ABOUT
bio
Okay, I loved animated movies as a kid, and spent a lot of my free time drawing, but never guessed it would be a major part of my life. Oh, sure, I could only ever see myself IN the arts; I just didn’t know how that would manifest. I kept those preferences throughout school, including college--- plus one VERY satisfying year as a graduate theater tech student, loving the immediacy of that creative environment and the magic of illusion--- emerging with a passion for design, people, history, travel, cultures, drama and, um, fantasy!
What in the working world could possibly use all that?
…. The film industry! Or in my case, ANIMATION! I’ve had a long and happy career in animation, beginning with the frantic model design assignments and tight schedules characteristic of TV work (Hanna-Barbera and Marvel’s “Jim Henson’s Muppet-Babies” Emmy-winning series), and luckily for me, development work for proposed shows in the off-seasons. Roughly following are nearly two decades in Feature Animation and Direct-to-Video divisions of several major (Hollywood and other) studios, being instrumental in the initial conceptualization of memorable characters, rough model sheets and other pre-production visual development (costume, interiors, props) for numerous projects, both realized and not. I continue to work in the field between other ventures. At one point in a 10-year stay at Walt Disney’s Feature Animation Department, I was asked to create a Character Design mentoring program, for which I drew up a proposal and implemented.
Animation is hardly my only interest, however. In the midst of different periods with various studios I spent one year as part of the team at Consumer Products (Walt Disney Company), involved with quality control of existing character merchandise in production (design consistency, re: outside licensees), packaging art for the Company’s products and those of their subsidiaries, plus the development of NEW merchandise. Other design work involved unrelated entities sponsored by the Company, and even some visual development for the film, “Return to Oz” (live-action).
In 2003 and the few years following, I illustrated the first several books in a series for The Helpful Doo-its Project, visually developing a character concept submitted by a writing duo (Wenger and Green)--- plus the friends of and world inhabited by that character--- that explores society’s disadvantaged communities in a format geared to very young children. The series is sponsored by different national/international charities and organizations, and is on-going.
I recently had occasion to expand my visualization work in the entertainment field, when asked to help recreate the dilapidated classroom environment of Karen Kay Woods’ one-act critically-acclaimed theater piece, “The Dance of the Lemons”, pulling on skills accumulated both in theater AND animation.
Whew! So… what’s next???