Design Work: Kung Fu Panda Showsite

Starting to get my design portfolio site back in shape! I'll be posting each project here as I get it together. Soooo...

Let's start with the site I designed for Nickelodeon's show Kung Fu Panda. 

{You can click on any of these images to see them full-size}

This is a character detail page, with one of my faves, Master Shifu. I was pleased to get to take this project on because the show itself is really, really well done. It's pretty funny, well-written, and beautiful. And I loooove pandas! {I can forgive their monochromaticity in part because of their massive cuteness.} The site is designed to reflect the rich, deep, dimensional, and saturated wold that the characters live in.

Here's a detail from the background:

Images I made for some of the other characters:

Around Halloween, I drew a cartoon mask based on each main character {except for mantis, who doesn't really have a face}, and put them on the site for kids to print and wear:

Here's what the video play pages looked like:

Cute little graphic I made to sit next to the description of the show on its about page:

Two of the promos I made for the homepage of nick.com:

Family Portrait

Redeemer's CFW 2012 Christmas Card

I was pretty excited about this one. Redeemer Presbyterian Church's Center for Faith and Work commissioned me to do their Christmas card! They gave me this C.S. Lewis quote {from Mere Christianity} and I sent them sketches of a bunch of visual interpretation options. They ended up choosing this direction, which was one of my favorites. I'm considering finishing some of the other sketches too; there were some others in there that I also thought had potential.
If you'd like to see more of my cartoon adventures with Cloud-God, you can check them out here:
Amanda Stays at Church

2012 Christmas Magic

In keeping with my new career goal of being a rainbow, in this year's Christmas card I brought some much needed color-awareness to a notorious sufferer of chronic monochromticity. {You have no idea how pleased I am that this is both a real word, and a word that sounds like the disease it is: Thanks for backing me up, dictionary!} Bright red is super great, Santa, but there are a whole lot of other awesome colors out there too. ;)

Amanda + Colored Pencils REUNITE!

"Christmas lights were invented to convert electricity into happiness."
Last week's post for the Wheelhouse saw me getting back together with a long lost friend—colored pencils. I've been working mostly digitally for so long, primarily because of the efficiency and quality of reproduction. But a conversation with my friend Craig about why I have fallen out of love with art-making led me to fire up the time machine and try it the old fashioned way. I am indeed less pleased with the ground I was able to cover in the same amount of time, the on-screen reproduction, and the hugely significant reduction of color gamut + precision, but the creative process here was much less painful. I also like that it's got that hand-done, human quality to it that my digital stuff has been lacking. I'm not ready to give up on digital, but I think I will try this again.

Disconcerting Aroma

Lofty Ambitions

Quarter-life crisis = solved in last week's Wheelhouse post. Too bad the odds of employment in this field are extremely low; I feel it's a career that would really suit me well.

Amanda's Advice for Appropriate Seasonal Adorableness

Wheelhouse post from a few weeks ago. :) It is unfortunate that I have yet to actually find an appropriately sized pom-pom.