Happy 25th Anniversary to Shrek! / Some of my work I did for the franchise licensing

Happy 25th Anniversary to Shrek! The first animated film was released today back in 2001. Hard to believe it's been that long! I thought I'd post some art I did for Shrek The Third and Shrek Forever After (Shrek 4 was still the working title it was called at the time I did art for the property). All the art I'm showing was done back in 2007 and 2010. Didn't do a whole lot for the 3rd film, but did a LOT for Shrek 4. It was my first time drawing these characters and working DreamWorks licensing and their approval process. While a lot of art had backgrounds, I had to keep a lot of the elements separate so that things could be mixed and matched if need be.

 

As a bonus to this post, I thought I'd post a piece of art and all the steps it took to get to the final version. 

The image below is of Shrek taking his morning mud bath. It's fairly simple in design and not much seems to change from image to image. Most of it I nailed first time out, and then it was fine-tuned in spots. My original sketch had him enjoying his bath a bit more and I tried to capture the nuance of the facial acting that was shown in the first film when he took a bath. That was changed though in the approvals to convey a  more "commercialized" look to all the scenes and characters. Any nuance was changed to show simple broad emotions that were clearly defined in each image. 

I would initially draw a bunch of images based on the art direction and scan them in submit them as JPEGs. All these were drawn on cheap copy paper. I photocopied the border grid on each page so I knew the exact space I had to fill. DreamWorks licensing would then review and do a redlined corrected version, meaning that they would draw over my art in red and made any corrections they wanted. I would then do new, clean, revised versions and resubmit the art batch again. As each batch of 10 images went to the approvals, I would always keep drawing or revising to keep it all moving. Some times it would be approved to go to the next phase (maybe 1 or 2 drawings at most), but most of my Shrek 4 stuff went through multiple revisions. All this on a deadline that kept getting closer and was being slightly tweaked.

With Shrek The Third, it was all fairly clean cut as the film was done in the can. Not so much with Shrek 4... There were many things still in flux and changing daily. Every time I submitted a piece with Rumpelstiltskin, he would come back looking slightly different from the reference I kept getting. Same for the witches and ogres. Fiona's "battle" outfit when she led the ogres had some minor tweaks to it. I will say that DreamWorks gave me a lot of great reference but you didn't know things had changed until you got the sketches back. I felt like I was the last person in the pipeline at times, but it sometimes goes like that. 

Not all, but for most images, there were around 3 or 4 revisions for each image. I kept each version and labeled them as it was needed for me to keep a record (as I got paid for revisions) and it made it nice to see how a piece of art progressed.

So, this piece just changed Shrek's facial expression. I originally drew his teeth the way they look, but they then wanted a more simple clean look to his smile. I did that, and then they saw it and went back to showing his individual teeth. He does look better that way. 

Keep in mind that this was an easy one and only had the initial drawing and two revisions. 

Once the final approvals came through (in batches) you moved to the inking stage. Once the inks were done, there were never any further tweaks done. Everything was always nailed down at the pencil stage.

I inked a bunch myself, but I had artist Dan Davis help me out with the inks (as our styles are close). Dan was a big help, and to be honest, I was burned out on seeing the same images over and over. The work had to be super tight and it felt like you were doing everything four or five times. You had to keep your enthusiasm up, which was hard at times. I don't think there were a lot of "cooks in the kitchen" at DreamWorks then either. It all went smoothly and nothing sat for too long. I think this was mostly a case of trying to do licensing for something that wasn't completely nailed down. 

I will say that it was a far cry from the way Disney moves these days. You submit something to Disney and it sits for months. Literally.

After this work, I think the next DreamWorks thing I worked on was the spin-off for Puss in Boots. From there, it was Kung Fu Panda 2, MegaMind, and Madagascar 3... though I'm not sure of the exact order at this point.

Somewhere in there, DreamWorks Licensing offered me future work internally. I turned it down at the time, or kept the offer open-ended, as I'm not sure what was going on then in my life. I might have had new Scooby work or something...