Sketchy Characters

Today I met with the newest member of the Bug House animation team, Dwight Hill.  After being initiated into the Bug House tribe by ingesting the obligatory Joshua Tree waffle fries, he shared his sample ROUGH sketches (his emphasis, not mine) of three of the characters. So below in order are: Dusty (our protagonist and owner of the controversial pet bug), Alice (Dusty’s perfectly coiffed nemesis), and one minor character: the Show-and-tell boy with the Venus Fly trap. 

This week I’m meeting with two more illustrators.  I am giving all the illustrators a storyboarding assignment, and we will be meeting up again in January to share them.  Until then, I'll be updating the blog with more sample sketches as I get them. 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And my eye is nearsighted.

So there’s this bug in Bug House.  He’s not a particularly attractive bug.  In fact, he is quite a hideous creature, and it is this Visually Unfortunate nature that causes all of the shenanigans in the movie. As he is the keystone of this script, one thing that Jess and I talked about in our last meeting was what our bug would actually look like.   She then said she would draw up some rough sketches, just to get a general idea of the form of this beast. 

Now, It should be noted that I have an abnormally high tolerance to bugs. It really borders on a disorder.   I had pet tarantulas.   I didn’t want the spider to die at the end of the TV-movie version of It because he had cute eyes.  Any creature feature marathon that includes giant bugs eating large portions of a metropolis is instant Kryptonite to my weekend productivity. So when Jess drew up this rough sketch of her proposed idea for Bug House’s eight-legged, eight-eye, fangy monstrosity, I responded with the following text:

“I want him as a pet.” 

I might have to forfeit my vote on this matter.