Luck of the Draw

At Powerhouse Animation we have a weekly excercise to help keep our design skills in shape. Every week at the animation studio we all create a design based on the same topic and at 5:30 on Friday we share them on the conference room big screen. We call it "Luck of the Draw."

We started out as doing caricatures of our fellow employees:

Here a some links to some of the roasts. CAUTION: theses are full of inside jokes: Frank Gabriel, Brad Graeber, Bruce Tinnin, Doug Beck, Jason Williams, Krishna Jain, Sam Deats, Megan Kluck, Ronnie Williford, Cindy Crowell, Louie Granda, Shane Minshew, Ryan Cullen, Charles Kohlmeyer, Micah Lincoln, Rachel Citron, Patrick Quiring, Ed Booth, Jessie Pyles, Sam Lotfi, Stephanie McCrea, Adam Deats, Mary Brown, Jeff Freeman, Chris Beaver, Aaron Romo, Phil Knoll.

Eventually, we ran out of employees so we bought a raffle drum and everyone threw in a topic.

Some of the topics we have had so far are:

Robots Performing Menial Tasks, Flamingoes Throughout History, Geometric Celebrities, Powerhouse Smurfs, Bizarro Powerhouse!, Bowling Alley Animations, Animal Evolution, 90s Sitcom, Alternative Media Animals, Mythological Creatures in Mundane Context.

Most of the work we do is traditional animation or Flash animation. We find that this really helps people experiment with styles, new media, and stretch their design muscles when doing character design. At an animation studio, sometimes you end up working on a project and drawing the same thing for weeks, months, even years. This gives us a chance to keep everybody sharp.

You can check out more of the Luck of the Draws as we do them on the employee-run “Phetchblog”, where you can also see other sketches our folks are doing in their spare time