Turtles Forever Teaser Trailer

http://www.4kidstv.com/tmnt/tmnt-25th-montage/0025

Here you go guys. After all the waiting it's coming.

See You Around Green Guys

Well, the rights to TMNT has been sold To Nickelodeon (Viacom). I feel like a proud second uncle watching his nephews go off to an opportunity of a life time. It's a little bitter sweet to see them go but I'm just glad I had my time to put maybe a little bit of my mark on a property I loved so much as a child. I definitely think Nickelodeon will do a great things with the property.
I don't know what this means for Turtles Forever but The current series produced by 4Kids and Mirage Studios will continue to air on CW4Kids Saturdays until Aug. 31, 2010.

Read the full story here
http://news.toonzone.net/articles/31520/nick-acquires-rights-for-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-new-tv-series-and-movie#

Turtles Forever Coming Theaters

This piece was done for a canceled Fathom event. It was worked on by all of the art staff and done in a crunch. we essentially finished this in 2 days. I wound up staying till 2am doing the composite you see here. Though this version was not what was finally used, I still thought you guys should see it.

Turtles Forever Poster

Hey guys it's been a wile, I had this post in my draft section for a wile now just waiting for the right time to post. I would of posted this earlier but I had no idea that the poster had been released. In fact I found it on line by accident on none other than Peter Laird's Blog.

Sorry I haven't updated this blog in a wile But I have been very busy with our current Project, A little something called Turtles Forever. Turtles Forever is our first Direct to DVD feature length movie. The DTDVD Follows the current TMNT as they confront a foe so huge it takes more than just one team of turtles to defeat it.
In posts to come I will be doing some behind the scenes segments that will give you an idea of the insane amount of work that went in to the creation of Turtles Forever. And with out further a due here's the first post :)

So let me set this up. The makings of this piece started way back in December around the time of the NY Comic Con. We were hitting the tail end of pre-production and "Lloyd Goldfine"  our supervising producer and director was worried that there might not be enough budget to pay for a poster. So I initially volunteered to do this piece for absolutely no extra pay. It was to be done on my own off time. It was due around the time of San Diago comic con.
The day of our Turtle retrospective at NYCC I had about 3 ideas for the poster. Lloyd and I agreed we wanted to keep the poster a bit mysterious not giving away two much of the final story of the film. Here are a couple of my original thumbnails.

This one Is what I call My Star Wars TMNT poster. Its very inspired by Drew Struzan's work and I planned to do it in a very painterly style. Something like my Ninja Tribunal Cover.

This second one is essentially what became the final poster. My inspiration for this was originally the Transformers the movie cover, but later it evolved in to something more. Originally I planned to have silhouettes of Bebop & Rocksteady in the for ground on the left an right. But that was later changed because I didn't want to clutter up the image with more characters.

The process was a bit slow going at the time. I had a couple of my personal pieces in the works like the piece I submitted to the Udons Darkstalkers Tribute Book. We also had some additional color models requested by Dong Woo (Our animation company). A lot of which were keeping me at work late nights.

A couple months passed and Lloyd needed to show Mirage what we planned for the poster. Here is a cleaned up version with grays and such.
When that was approved I started the final. I planned to do the whole thing in separate parts so that the 4Kids graphics department could edit the image when needed or use elements of it as promotional material. Here are some of the element separated.

Here we have the new Turtle copter with April and Casey and the old turtle blimp. This probably took me the longest out of any element in this poster. Drawing vehicles always takes me a lot of time. also April and Casey are on separate layers.

Here we have the 80's Turtles. I had a lot of fun drawing these guys. I have to say I haven't drawn them since i was a kid. Me and a buddy from elementary school used to always draw and trade drawings of these guys. Believe it or not it was a little hard to keep these guys on model but once i got it I was able to replicate it over and over. It's kind of subtle but if you look at the line art you will notice the line art has a slight brownish tint. That is something we in the color department came up with. All the characters from the 80's show have this line treatment in the film. To give them a slightly older feel. I will go in to more detail in a later post.

Next we have Tokka and Rahzar, yup they are in the movie :). the reason they are here is I didn't want to have two much 80's characters or 03 characters.

Finally we have the 03 turtles. you will notice they aren't the Back to the sewers versions of the turtles with eyes. The FF turtles were going to be used for BTTS but for property unity they were redesigned to reflect the current movie. These are slightly adjusted versions of the Fast Forward turtles. the main adjustment being their outfits and the rendering of the shadows. I will go in to a little more detail in a later post.

And here is the Final Image I submitted with out text

I finished this piece before Comic con an the first sneek screening for the Film unfortunately final text and such were not finished in time for printing. This image in the end was a massive undertaking I pulled more all nighters than I should of but I'm really happy with the final product. Even though I didn't get paid for this I consider this the least i could do for a property that has given me so much in my carrier. Happy 25th!!

TMNT: Comic Con Panel

Here is youtube footage of the TMNT Retrospective that we did at the NY Comic con.

PART 1


PART 2

PART 3








I would like to thank the fans of the show for coming in and showing there support and listening to us yammer on about it .

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Ninja Tribunal

Here is the season 5 Ninja tribunal DVD cover. I figured I'd show you a little of the process that went in to this Piece. When I was asked to do this cover I wanted to make it different than the others seasons on DVD . I had been painting Chaotic cards and I wanted to try something similar. I wanted to keep the hard animation like shadows but still have it look painterly. To sell them on the idea I repainted the tattooed Leo model from season five and Did two thumbnails.
The for this cover I wanted to keep the mystery of what the season was about, Not giving away to much. I figured the visual of four shredders looming over the turtles would make people who hadn't seen the episodes yet be like oh man there fighting Four shreddersthats going to be crazy . I actually second guessed my self when I did my first two thumbnails. I figured they wouldn't go for the four shredder idea. So this is what I came up with. It's the four Shishos out of their Shredder armor. I also included splinter in this cover. I felt he should be on the cover as well. The other thumbnail I came up with had the same composition but instead the Demon Shredder was looming over the turtles. I'm actually glad they didn't select them.
The comment I got for this version is they felt it was a little to similar to the other DVDs. In a meeting after they rejected the first two ideas, I told them my first idea and they seemed to like it . I also worked an idea of the Shredder looming behind the DVDs. This is my Thumbnail after the meeting. They really liked this one but they weren't happy with the placement of Mikey's left leg.
Here are some extra elements I created to populate the DVD. Just some cool action poses for Splinter and The Ancient one. I wanted these old guys to look awesome, asspecially Ancient one.

This is my final sketch. all the characters and elements are separated on to their own pieces of bristol paper. I figured if some element's didn't work for the 4 kids Graphics Department they could adjust it if need be. They could also uses the separated elements to populate the DVDs as well as the menus. I Inked all the images by hand with a brush. When I colored them I redesign all the colors of all the characters I used. I also repainted the tribunal hall to match the painterly style i was using for the turtles.
So there you have it the final cover as it will appear on the DVD cover. There are some elements that were adjusted By the 4 Kids Graphics Department but it still essentially what I intended. All in all I made 12 separate illustrations for this project, all four turtles the four Shisho Shredders, Demon Shredder, Splinter, Ancient one and the Student Amulet. This project was a massive undertaking but well worth the effort. My younger self would be proud.
If you want to find out more of what goes into making the show. I suggest you take a look at the Official TMNT the Animated Series blog Inside The Shells. There you will find a lot of the great production art for the lost season as well as wallpaper of the images I haven't shown here. Its updated every Thursday so check it out.

If your interested here's where you can Pre- Order the DVD http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-Tribunal/dp/B0014567V6

TMNT © Mirage Studios, 4 Kids Entertainment and Playmates

TMNT: FF Season 2 DVD Dark Turtle Extras

Here are some extra Characters Done to populate the TMNT FF Season 2 DVD back cover menus and disks. The line are was done by Adrian Barrios Colors by Me. Here's Little known Fact about the dark turtles. Peter Laird was responsible for the final skin color for the dark turtles. Originally they were meant to be the same colors as the Turtles they were cloned from. If you want to check out the Front of the DVD cover check here http://nexxorcist.deviantart.com/art/TMNT-FF-Season-2-DVD-Cover-75813142

Here is the final




TMNT © Mirage Studios, 4 Kids Entertainment and Playmates