It would be much better if I could find the original designs for all these characters but they’re either buried deep in some folder or I dont even have access to them. I’ve never inquired but it seems very early in OK KO’s development a ton of background character concept art was produced. I was still freelancing for OK KO on this episode and was given the original concept art as well as the board artists redesigns.
You’ll have to take my word that each of these are a departure from their original concept design. My job was to blend a little of the old in with the new for the final design.
Purrcival has been revised, I’m not sure by who, but I had drawn him holding a book in his left hand. I dont mind that it needed to be taken out but I want to be clear that I did not draw that hand.
Behind the scenes info from Character Designer Ben Bates!
More from ‘Red Action to the Future’. I’m not sure how well the idea really communicates in the final episode (or what sense it makes, it actually really weirds me out since at her age she should have already reached her maximum height) but as Red Action ages she gets quite a bit bigger. I worked really hard making slight adjustments here and there to make her proportions continue to make sense and balance. (I did not draw the “normal” Red Action on the left but all the other stuff is me with colors by the Color Stylist).
Or whoops, no, I also didn’t draw the lines around the mouth or the muscles(?) in the arms on far right version of Red Action. I was unaware she was supposed to be that old when I was originally assigned the job.
Behind the scenes info and designs from Back In Red Action from Ben Bates!
Ok these are from ‘Red Action to the Future’ and this is the first time I’ve watched a finished episode with my work included! It turned out great and reinvigorated my sense of self-worth haha!
All the work for this episode was drawn while I still worked full-time at Marvel Animation as a storyboard artist on Avengers Assemble, I did this OK KO stuff as a freelancer on the side (and had a blast doing it). The first few images are my line art with our Color Stylist Kali tearing it up with the colors.
The third image is a screenshot from the finished episode. At first I thought the overseas animators were using my chip bag design as a texture, just pasting it in digitally, but careful examination reveals its hand drawn! Those Koreans are killing it, nearly perfectly replicating a fairly complicated design for animation.
Speaking of design, the next two images are straight from the storyboards. As you can see the design for the box and bag were already pretty well defined by the board artist. I simply fleshed out the concept. Now that I work full time at Cartoon Network on OK KO as a Character/Prop Designer thats mostly what my job is. The storyboard artists design everything and I draw a pretty version of it.
Its an interesting reversal from my previous experience at Marvel Animation. Avengers Assemble was a script driven show, which meant as a storyboard artist I was being dictated what to draw by the writers. And anytime a new character or prop appeared it didn’t matter what I drew in the boards, the Character/Prop designer was entitled to design as they saw fit. For example we didn’t have any design for Whitney Frost (aka Madame Masque) when she first appeared on Avengers Assemble. For my own amusement I tried to introduce body shape variation (because its fun to draw different types of people) and designed her in my boards to be a heavier, stocky woman. Naturally this was rejected.
OK KO is a board driven show, even though each episode still begins with a group of writers hashing out the plot, the storyboard artists are really the authority and creators of the episode and in a broader sense the show. Whatever is in the boards my job is to primarily execute their vision.
Perhaps both of these experiences describe the differences of most script driven shows and most board driven shows. I just find it interesting how I can go from one end to the other and stay in the same place on the totem pole.
Designs and behind the scenes info from Designer Ben Bates!!
Loved working on Back in Red Action! @miraongchuaand@parkersimmonsyall did an amazing job with this ep! I had the opportunity to do a new design for Red as well as ½ the hue troop based on Mira’s BEAUTIFUL concept drawings (and boards!), which you can see here! I wanted to show the lineup Kali created with the whole hue troop based on Mira’s size comp - @brandonwuart did the final designs for Green and Yellow, and all the colors are by @kalidraws as always! Red’s social media pics are all straight cleanups of Mira’s drawings, but I wanted to add a bunch of extra thumbs for her profile (even though it’s only on screen for a few frames…!) This ep also had CG vehicles, so Brandon and I ended up doing elevation drawings based on @parkersimmonsyall‘s vehicle concepts! It was tough to do such a weirdly flat and precise turn but they got the job done. Art direction is by John Pham!
Work I did for Back in Red Action! @miraongchua designed the amazing hue troop and @parkersimmonsyall designed the vehicles. I did the model sheets for Yellow Technique and Green Guts and @juliasrednicki did the rest. It was an intense episode because the vehicles would be done in cg so we needed to change the way we did the model sheets to fit a cg pipeline. The lineup and colors were done by our colorist @kalidraws! Also the one Red Action selfie was done by Julia as well! This was a tricky but fun episode to work on so I hoped you all enjoyed it!
