Mike Yamada is a visual development artist at Dreamworks Animation, whose credits include Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Bee Movie and Monsters vs. Aliens, among others.
Most of the work on his blog is from personal projects, or demos done for his classes at the Art Center College of Design. A number of the pieces are from book projects and are collaborative with his partner, artist Victoria Ying. The two share a design studio called Extracurricular Activities, which is also the name Yamada has taken for his blog.
Yamada’s work ranges from moody and detailed in some of the earlier visual development pieces, to light, whimsical and delightfully stylized. He and Ying seem to have nicely combined the two approaches in the storybook project, Curiosities.
