Cartooning for Passport To Explore (The TV Show)

A while back I had the honor of doing some cartoon designs, to be turned into cartoon segments, for the TV teen travel show, Passport To Explore... or PTX for short. I also designed the basic outline for their logo, which their animator added an earth behind, and the lettering.

Because the budget was extremely low per episode, I couldn't financially justify spending a lot of time on background paintings or cartoon people, who were only going to appear on screen for about 30 seconds, in between segments. I had to play it down and dirty, creating characters with interchangeable limbs so that the After Effects animator could make them do what the script called for, in a short amount of time.

Backgrounds, believe it or not, are easier for me to paint, rather than draw and put into photo shop for coloring. Again, they had to be painted fast and lose. In many cases, the concept drawing was what I painted over, to save time, using water colors, ink, pastels, and acrylic. When it cam to references Google Images was my friend.
Check out below, where I had to tell the story of Kentucky Fried Chicken, pioneered by Colonel Harland Sanders.

...and here are a few more of my favorite images from the show.

Special thanks go out to my wonderful intern at the time, Rebecca Kim. I couldn't have done it without her, scanning all of this stuff, and helping out with the Photoshop coloring.

Passport To Explore: Coming This Fall !!!

Passport To Explore is a teen travel show coming out this fall. I did all the animation designs, painted backgrounds, storyboards, and trademarked logo designs, using both hand drawn and painted illustrations, as well as coloring in Photoshop . When they were looking for a catchy abbreviation for the show's name, I coined "PTX" for them. Unfortunately, the trailer doesn't show any of the animated segments I worked on with the show's motion graphics editor Adam Bedford, but the circular PTX logo with the plain flying around it is my design. Keep an eye out for it, this fall.