Art Portfolio - Nicolas "Nico" Marlet

 During this week Art Portfolio lessons we have to make research on an artist whose work inspires us. I decided to find some information about Nicolas "Nico" Marlet who is French- American character design and animator working in the place where I always wanted which is DreamWorks Animation. 

He was born at the end of the '60s (1969) in France. During his artistic career, he took part in creating a lot of movies, for example, The Prince of The Egipt, The Grinch, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda or How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Marlet is the most famous for designing characters for these 2 last ones. His works are admired by a lot of people, there are several books where we can find Nico's personal sketches from these movies such as The Art of DreamWorks Animation or The Art of Bee Movie. 

Fung from Kung Fu Panda 

Vikings from How To Train Your Dragon

In Nico's drawings, we can see his trademarks which are textures and patterns with more soft lines than in his early works which give Marlet's character design unique character.  Nicolas colleague Raymond Zibach who is DreamWorks Production Designer says of him that in one interview " The way Nico designs, he looks at actual animal and tries to distil down what's there into something that works for the film". Which describe him as some kind of genius I think. 

Through basic shapes such as a circle or rectangle, he can create various characters, he shows this during drawing Po from Kung Fu Panda. Nico has a great talent in expression drawing where he shows wonderful poses in his characters. There is a lot of what I can learn from this artist, especially for my Set Project.

I tried to use this technique using pens and I drew six characters drawing on three shapes circle, rectangle and triangle. I made three people and three animals. The final effects of my sketches look nice but some did not look as I wanted, maybe because of small experience in that kind of drawing I am not sure. Drawing animals was always the hardest thing for me.

References:

Nico Marlet (2008) Kung Fu Panda https://characterdesignreferences.com/artist-of-the-week-11/nico-marlet (02.02.2021)

Jennifer G. Oliver (2010) Nico Marlet http://characterdesignnotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/nico-marlet.html (02.02.2021)

Peter Debruge (2008) Panda designer breaks it down How Nicolas Marlet mastered art of Kung Fu https://variety.com/2008/digital/features/panda-designer-breaks-it-down-1117986536/ (02.02.2021)

Ramin Zahed (2014) The Art of DreamWorks Animation p.155-165 New York, Abrams (02.02.2021)