Julia Lundman

Electronic Arts/Pogo.com Game Icon Designs

2009-11-12T11:27:00.000-08:00

(click on art to see larger image)
I worked on many games at Pogo, for which assets were needed, such as these icons. All were done in either Photoshop or Flash. (even the koi!)

Canasta art for Electronic Arts/Pogo.com game

2009-11-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

While I worked at Pogo, I designed a few games. Here is some of the art I created for the game Canasta. The idea I had for the characters in this game is a 50's nuclear family, with the wild cards being Beatniks. The male Beatnik became really popular is still used today in badges and other Pogo art. All of this was designed in Flash and is vector based. This was a really fun project!

Electronic Arts/Pogo + Hasbro Concept for Kids Avatars

2009-11-11T17:23:00.001-08:00

(click on art for larger version)
At one point, Pogo was playing with the idea of creating a Pogo Kids website, complete with kids games and an avatar system, all created in Flash/Illustrator. This was (and still is, I believe) to honor a deal that Electronic Arts has with Hasbro, who they have partnered with in the online gaming community. Although these initial concepts never came to fruition, I enjoyed designing some interesting characters that would be vector based. I really loved the graphic look we had in mind for the concept.

Electronic Arts/Pogo Desktop and Character Designs

2009-11-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

(click on art to see larger version)
I had the opportunity to design a few games which needed game art as well as characters. I designed these characters and illustrated these desktops as free give aways to Pogo users.

Electronic Arts/Pogo Virtual World concept

2009-11-11T16:45:00.000-08:00

(click on art to see larger version)

At one point, Pogo was going to create a new game screen that functions similar to a home page, but with components that are customizable. We had also talked about creating a virtual world, in which the user could chat using their Pogo Mini avatars. For this demonstration, I created a world concept that was under the sea and placed a few Mini's. Here is the design. I also designed the other elements, as well.
Unfortunately the project never came to fruition. It's too bad - would have been a blast to work on!

Electronic Arts/Pogo Badge Designs

2009-11-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

(click on art to see larger version)
I also illustrated many mix and match badges for Pogo.com. The users collected the badges as rewards for achieving a certain number of games won. The badge program at Pogo has been very successful for our users, who like to collect as many as they can!

Electronic Arts/Pogo Mini's Background Design

2009-11-11T16:10:00.001-08:00

(click on art to see larger versions)

Here are SOME of the many backgrounds I painted for the Pogo Mini's. Some were animated, as well. I dropped in a few Mini's to show how the system worked together with the backgrounds.

Electronic Arts/Pogo Minis Costume Design

2009-11-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

(Click on art to see larger versions)

For the past few years, I have been working at Electronic Arts online casual gaming company, Pogo.com, as a staff artist. I have been primarily designing game art, costumes, backgrounds, and badges. On Monday I was laid off due to overseas outsourcing. I feel sad about this, especially since every single day I came into work feeling excited and happy about the work I was doing. I always took every single project seriously, no matter how 'small' or how 'big' the assignment was. I've always held that if an artist is a good artist, no matter what he or she touches, it should be of the highest quality and taken seriously.

I began working for Pogo/Electronic Arts as a contractor in 2003. At that time I designed some games, Canasta, Pinochle and a few others, while also providing lots and lots of artwork for various other games, like Mahjong, TriPeaks, etc. Eventually Pogo began a program called the Pogo Mini's, avatars for the users that can be customized with faces, skin color, facial expressions, hair, clothing, costumes, backgrounds, accessories, and even pets. I enjoyed this work SO much and always tried to bring interesting and fun items to our users.

2009-11-04T16:12:00.000-08:00

I found this little watercolor I did for an illustration job several years ago. It's a little cheesy.

2009-11-03T11:11:00.000-08:00

a couple of small watercolors from my sketchbook. The tree was in the Presidio and the tower is part of a highschool (the name of which I don't know) across from Dolores Park.

Colgate commercial

2009-10-22T19:20:00.000-07:00

Here is a small illustration I did for Calabash, again. I think I painted this in 2007, a rough year for me, to say the least. Thankfully, work was great that year. I was freelancing for Pogo, got to work on a Spiderwick video game, and painted a lot for Calabash Animation Trix and Lucky Charms commercials. I also painted many of the oil paintings on my website that year and sketched incessantly in my sketchbook. Maybe by keeping busy, i was trying to escape the encroaching dread of a midlife crisis, bad choices in my personal life and a divorce. Thank god for being an artist.

Anyway, Calabash asked me to take the sketch below and illustrate it, bringing it to a more detailed and clean rendering. Normally I do not like to take on freelance work that has been sketched out for me entirely, however in this illustration I felt there were challenges in the rendering that I wanted to take a crack at, such as stone countertops, a mirror and running tap water. Given that I only had a day to paint this, it was probably a good thing that the sketch was already worked out.

Trix Color Script panels

2009-10-22T19:10:00.000-07:00

I found a few color panels from a color script I did for Calabash Animation back in...hmmm...maybe 2007. This was for a Trix cereal commercial that was done for the Mexican market. I had fun painting these.

2009-10-07T17:14:00.000-07:00

Here are some packaging illustrations I did for a tea company about five years ago. The rendering is a lot tighter and more detailed than I would prefer; the client asked me to make sure they looked as realistic as possible while still maintaining a painted look. I'm not sure if I pulled it off. I'm also not sure about those ellipses. The illustrations have been sitting in my archive for a long time, so I thought I'd give them some fresh air. There are a few more in this series, but these are the best.

2009-10-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

I added a background and more detail to the seahorse painting I started earlier. I am working on a few more of these, too. I am having fun messing around with the color scheme and lighting of the deep.

Sketch Comps/Greeting Card illustration

2009-10-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

One of the first clients I found right as I left art school in the early 1990's was a greeting card company called Prudent Publishing, whom I still work with from time to time. The process in working with a greeting card company involves working up several comps, which then go into a review meeting. Typically, Prudent Publishing would have some ideas in mind when they'd ask me to generate some comps. So I would quickly paint them up and wait for the review. Sometimes the comps would be approved, and I'd be asked to work one or two of them into fully rendered illustrations. Here are several Christmas/Winter themed comps from several years ago (copyright Prudent Publishing Co.):

Santa! This one never made it to a card, but the comp was really fun to paint!

and below are a few cards that I illustrated:

Spiderwick Nintendo DS background pan

2009-09-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

Wow this looks really tiny when I upload it! It is a pan background that I created for a Nintendo DS Spiderwick game while I worked at Backbone Entertainment, in Emeryville. It was such a fun project to work on. It made me a HUGE fan of Tony DiTerlizzi, the illustrator of all the Spiderwick books.

More Learning Company backgrounds

2009-09-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

These are all for the Learning Company's, "Strawberry Shortcake", "Reader Rabbit" or "Katie Kadet" cd rom series, painted around 2002, I believe, all in Photoshop.

San Francisco, Reader Rabbit, and The Learning Company

2009-09-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

In early 2000, I moved out to San Francisco. When I arrived here, the dot com crash had just about begun, leaving a lot of artists around town clamoring for freelance work. It was not great timing on my part, but despite the struggle, I did not regret moving to this beautiful California city. Most of the freelance work I found the first few years in living here was not local, rather it was either for Calabash back in Chicago, Celluloid Studios in Denver (which was bought by Will Vinton in recent years), greeting card and book illustrations in NYC. I considered going back to school at the Academy of Art in downtown San Francisco, but as it turns out, I was busy juggling various projects from various companies, leaving me little time or money to reinvent my career. I made a choice at this point to continue what I was doing and see where it would lead me. Over time I gradually built up as many freelance projects I could in order to customize my portfolio for the bay area, which is heavy in video game work and film. Try as I might, I finally found some good steady and rewarding freelance work through the Learning Company, who at that time was making educational cd games.

Given that this was still an animation based production, the work flow had a similar pipeline: layout was done by a layout artist, then colored by a colorist, which in this case was me. The drawing was done by [the great] Marcello Vignali. I painted it in Photoshop.

I'm not sure who did this drawing. I colored it, trying to make sure the palette and lighting was consistent from scene to scene.

This is a little spot illustration I did for a Reader Rabbit board game. I wish I could find more samples from this particular project. It was a fun one!

A few Lucky Charms backgrounds

2009-09-23T11:43:00.000-07:00

I only have a few backgrounds in my archives from all the Lucky Charms commercials I worked on in the 1990's. Here are a few. As you can see, this style and color palette is very different from the revised and updated palette in the two previous posts.

This background is a four foot long painting used in a pan camera move from left to right. Lucky was flying through the air in this particular scene. I think it took me a week to paint it. Too bad I can't show you a larger version. I think I had scanned it in sections and put it together in Photoshop.

Lucky CharmsRedesign/ Color Script

2009-09-22T16:12:00.000-07:00

So, the Lucky Charms redesign ended up being a success with the ad agency that handles the General Mills commercials. Calabash then went into the story board phase with the new look in mind. Since this was such a departure from the standard Lucky Charms commercials, I was asked to come up with a color script using the story boards that the director made. Here are a few select panels from the color script. I've written a few words about it below, too:

I spent a good deal of time coming up wtih the palette and lighting in order to suggest a dark and mysterious forest, but not too scary. I thought that if I used a somewhat saturated purple in the shadows, the color would have the duel effect of being a shadow and suggesting magic. I also thought the forest would look as though it were a 'deep' woods that does not get a lot of bright sun if I used an emerald green local color on the grassy areas instead of the typical sap green. Also, it was tempting to make the very distant areas dark to suggest darkness, however, I decided dark tones in the distance would make the woods look more frightening, so I kept those areas light and desaturated.

All in all, I enjoyed working on this campaign. I ultimately ended up color scripting all of Calabash's General Mills commercials, which ended up being useful in many areas of the production process, from pencil test, to ad agency approvals to compositing and effects. The color scripting work I did for Calabash was always my favorite part of the job. I miss it!

Lucky Charms Redesign Concept Paintings

2009-09-21T14:47:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, the ad agency that handles the Lucky Charms campaign wanted to revamp the look of the character's world. The directive they gave artists was 'Harry Potter-ish, magical and mysterious'. Calabash, the animation studio that produces the commercials, asked me to come up with some concepts, which are the two paintings below.

Also, my ex husband, Mike Midlock, drew the Lucky and Crow concept and I painted it for him:

I also painted this house, which was drawn by the senior animator/director at Calabash, Wayne Brejcha. In the end, the agency decided that this look was faaaaaarrrrrr tooooooo dark for a cereal commercial, so I was asked to lighten up the color of the house, making it day time instead of night and make the colors more cheerful.

I still think it would have been neat to see a creepy Lucky Charms, but then again we don't want to scare the children!

Keebler Elves Commercial/background paintings

2009-09-18T16:33:00.000-07:00

Back in the 90's, I was a background painter for a commercial animation studio, Calabash Animation. This was the first job I had right out of art school. I am grateful for the experience I had there, as it was where I really learned how to mix color, apply paint and learn the dynamics of foreground, background and midground values and lighting.
I was trying to organize my archives this afternoon when it occurred to me that I don't have any of this work online anywhere. So why not post it here, I thought.

These backgrounds are all traditional gouache paintings on illustration board. They were for a Keebler Elves commercial. I have many more backgrounds and production art which I will post in the coming weeks as I sift through my archives.

btw, the sad thing is that these are all color xeroxes, scanned...i have the originals in storage. back in the day we didn't work digitally, you see.

This painting of the Keebler Elves tree was dropped into a live action scene.

All four elves were sitting on this couch with wonderful flickering light. Wish I had a copy of the commercial to post.

This scene had some live action footage dropped into the white area of the tv.

Erik Tiemens Watercolor & Gouache Painting Workshop

2009-09-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

Over the past weekend, I attended the Erik Tiemens' Watercolor & Gouache painting workshop in Mendocino, California. Erik Tiemans, for those who are unfamiliar, is a concept artist in the film industry. A few times a year he teaches a workshop at the Mendocino Art Center. Overall, as a working illustrator, I found this workshop technically useful; as a painter I found this workshop inspiring.

Tiemens' palette is largely composed of the familiar colors many painters use, but with a slightly blue and gray emphasis with brown undertones. The influence of the Dutch Masters' painting is evident in his work, which he talked about to some degree on the first day.

Tiemens' approach to painting outdoors is similar to pre-impressionist painters, who would spend time in the countryside sketching from life (usually with sepia ink or watercolor), bringing the sketches back to the studio for further development. Here is a sketch he had hanging on the wall in class (a better photo can be found on his blog):

And here is a beautiful finished painting he brought to class:

Although Erik Tiemens works in the film industry as a well established concept artist with a great deal of respect, apart from that field he is just a really damn good painter with a lot of interesting work. It is difficult not to be inspired by his enthusiasm for the craft and history of painting.

But since this was a workshop, what did I take away from it?

Here are some of the field sketches I did during the workshop:

and small studies, experiments worked up from memory:

I love the idea of sketching out in the field, 'gathering data' as he referred to it, taking those sketches and experiences back into the studio to come up with something entirely new: a composed impression based on what was learned from life. To pull this off well, a certain amount of craft and skill is involved that one must, in the end, feel as though the landscape has not been slavishly copied, but rather pulled from a well of knowledge and creativity. In the end, the artist must arrive feeling completely personally immersed in self expression. Isn't that what it's all about? I left the workshop and the beautiful town of Mendocino completely inspired and looking in a more complete direction for my own work. I highly recommend this workshop for any working illustrator or fine artist who simply loves to paint.

2009-09-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

Lucky Charms cereal box illustration. I painted the far background, hands, and small panel illustrations. Lucky was prepainted and dropped in later. I don't have a sample yet of the entire printed box with text. Hope to get a sample soon!

Prudent Publishing/Greeting Card comps

2009-09-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Here are a few watercolor comps I did for Prudent Publishing Company, a greeting card company. I enjoyed working on these. I don't believe they were used in their greeting card line, but it was fun nonetheless to help out. All comps are owned by Prudent Publishing.