Artist Spotlight - Carter Goodrich

One of my favourite things to do is look at the work of more experienced artists - of course you have to be careful when and how to do this as if you don’t feel good about your own art it can do more harm than good. Generally, it tends to inspire me or help me realise the gaps in my knowledge that I need to work on. There are so many artists I have been inspired by on this journey so I’ll be spotlighting them once a month, starting with Carter Goodrich.

Carter, Carter, Carter can’t you see sometimes your works just hypnotise me?

Carter Goodrich - man I love his work. I’m starting with him as he was one of my first big inspirations when I found out what Character Design was. I remember being interviewed to get onto an Animation course in 2013 and they asked me about my influences and the first name was Carter Goodrich. The teacher hadn’t heard of him (to my disbelief, though I’d probably only heard of him weeks before) so I was only too happy to educate him right there and then and I’m sure my passion came across. These are the images I would have been showing him - development work for Brave, Despicable Me, Hotel Transylvania and Ratatouile:

I loved everything about Carter’s work - the shapes, the proportions, the character, the humour, THE TEXTURE, THE TEXTURE, THE TEXTURE! I didn’t understand how someone could use a pencil to such good effect and imbue the characters with such life. At the time I was a Photoshop novice and also clueless about colour so he was one of the people who gave me hope that it’s possible to be a Character Designer without using Photoshop (PLEASE LEARN PHOTOSHOP IF YOU WANT TO BE A CHARACTER DESIGNER - it’s on every job description haha). Anyway, I’m sure I definitely went through a phase of trying to wield my pencil like him and I’m sure the results were embarrassing!

I was also aware of Carter’s work for The New Yorker magazine and his friendship with Pete de Seve who’d had a similar art journey (in one interview I watched of them they were joking about who copied who). I feel like it’s rude to mention Carter without at least mentioning Pete de Seve so I will talk a bit about him. Pete, of course is amazing in his own right and around 2013/ 2014 when Carter was my world I called Peter ‘Mr Ice Age’ as the main thing I knew him for was his work on the Ice Age movies - I later found out that he’d worked on a host of other things which I didn’t expect like The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I love the storytelling and personality he puts into his drawings, especially the one of Scrat from Ice Age (one of the most unfortunate characters on screen, ever). The guy is a master no doubt, though I do resonate more with Carter’s work for some reason - maybe it’s because I feel it’s easier to break down or try and replicate? I’m not sure.

If you don’t know Carter’s work or Pete’s. look them up! Hope you enjoyed this as there’ll be another artist spotlight next month, possibly with some annotations over one of my favourite current designers’ work.

God bless,
Selom