Illustrator, cartoonist, animator and director Chris Sanders is best known as co-director of Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods.

Before leaving Disney Studios to work for DreamWorks Animation, Sanders worked as a story artist on The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King, and was head of story on Mulan.

Though the gallery on his website/blog is as yet empty, the blog features a wonderful series of posts featuring “The Lost Boards“, storyboard drawings done for The Croods, along with other sketches and drawings.

[Addendum: there is also a gallery on deviantART, that includes work in progress.]

Sanders’ storyboard drawings have the kind of wonderfully jaunty, energetic line quality that I associate with the best animation drawing. Quickly suggested and seemingly casually rendered, they have an appeal in an of themselves as drawings, beyond their role in visualizing scenes from which animators would create a movie.

Sanders also has a place on his site set aside for new episodes of Kiskaloo, his webcomic (images above, bottom), though they have not started. In the meantime, you can enjoy the archive of the original run of the strip in the Kiskaloo.com archives.

[Via Jake Parker in the Drawn archives]