Author: derrickutz

http://www.derrickutz.com/search/label/Kodi%20the%20Starfish

Rebranding Myself
From “Illustration and Graphic Design by Derrick Utz” to “Dutzworks”…Yeah, a whole lot easier to say, huh?!!

The Tiny Titan
Will have its own post soon

Bots Amusement Park
Temporary back burner

Well, I have to run for now but I am pretty good about updating my newly rebranded Facebook page. You can connect to it through the new widget in the sidebar to the right. If you are enjoying the art, story and content then follow me there and I will try to supply you with more awesomeness that touches your hearts and excites your souls!

Hello Jakob!

Trying out a new logo!

Derrick “Captain Dutz” Utz

Here are the major projects I am currently working on!

Project Type: Comic Book
Title: Super secret awesome comic of awesomeness…awesome!
Role: Penciler
Description: Its a secret but..well, its a secret! I will be able to confirm available info within about 6 weeks. We will know after that time if the project goes into production and then I can distribute content
Link: Not yet available.
Deadline: Ongoing

Avast, me Hearty’s!!! I hope you all are doing well and are seizing (and ruling!) your own creative adventures!

At last I have gotten to a point that I can post the booklet for its first volume’s download! What is it? This is a “toolkit” I started building a few months ago with the help of some other indie creators I know and have worked with. I still have more information to add and I still have books about creating, structuring and writing stories that I will be reading soon so I will update it at a later date. I just needed to get this part of it off my desk and out to you all so I can concentrate on “Bot’s Amusement Park” and my design briefs that were mentioned in the last post here.

This kit’s main purpose is to help illustrators with that all elusive task of story writing and structure. Since i often create instruction sheets for work, I decided to create a set of forms and fill-in-the-blank questions for myself that would help guide me to asking the right questions and structuring the answers. This is what eventually became the Indie-Man’s Toolkit! Below is the list of the artists that helped me on this round and I will update the list when I get Volume 2 finished in the future.

All right everyone!! I have made a special page on my site to download the Indi-Man’s Toolkit! It is totally free and is just to help you all with your creative processes! The special page is just to help me count the visits and downloads so I can use them to build better material. Click the link below and get to creating!!!!! Thank you all so very much for being here and for joining me in all of these creative adventures! Please let me know if you have any questions about the kit or from me.

This is cheesy for a reason! We geeked out like crazy!

Hello all! I am sorry for the delay in posts since my last. I have been jumping around with a great deal of projects and meetings. This is one of the things I want to tell you all about today! I have been so very blessed to be able to spend time with a couple awesome creatives and inspirations of mine and I just have to share the awesomeness with you!

Chris Oatley!!

     First of, holy shnikies!!!!! A few weeks ago, one of my greatest teachers and a dear creative to me, Chris Oatley passed through Dallas on a long trip he was taking from California through other areas of the country. As I have mentioned before, Chris is a former Disney character designer but recently, he began his own online school for illustrators and digital painters called the Oatley Academy! Chris and the Academy were also just recently mentioned in “ImaginFX” magazine (Link here)! Great work Chris!

     Any time with a creative of Chris’ caliber and experience is priceless and I am very appreciative that he gave it. I was able to join he and another artist, Jake Ekiss, who is local to my area for coffee and conversation that lasted for hours!!! It was amazing and we covered ground on everything from our current and future projects to the very fibers of what it means to be artists. I cannot tell you what it meant for me to discuss art with a man who has spent time building himself up to work with some of the greatest professional artists in the entertainment world today. Both Chris and Jake were a blast to be around and I look forward to future opportunities to spend time with such amazingly talented artists. Wow!!

Here is the untouched photo of our awesome meet-up!

Links!
Jake Ekiss
Chris Oatley
Chris Oatley’s Art Tumblr
Paper Wings Podcast – A comic creation show hosted by Chris and co-host (and amazing artist/creator) Lora Innes!

Brandon, Creative Director extraordinaire!

     As if meeting with Chris wasn’t enough, I additionally was graced with the opportunity to visit with the Creative Director for one of the most well-known and regarded marketing and design agencies here in Fort Worth! This has been a meeting in the making for a few months now because of our busy schedules and the great deal of responsibilities that Brandon ruthlessly tackles on a daily basis. I discovered the company a few months ago as I was searching for opportunities to improve my design skills. Many members of the team were able to connect with me both in emails and in person and it has been a great experience and honor to be met with such an amazingly willing regard. It speaks volumes to both the quality of the company and it’s team members.

     Following some correspondence, Brandon and I were able to meet today over coffee and a custom portfolio I created especially for he and his team. In that 30 minutes I was handed one of the greatest gifts any professional creative should seek; perspective. He took time to study my material, laid out what he felt made me stand out from other artists and helped me to understand the traits and skills that I need to tackle and improve in the near future.

     You see, my professional goal is to grow both to the point that I am creating amazing quality design, and to eventually work with an energetic team on excited client’s projects. Currently I work as a Graphic Designer in the role of a production artist because that is the seat my company needs filled. That is not how I see my talents and abilities being used in the future so I had a decision to make. I began to contact different companies in my local area to begin a discussion to simply learn how and where to grow my skills. This is to get me on track to meet my goals of being an asset to a team and lifesaver to clients who need a creative solution. Brandon understands this completely and has been willing, just as others within his company, to take time and invest knowledge into me. For this I am very grateful to all of them and I wish them the best as they improve the quality of design and communication across Fort Worth and all of the DFW Metroplex. Thank you!

Current Project changes

     To adjust to the current tasks at hand, I am narrowing down the amout of personal projects I am handling. listed below are the new groups and I will keep you all “posted” on the progress as it happens.

1. Bot’s Amusement Park – All-Ages Illustrated Story for Publication
     Bot’s Amusement Park is going to be the main production project I will be working on. It will have the shortest “desk-to-publication” time of my current major projects. I am currently working on the development and exploration stages. My goal is to post the progress of “Indie-Man’s Toolkit” ( my story and art planning tool ) to the site later this week. I will then use it to aid me in the development of both the story and art of Bot’s to streamline my planning and writing process. The sketch art for this can be seen on my new facebook page so please take a visit if you want to see the doodles as I go!

2. Design and Creative Growth –
     These are the projects that I am going to take on to improve my professional graphic design and visual problem solving skills. These exercises are going to be vital in aiding my growth into higher positions as a designer and professional creative. They will consist of designs based on real world and mock design briefs, promotional materials and editorial spreads. I am also working on getting started on a few sessions of continued education to refresh me and add to my current skill offerings. I am not trying to up my degree. I am actually just going to see if I can polish my current set since I have been out of school 5 years as of this month. Thankfully, my design college offers class audits to it’s graduates. This, combined with a new list (thanks to Brandon) of websites and periodicals, will help me become the “Design Superhero” I am determined to be!!!!

Whew!! What an epic length post!!! That’s what you get when you have this much awesome going on in your life and I am so thankful you all are here to join me in it! Please let me know if you have any questions or if you want to know more about any of the things mentioned above. Until then,

This is the newly updated Captain Dutz art! It will soon replace the illustration on the header of the blog!

Ahoy there my dear fans, friends and family!

     Ok, for a long building update. I have been working on some new things lately to improve my processes and make progress on many fronts. There are two major things that have been on my front burners and I am finally at a point where I can discuss them with my fan base at large.

     I would also like to point to the new art at the top of the page! This is a new piece created for a special project, one I will discuss soon, and is the new Captain Dutz brand image. I just finished today and I hope you enjoy!

On to the update!

     As many of you know, I am a full time designer and create & illustrate my own personal projects on the side. This leaves me very little project time between work and a family time as a husband to an awesome woman and father to two magnificent children. Due to these restrictions I have to be efficient…I mean really efficient, especially since I suffer the same “distracted squirrel” complex that many artists have to deal with. It is a miracle at times if i even hit the computer or drawing table.

Project 1:
     This issue lead me to the first of the two projects in front of me. Being an illustrator, I have a limited knowledge of the craft of writing. Oh I can come up with an amazing story, but I have a problem with forging it into a story that does not seem like the reader is chasing another squirrel through the pages of a story. I know there are certain element that every good story needs and thanks to the awesome content of my favorite comics creation site, Paper Wings Podcast, and some amazing writing and artist friends, I have been developing something called the “Indie-Man’s Toolkit.” This is being worked on in a private group and is mostly finished now. It will contain checklists, organizational forms and layouts to plan key scenes, pages and covers for many different types of visual story telling.

     This is not to replace the craft of writing stories. That is an art to itself and cannot be replaced by forms and fill-in-the-blank sheets. Instead, this tool is to help the independent artist/illustrator with breaking down the pieces needed for writing their own stories. I plan on using this to help me be organized so that when I hit the drawing table; I have the story in a logical order, items/characters/places referenced and practiced and key scenes caught when they are fresh and awesome from my brain. I mighty task to itself.

Project 2:
     This leads into my second project. While developing this and communicating with the Paper Wings community in a recent blog with guest storyboard artist, Ryan Woodward, I was given some advice from one of the hosts, Lora Innes. I was given a great message from Lora concerning my stress about the workload of Kodi the Starfish, my independent children’s story project. As I mentioned before, I do not have a huge amount of time available and the reason I started to develop the toolkit is because I started to realize how much work I had ahead of me just to even write Kodi’s story, let alone draw/color and letter it. In the end, to do it right, I was looking at Kodi’s story taking 3 to 5, (50) page books. Possibly. That is a lot of work and alot of art. That also meant that I would not look at having a finished book very soon and the story itself would take a very long time at that rate to even finish right.

     Lora suggested that I look at doing a project that I could finish sooner to both ride the wave of accomplishment and to have a finished product on the table sooner (a very important goal to me). This is one of the greatest changes I can make to my current workload. I have been under a huge weight when putting all of the factors of Kodi’s story together and that is not doing him justice. I think it would be best to put him back in outer space for a time more to let him and myself grow some more. This means that I seriously do not want to drop Kodi’s story completely, I just need to “wait until the most opportune moment.” That moment, I believe, just isn’t here quite yet.

     In the spirits of choosing a shorter term project, I have reached into my “Lightning Box (my version of catching lightning in a bottle)” and have pulled out what I think will be a great first, full-length finished project. It is called “Bot’s Amusement Park” and will be one, self-contained book when finished. It will be about 50 pages in length, maybe shorter and will be a twist on the fully illustrated comics/graphic novels available to audiences today. In this form, I will be able to do one of the things I do best, high-quality line art that will integrate wonderfully into this style of story. I will explain more as I progress and will hopefully have a logo, pitch and concept art for you soon. First I need to finish the “Indie-Man’s Toolkit,” then I will use it to help me develop, plan and write Bot’s Amusement Park correctly from the start. I am very excited about this because it will give me the opportunity to tell a complete story sooner and this story means a great deal to me. It is a heart-felt story about family and where that finds it’s strength and growth. If you cannot tell, family means much to me and I long to tell stories that can hopefully strengthen others!