background design portfolio
Welcome! I’m a full-time career background designer for animation. My designs are informed by my history of working in architectural rendering and love of capturing what connects a person or character to the environment that surrounds them. Take a look at the small sampling of my work history below, and please reach out if you have any inquiries.
For followers of my work: What is Background Design? It’s the art of drawing backgrounds for animation! On a production, designers are responsible for the drawing part of a background, usually based off of a storyboard sketch. Once finished, it will be passed on to a background painter to receive full color treatment, For this reason, BG Designs tend to be just black lines without color, or simple grayscale compositions.
personal design samples
The pair of designs below have been painted by the incredibly skilled painter Jessica Luong. We (unofficially) wanted to explore what a modern background style might look like for the classic animated show “King of the Hill.”
Below here are designs I made in 2022 exploring atypical man-made locations coexisting with nature.
design for adult animation
design | titmouse | paramount+
star trek: lower decks
Produced BG Designs for Seasons 2, 3, and 4. Lower Decks is an adult animated series following a team of four young starfleet ensigns as they start their careers at the literal bottom rungs, and prove their worth on the small but venerable USS Cerritos.
Job Type: Full-Time, 2021-2023
Created by: Mike McMahan
Art Director: Nollan Obena
BG Lead: Denny Fincke
design | netflix animation
inside job
Produced BG Designs for the Netflix Animation original adult series “Inside Job,” parts I and II. Inside Job is a modern-day workplace comedy/drama with architecturally heavy environments full of conspiracy theory satire.
Job Type: Full-Time, 2020-2021
Created by: Shion Takeuchi
Art Director: Jeffrey Thompson
BG Design Lead: Tom Eichacker
design | titmouse | amazon prime
the boys: diabolical
The Boys: Diabolical is an 8-episode adult animation anthology telling stories from “The Boys” universe. I was brought on specifically for the final episode, “one plus one equals two,” in a half-visdev / half-design role, but also helped out with backgrounds several other episodes.
Below is a sampling of my work for the finale.
Job Type: Full-Time, 2021
Directors: Giancarlo Volpe, Jae Kim, Matthew Bordenave
Other BG Design projects
design | titmouse
bad bunny summer 2022 tour
In summer of 2022, I helped Titmouse produce on-stage screen graphics for one of Bad Bunny’s songs for his 2022 Summer Tour. This song featured anime-style backgrounds across three massive screens providing the backdrop for the performance.
Below are a selection of ultra-wide backgrounds produced for the sequence. I produced a kit of multi-layered animatable palm trees to get these BG’s finished with a fast turn-around because this entire job was only 2-weeks from start to finish. The assets were made as smart objects so that the painters would only have to color each source tree once to cover all of them at once.
