Eggs Of Steel
title: Assistant DesignerI was living with my parents again after college, looking for work in comics, when I got a call from Dan Quarnstrom at Rhythm & Hues. Dan had been a teacher of mine at Otis, and he wanted me to do some artwork for a game bid. I went to LA for a week or so and contributed to a pitch book, and when the job was a go, was finally able to move out on my own.
Eggs of Steel was a bit of a challenge for me since I was used to drawing pretty scary stuff. I still had a lot of the violent Predator imagery in my head, so it felt good to work on something a bit more family-friendly. Plus,it had cool robot monsters, so i wasn't too far out of my element.
Since the main character was an egg, a lot of hurdles had to be overcome; How does he emote? How can he be dynamic? Dramatic? Funny? I did a lot of 'attitude' drawings as well as walk, run, jump, cycles. In fact, the cycle drawings got increasingly elaborate and began to incorporate environments, and shifting perspective. It was awesome to get a sort of animation dry-run, and it really helped me down the line on other projects. Another great aspect of this job was that it paid a lot more than comic book work had. I was able to move to San Francisco with my best friends, and set up freelance shop out of my apartment. It really broadened my career horizons, too, as this job gave me valuable experience necessary to get in to Industrial Light and Magic a bit later.
