art direct and do the backgrounds. We produced this towards the end of last year, during our final days at the Cartoon Network in London. The idea was for Rikke to make around 4 or 5 of these. She did 2 more boards, but we got too busy on one of my projects and only got a chance to finish this one. Below are a couple of the BGs I produced for it.

Another piece I did last year is this cover for uber Author Jo Nesbo and the first book in his series Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder.

I've been super busy since arriving in LA in February and have been up to my boobs in storyboarding on a fantastic project for Dreamworks. Obviously I can't post anything about it otherwise I'll have both my balls instantly targeted by the Dreamworks legal sniper! But here are a bunch of links to a few of the great artists I'm very lucky to be working with right now.... Bob Logan, Sean Charmatz and Thurop Van Orman. Check out their stuff and send them love!

Also here's a sneak peek image from another project I did for the Cartoon Network.
Hopefully one day I'll get to post the whole thing online!

The ATM and related artwork, and the image at the bottom of this post, are all copyright of the Cartoon Network (I think so anyway, better to be safe than have my balls sniped!).

UPDATE - Also, I forgot to mention, the last image in this post features an awesome background by the amazing Kevin Dart! And the last one in the post below (the image featuring Hamilton Majors) has a BG done by super talent, Eli Hanselman. Thanks guys and also a big friendly face punch to celebrity Frenchman, Sylvain Marc who did some incredible character concept work on the project.

UH OH!

Happy 2012! Apologies for the massive gap in posting towards the end of last year. I was up to my beard finishing off a couple of short films for the Cartoon Network, doing some writing on the second season of Ben Bocquelet's fantastic show, the Amazing World of Gumball, as well as wading through a pile of lovely freelancing work thanks to my wonderful agents at Arena!

On top of all that I've also been massively busy packing and getting ready to leave behind the golden paved streets of London and relocate to the sun-shiny boulevards of LA. From late February myself and Rikke will be starting work at Dreamworks in Burbank as Story Artists. Sad to leave behind all the great people I know in London, but really looking forward to getting stuck into a new challenge and seeing what LA and the US has to offer!

In the meantime we've been on a bit of a holiday over New Year. Above is a lino-print/mixed media piece I did while staying with our delightfully retarded friends Bagga and Emily in Australia. And below is a sneak peek of some projects I've been working on that will hopefully surface some time in 2012. Keep your retinas peeled!

JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF MY BRAIN!

Here's a selection of black and white illustrations I did last year for the inside of James Carter's poetry book, Journey to the Centre of My Brain.

ILL COMMUNICATION!

A new editorial piece. The brief was to illustrate two little space monsters trying and failing to communicate with each other.

Tick, done!

ARTISTS VS EARTHQUAKES!!!

The very talented Sylvain Marc and Paul Nicholson are organizing an event called 'Artists Vs Earthquakes' in London in aid of Artists Help Japan, a charity created by Pixar's Dice Tsutsumi. The opening night is from 7pm on Saturday 7th of May at Cafeand. There are a whole host of amazing artists from the worlds of animation and illustration exhibiting and selling their wonderful wares including Uli Meyer, Dice Tsutsumi, Sylvain Marc, Neil Ross, Veronique Joffre, Rikke Asbjorn, Dave Needham, Michael Schlingmann, Alan Kerswell, Matt Layzell, Rich Wake, Chris Sasaki, Matt Jones, David Z Greene, Mario Cavalli, Genevieve Godbout, Anotoine Birot, Boris Hiestand, Simon Tofield, Simone Lia, Pete Western, Paul Nicholson, Tom Gauld, Daniel Greaves...phew! And that's only touching the tip of the ever growing line up of phenomenal talent involved. Check out the blog here to see details of the exhibition, view the pieces and find out how you can bid on the great artwork on offer.

I've got three pieces in the exhibition. There's the one above which is a framed original Pinky Malinky comic (Arcylic and Ink on Heavy stock water colour paper, image size 38cm x 23.3cm). Then there's the two pieces below, Bubble Trouble (signed and framed 29.7cm x 42cm digital print) and Cheesey-Burger (signed and framed 29.7cm x 42cm digital print). Happy Bidding!!!

Also I'm happy to announce the amazing Rikke Asbjorn (creator of Little Rikke and The Furry Pals, as well as animator of the Gorillaz, the 'Monkey: Journey to the West' Opera and much commercial work for the award winning Passion Pictures and many other animation studios around London) has started a new blog and promises to update it with her brilliantly funny and ridiculously charming drawing and characters. Why don't you go over and say 'hey'!!!

She also has a great piece in the exhibition above, which if you don't buy it I will!

HOTDOG! IT'S PINKY MALINKY!!!

Pinky Malinky is an animated short I created and directed as part of a series of six shorts produced at the Cartoon Network Development Studio Europe in 2009. As I said in the previous post, our brief was to create something short, funny and that could show potential for being developed further towards a TV series.

The main character Pinky is a 14 year old boy who awoke on his first day of High School to discover he's been transformed into a 3-foot tall hotdog sausage! It's a show about fitting in at High School, but with the added difficulty of being a quite literally a wiener!

The short was written alongside Rikke Asbjorn and shows Pinky trying to overcome his fear of the school bully, Barry Fistburger...all set to a Rock/Heavy Metal soundtrack!

Here are some screen shots from the short...

Here are the storyboards from the film. I did these in Photoshop then we put them together as an animatic. We then did layouts from the rough boards and animated it all in-house using a combination of Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator. The whole thing was then put together in After Effects.

Here's a bunch of design and early concept stuff from the show. The human character designs were worked up from Warwick Johnson Cadwell's initial brilliant concept designs.

A big thanks to CN for allowing us to produce these shorts, and a massive, hearty and well earned slap on the back to all the wonderful people who helped make it happen. Here are the credits...

Created and Directed by Chris Garbutt

Written by Chris Garbutt and Rikke Asbjorn

Storyboards - Chris Garbutt

Lead Animator - Rikke Asbjorn

Animation - Rich Wake

Art Director - Chris Garbutt

Compositing - Stephane Coedel

Editing - Lee Gingold

Voice Talent - Ben Small and Rasmus Hardiker

Music - Dave Newby

SFX and Final Mix - Hackenbacher

Big Thanks to - Steve Small, Charlie Bean, Matt Black, Alan Kerswell, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Celine Desrumaux and Tim Bjorklund

Production - Angelica Jung-Woo, Joy Whilby and Jen Coatsworth

Exec Producers - Suzanne Berman and Daniel Lennard