Steven D'Amico

Suki The Very Loud Bunny

2011-07-14T07:13:00.000-07:00

In February Dutton Children's Books released my fifth book with Carmela and our first book outside of the Ella The Elephant series, Suki The Very Loud Bunny. If you take a look at the concept artwork from my November 2008 post you can see how the final illustrations have evolved into something lighter, brighter and bit more in the vein of the rendering style of the Ella books.

With the character design for this book I tried to straddle a line between "real" bunnies and something a little more anthropomorphic. They can sit upright, but I never show them walking or running on their hind legs. Like real bunnies, they don't wear clothes or have opposable thumbs, however, their facial features were arranged in a somewhat more 'human' fashion to help convey emotion.

The environments of Suki's world didn't turn out to be quite as complex as I'd originally envisioned in the concepting phase, but they did end up being more detailed than the backgrounds for Ella.

Harley-Davidson Museum: True Evel exhibit

2010-10-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of reuniting with the Belle & Wissell studio to do some illustration work for the Harley-Davidson Museum's 2010 Evel Knievel exhibit, "True Evel". You can view a video of the final installation here.

The museum installed a life-sized "mug board" for visitors to stand behind and get their photo taken. I reworked a classic photo of Evel gesturing to the crowd using brushes and blending tools in Corel Painter 11. The idea was to emulate the kind of 70's commercial art illustration used on lunchboxes of the time.

A motorcycle jump video game was also developed for the exhibit. In addition to the environment and motorcycle artwork, I created original poses for Evel and his female counterpart, Derry Daring. These were used on the character selection screen and on the sides of the classic video arcade kiosks.

Bacteria fun!

2010-02-10T05:06:00.000-08:00

These character designs were developed for the LOTT Alliance in Olympia as part of a series of illustrations created for their new learning center scheduled to open Spring 2010. LOTT is a massive wastewater management facility that serves Lacey, Olympia, Tumwater and Thurston County.

The charicatures needed to be based on the real-life appearance of each micro-organism. A nearby microscope will allow kids to see the actual organisms up close.

This is one of four exhibits I was contracted to illustrate through Aldrich Pears Associates in Vancouver, B.C..

Tower Records

2009-09-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

From 1986 to 1990 I was the display artist at Tower Records in the University District of Seattle. Back in the day, life at night was a blur of concerts, clubs and band practices, but days were filled with the spray paint, foamcore and X-Acto blades of my small studio in the store basement.

Good times.

One of my early windows was for R.E.M.'s Document album. The panels and graphics here are all painted 1" Foamular cut with a hot wire and hung with fishing line. I liked using "real" props like tree branches when I could. I don't know what they had to do with the album but they seemed to work.

Most of the construction for freestanding displays were made from laminated sheets of foamcore. Except for the photos or posters, everything was usually hand cut and painted. Sometimes after spraying paint all day I'd blow my nose and different colors would come out.

Displays for Green River and Mother Love Bone led to the job of creating the lettering sculpture on the cover of the first Pearl Jam record. Jeff Ament remembered my work when they were concepting the cover and gave me a call. Looking at the Green River board I was wondering why I didn't use thick foam instead of flat foamcore for the lettering, then I remembered. People walking upstairs would always bump into stuff in the stairwell and knock the letters off.

I was a big Pixies fan and I worshipped the work of Vaughan Oliver and Nigel Grierson at 4AD. I coated this board with black paint and then drizzled and rubbed solvents over the top to give it a marbled texture. The dissoved areas created sepia tones similar to the ones on the Surfer Rosa cover.

One of the few I actually took home.

Because the window space at the store was huge, I rarely devoted the entire thing to one album. But there was a big push by Capitol for Heart's Bad Animals and I figured out a way to fill the whole thing with crumpled butcher paper. Sometimes the simplest solution was the best. My pal Astrid was the Capitol rep at the time and she probably gave me a stack of promo CDs to do this. Windows often went to the highest bidder... haha.

This Queensryche display was on the wall for like a year and a half. I tended to leave local artists up as long as I could. The images on the board were done using a projector to sketch, then hand paint.

Ella Poster Puzzles illustrations

2009-03-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

I did these illustrations of Ella, Belinda and Tiki as part of the Poster Puzzles game on the Ella site. You can play the game by going to the Fun Stuff section here.

Vintage SI spots

2009-02-24T06:50:00.000-08:00

I recently dug up some of the illustration work I did when I began working at Smashing Ideas in 2000. The very first project I worked on was a collaboration with the lovely and talented Ms. Jessica Barnes for a company called Safe Harbor. I created a series of retro-looking spots in Flash that were used throughout the piece.

Another client I worked with back in the day was Post Cereals. We did a lot of games and activities for their Postopia website early on. These spots are from one of the first games we did for them, although I can't remember the name of it. Something to do with treasure, looks like.

Starbucks training manual

2009-01-25T10:20:00.000-08:00

I just finished doing a series of 35 or so spot illustrations for Starbucks. They'll be part of a new barista training manual due out later this year. I was provided with reference snapshots of each of the objects, which I used for color sampling, etc. I was asked at one point whether I was using Photoshop filters to achieve the paint effects (I wasn't). The illustrations were authored in Corel Painter X using the charcoal and blender tools on a rough french watercolor paper surface.

On a few of the images I patched photo elements into the drawings and used a grainy blender to 'painterize' and marry the patch to the drawing. On the warming oven illustration below, for instance, the control panel was originally a photo element that was added and blended to match the rest of the drawing.

Ella website

2009-01-24T07:17:00.000-08:00

In 2005 I collaborated with Smashing Ideas to produce a companion site for the Ella books. To visit the site, click here.

I created original artwork for the site environments and some of the non-animated props. Animated objects were re-drawn in Flash by studio animators Laura Tulio (intro sequence), Jason Medisky (Ella) and Doug Gordon (props, rollovers). I was concerned at first that the charcoal renderings wouldn't mesh well with the flatter vector artwork, but in the end it felt like everything hung together pretty well. A huge shout-out to Smashing Ideas and Steve Jackson for investing so much time and energy to the site!

Ella is currently in development for television by The Cookie Jar Group. Which is very cool, but since a lot of properties are developed but never actually make it to the screen Carmela and I are keeping our optimism on the cautious side. We've been encouraged by the episode synopses, which seem very clever and cute, and we've been told we should see concept artwork soon!

The Story Of Belle & Wissell Story Kit

2008-12-17T06:12:00.000-08:00

Carmela and I worked with the good folks at the Belle & Wissell to develop a "Story Kit" and window display to promote their Georgetown studio. The limited edition kit (250 sets) contains artifacts and story parts that, pieced together, explain how the characters Belle and Mr.Wissell met and began their adventures in time travel. The cryptic nature of this promotional package adds an element of mystery to the fragmented yet compelling storyline that Carmela devised. Exploration of the contents of the kit provides key details, yet allows the reader to fill in story gaps with their imagination.

As a bonus, each kit contains a pair of authentic vintage Korean War-era goggles, complete with interchangeable colored lenses - just like the kind Mr. Wissell wears!

The final illustrations were created after a fairly lengthy exploration and development process. I used Belle as a barometer for the illustration style, and created numerous versions of her before Gabe and I settled on her final design, a hybrid of a couple of different sketches.

The whimsical, loose line work of these illustrations allowed a lot of playfulness and required less calculation than some styles I've worked with. A series of four plates were included in the Story Kit:

You can see more images of the kit and order your own here.

Suki The Very Loud Bunny concepting

2008-11-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

Right now I'm working on developing a new book with Carmela about a noisy bunny named Suki. In these initial studies I've departed from the soft charcoal textures of the Ella books in favor of more detailed line work and watercolor washes.

The image above is of The Burrows, home to Suki and her siblings. Below Suki narrowly escapes capture by two very strange looking bunnies.

The reception from the publishing community to these drawings so far has been positive but cautious. Straying from an established brand represents extra risk, so I'm trying make sure these illustrations stand on their own merits. Next I plan on developing an alternate set of tests employing a more Ella-esque style. As an illustrator I want to stretch, but there's a potential marketing component here that shouldn't be ignored.

Backyardigans Space Adventure

2008-10-09T06:43:00.000-07:00

This was a game produced by Smashing Ideas for Nick's Noggin website. It's pretty typical of the kind of children's content I get to work on at SI. Nick is one of my favorite clients to work with, they have great properties and they're usually very accommodating creatively.

The challenge with this project was adapting the 2D illustration and design capabilities of Flash to the rich 3D artwork of the Backyardigans TV show.

I decided to use Flash to create the game logo and user interface elements, but I decided to play with e-on Software's Vue 5 to see if I could produce some decent 3D environmental artwork. The characters were re-rendered in Flash by studio animator Laura Tulio in order to animate as 2D artwork.

In the game, users progress from level to level by unlocking planets.

The most complex 3D scene I attempted was the creation of an alien village as the Backyardigan's final "payoff" destination.

In addition to the 3D environments I created a series of vector spot illustrations in Flash that were associated with the spelling words in the game. I used photo references for most of the spots, which helped me nail certain details that I sometimes find difficult to re-create from memory.

Alien All-Stars

2008-10-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

For the past 3 years or so I've been helping develop Alien All-Stars with Derek Munson, author of the award-winning children's book Enemy Pie. Designed for 6-12 year old boys, the property mixes science fiction with sports and galactic weirdness with humor, along with an occasional dose of gross. The first offering of the property will be a series of trading cards released in 2009 with a support website. The initial site will be expanded into a virtual community as the AAS universe grows.

My character designs for Alien All-Stars are influenced by, among other things, Alex Toth's Space Ghost, Pixar's The Incredibles and Odd Rods. The first piece I completed for the project was a promotional "Souvenir Guide" for potential investors. The logo calligraphy was hand-drawn, then warped using Adobe Illustrator. All of the final cover artwork was rendered in Adobe Flash, based on original concept sketches created by myself and Jason Medisky, another contributor to the project.

Once I finished the guide I began producing artwork for the initial 48-card series. Most of my cards use the same flat "cartoon" style I used for the guide. There are two other contributing illustrators on the project, Chad Otis and Monte Michaelis.

With a few of the cards, I've experimented with a more painterly style using Corel Painter.

I helped create the design template for the cards, but Chad did most of the heavy lifting.

Here's what the flip side of the player cards look like.

Ella Sets Sail

2008-09-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

Released in May of 2008, Ella Sets Sail is the fourth and final installment in the Ella The Elephant series that Carmela and I created for Arthur A. Levine Books. Here are a few of my favorite illustrations from it...

In this scene, good ol' Belinda is causing trouble for Ella once again. This time she's borrowed Ella's lucky hat, only to lose it to a strong gust of wind. Run, Ella, run!

Ella, Frankie, Tiki and Lola amuse themselves in the House of Mirrors.

Ella runs into a cranky Mr. Pelican. She really must have bananas between her ears!

That hat sure looks familiar!