Man Arenas is a production designer and concept artist, primarily for animated films. His production designs, storyboards, location drawings and character designs are sometimes simple, sometimes complex but always beautifully realized, He works in a loose, confident drawing style that is full of life and just plain fun to look at.
Many of the images on the Dodecaden site have a magnifying glass icon (usually at the upper right) that opens a wonderful hi-resolution version in a pop-up. Some of the images also have a word balloon icon that shows a comment about the image when you mouse over it.
Unfortunately, there’s very little information on the site about Arenas himself or his techniques. It looks like he starts many of the monochromatic images with an ocher line drawing, switches to black crayon or chalk for the final linework and finishes out with washes of what I’m guessing to be gouache, highlighted with white chalk.
There are terrific images throughout the site. Under the “Productions” link, they are arranged by type of project (Movies, Production, etc…) and under the “Artwork” link many of the same images are arranged by type of drawing (Storyboard, Character Design, Layout, etc…). My favorites are the beautiful tone drawings for an animated film called Laura’s Star (from Warner UK; here’s the movie site).
Addendum: reader fourmi (who has a very nice blog herself) wrote to let me know that Man Arenas also has a terrific blog called Yacin the Faun (some amazing stuff here), and Man wrote to mention that the Dodecaden site has several language versions: English, French and Spanish (links at the bottom of the pages), a great feature.
