Mouthing Off

One of my many unique duties on "Creature Comforts" involves drawing mouths onto animatic stills. Each character on the show has an accompanying drawing (created by one of the character designers) that will stand in for the visual of their shot until the animated shot is completed. While I consider myself to be a creative person, visual arts have never been my strongsuit (as my elementary school art teacher would eagerly tell you). So initially I was wary of altering the character designers' drawings in any way, but for our first animatic deliveries to CBS mouths had to be added so that the viewer could tell which character was speaking. This only applied to cases where there was more than one character who appeared in the shot, for instance the three alligators. In addition to making an open mouth for one character, I had to close the open mouth in the original drawing. Hooray for Photoshop!