In late 2020 I shifted from teaching art part time, back into working as a prop designer full time for 2D animation!

I’ve done a lot of kids shows in the years since but it was a pleasure to return to the medium doing an adult satire set in the 70s. The last season of ‘F is for Family‘.

I learned of the opening the same week I confirmed I was not going to return to teaching after September, did a quick test to show my range and was hired! It was intense! Test pages for the job will be in their own small set at the bottom of the page.

Not only did I come on as a senior props designer, department supervisor for design and clean up both. But when full production started I ended up helping to supervise the Character design department too! It was a lot!

The sheets here are assortments of things done for the 5th final season of the series. Not everything here is the version finally used, most are. But a few are examples of my own favorite bits, things that got cut that I liked, and one is more of a gag I did to play with the director a bit. The actual commercial for Skinny’s was not that gory. Heh!

I’m close in age to Bill Burr, who’s fictionalized childhood the show was based on. So I shared a lot of similar cultural landmarks growing up in Toronto in the same era. Lot of fun nostalgia to draw this stuff.

My selfie character design, used a rigged stock body that was close enough and tried to capture what I looked like at the time in the show style.

The props were on the very technical, realistic side which luckily I enjoyed the challenge of. And I also had to start learning Toon Boom Harmony in order to eventually use it myself but at this point just check the work of the clean-up teem, who converted the designs to vector on that show.

Almost all the designers were still working with either Photoshop, or Clip Studio. Then cleanup used those to draw over in vectors to prep the poses for colors and rigs. I was still learning the program and had a check list of things to look for to make sure rigging got what they needed.

Part way in I noticed one of the clean up team was clearly more skilled in this area though so delegated to them some of the checking so I could focus on my drawing work load more and take care of other supervisorial tasks coordinating schedules, assigning and tracking assets through the department to keep the episodes on time.

As the Ch dept. Supervisor too, I had the pleasure of suggesting a bunch of the crew be made extras for some of the big group scenes in ep 504, and drew my own likeness for mine!

Over the shows I’ve worked on since I did become vary familiar with Harmony myself happily, and have been doing my designs directly in Toon Boom Harmony since 2024. Happy to say the teams I worked with for Props, Characters and Backgrounds on this series were a fantastic crew in all departments!

Personal highlights for me were the magazine and publication covers, movie posters, and LOT of packaging graphics. Also helped with some of the poster and billboard art for the BGs as well. Not typical props work on all shows, but this one had more detail in that area than usual and my background in print design and the era proved useful to the director!

Here’s my test, the one sheet provided by the Director as a request for what he wanted, my roughs and the final inked cleanups done in clip studio.