Create Pixar Style Concept Art

Background Art, Concept design, and Art for Animation: there is the one element of an animated movie that really creates the atmosphere or mood. The art of the movie.

Learn to draw and paint Pixar style animation backgrounds!

As a Background Designer, you get to create these magical worlds that viewers can escape into. And if drawing a street scene sounds difficult, this class will teach each step along the path to painting colorful and quirky scenes.

For the class project we are going to create a scene inspired by the charming and magical Disney Pixar movie, Luca, a scene saturated with warm mediterranean colors that exudes a quirky and authentic style. A street scene with buildings can be a really daunting project. So, I’m going to take you step by step through the entire process and explain everything that I do and why I do it.

• I’ll teach you first how to research your ideas, and build a solid reference to work from

• You’ll learn how to translate your idea or concept into a rough sketch.

• How to wrangle that complex drawing or idea into simple and manageable color shapes

• From there you’ll roughen the edges, add texture and color variation, giving your world a lived in feel, a real place that has history, life and character.

• Finally I’ll show you how I add all the minute details that go into a street scene - things like windows, doorways, drainpipes and even washing lines.

I worked for 15 years as background artist and environment designer for animation. Before getting my career up and running I was enthralled by the scenes and images that the art of animation created, and I never thought I would be able to do something like that.

In fact even when I tried, it felt impossible, because i didn’t even know where to start.

When I finally did get a lucky break and land a job as an assistant BG artist, I learned in my first week on the job, every trick and technique that had been missing and that was all I needed to set me up for the rest of my career.

So, that’s what we’ll do today! Join me in this class :)