Random Cars 2 Concept Work

I usually show the best stuff I did rather than the odds and ends from a project, but Cars 2 was mostly odds and ends for me.  So here's a glimpse into the actual day-to-day work of a concept artist.

I was the first concept artist on Cars 2, and my first job was to create a style guide based on the first movie since Pixar didn't have one for Cars 2.  I did a bunch of pages for this, but I'm only posting these (and posting them very small) because I'm worried about legal issues.

We had almost no art from Pixar at the start, so my first task was to show how to translate Tokyo's Ginza district at street level into the Cars world.  I gave up on this one because I knew this was mostly wasted effort since we would get the actual art from Pixar later.

Our world builders are very competent, but we end up doing lots of paintovers anyway, I think because multiple eyes on something always produces better results.

Another early task was to test out how various game design ideas for gadgets would look on the cars.  I don't think any of these ideas made it into the game.

I went back onto the project at the end, and at this point they needed final concept for the gadgets.  Some of my job was to add some polish to things other people had done (The upper left cluster), but in other some cases I had to explore a bunch of new ideas.  In cases like this you just paint or draw over the model because it's a waste of time to draw the car over and over again.