Colin Jack had just finished working on two back-to-back films as a story artist for DreamWorks feature animation, and his Christmas wish was for a nice long break. The kind of break where you can do absolutely nothing except stay up late watching The West Wing. But just because you’ve taken an entire month off work doesn’t mean your brain is going to take a break with you.
Jack started his career as a children’s book illustrator and continued drawing for 10 years until his time became consumed by film production. During the break, he pulled out his iPad to draw for himself and follow every flight of fancy, which ended up producing a 12-piece exhibition at DreamWorks gallery.
It all started with a half-remembered piece of cereal art of a monkey. He threw the monkey behind the wheel of a car and started improvising. An outline for the passenger had the shape of a Canadian mountie, and so it became a mountie. And with the back of the car wide open, why not fill it with something as big as a dinosaur?
Working digitally allows Colin to create quickly while messy watercolor brushes reveal happy accidents, like how an unerased bit of a character sketch turned into a bubble pipe for the dapper T-Rex.
As more and more details got added, what started as a simple sketch transformed into a bigger vignette. Colin says he likes to take every “opportunity to add more story and details on the edges of [his] work” because “you’ll learn so much more about that character.”
Now, everybody asks him questions about what brought this odd trio together. Where are they going? Why is the Mountie so concerned? Is Mr. T-Rex their boss? Don’t go looking to Colin for answers to any of these questions. That’s for you to imagine.