Author: Meinert

Upside Down

A few years ago, I worked on a feature film called Upside Down, directed by Juan Solanas with production designer Alex McDowell. it was an unusual and challenging feature, visually tricky to wrap one’s head around, but made for an interesting visual challenge. Here are a few early concept paintings I did for it. I hope I don’t get in trouble for posting them – one of these images is already circulating on the internet – but it’s my first time showing any of this. I have no idea whether these concepts made it into the final film, so don’t assume these reflect what the film will look like.

The Limitless Ether

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I’m starting a new personal project. I’m hoping this will be big. It’s called “The Limitless Ether.” Like many of my projects, the title came first. This is all I can say for the moment: It will be a short story. It will be in motion. It’s definitely steampunk, and it will be a space odyssey.

I will be sketching and developing it this summer and hope to have the pitch ready by fall. No, I didn’t draw this beautiful solar system chart, but it sits on my desktop for inspiration.

So much artwork, so little visibility

I suppose I could use this blog as a blog for writing once in awhile. At this point, I have about three years of artwork which I cannot post online for various reasons. Okay, specifically, I cannot legally post any of it; a film that has yet to be released, another one which has not come out on DVD, one which is still in production and a game which may be another year before I can even say what it is. I’d like to say I have sketches to show, but I don’t. Working on high-profile projects is intense and time-consuming, and I would rather put down the pen at the end of the day and get on with my other interests.

That said, I’m itching to find the time to work on some personal projects I have kicking around in my sketchbooks and my garage. I have been writing outlines and notes for art projects which need to get done soon, for my own satisfaction. I’ll be posting and sharing some thoughts about these in the next post. Meanwhile, here’s a teaser logo for one of my ideas:

Robot Punch!

Busy busy. I’ve been at Warner Bros Games for a year already, on the project-that-shall-not-be-spoken-of-yet. In the meantime I’ve been moonlighting on a couple of fun ventures. Robot Punch is a small start-up  t-shirt company in Winchester Ontario created by my friend Jeff Peto. He’s the son of my high school buddy James. To help get the business off the ground, I designed the logo, as well as their first run of t-shirt images. They had their launch at the Ottawa Comicon and it went very well. Here’s a link to the Facebook page to see the shirts in print:

https://www.facebook.com/RobotPunchApparel

Samples of my designs:

Tesla Graphic Novel

Last year, I was contacted by author Anthony Flacco and asked if I would be interested in illustrating a graphic novel, which he wrote, about the life of Nikola Tesla. I was thrilled by the opportunity to work on the story of this great man. It would have been  200-plus pages and at least 1100 panels. The script was compelling and beautifully written, and would make a great film. Long story short, it was eventually turned down by a couple of high-profile publishing companies. Heartbreaking for the author and I, but it’s still out there and who knows…maybe one day…

Here are sample panels I provided to help sell the book. They were drawn in pencil, which would have been such a fun way to create a graphic novel.

New Lightsaber

Here’s my most authentic-looking lightsaber yet. I found the top half at a camera flea market, and I recognized it right away as the kind of flash gun used to make Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber in 1977. I added parts I had lying around and voila.

Rebranding Fiction Science

Meet Joe-Bot, my new mascot. Still working on finding a good balance of logo, text and color, so this is temporary. I like this little guy, and want to make it my new logo, and build my new website based on this kind of iconography. I’m going to build a whole story around this little robot and look forward to refining and rebranding my company.