Kung Fu Friday: Pencilling Po

Welcome to another installment of Kung Fu Friday! Last time, we shared regular Kung Fu Panda series artist Massimo Asaro‘s rough pencils. This week, we’re going to show you the next stage: pencils!

Once Massimo has roughed out the characters for placement, action, and to map out enough space for letterer Deron Bennett to eventually place the word balloons, he moves on to a tighter version of the art, commonly called the “pencil” stage. Of course, the “roughs” are done in pencil as well, but the “pencil” stage is a cleaner version of the artwork for the inker or colorist. For Kung Fu Panda: Tales Of The Dragon Warrior, Massimo skips the ink stage and his finished pencils go straight to color, so they need to be as clean and as tightly drawn as possible.

When the pencils are complete, they go to DreamWorks Animation for review and approval. At this stage, a DreamWorks Animation artist may ask for revisions, and offer corrections to the art, called “redlines.”

The redlined artwork is returned to Massimo so he may make any corrections necessary for the final product. Then we move on to the color stage…which we’ll show you next Kung Fu Friday!