With Out of Picture 2’s release only a few months away, I wanted to share a small preview of what some of the artists have been up to. A very small preview for now, but rest assured, everyone has been really pouring themselves into this second book, and we can’t wait to share more of their work when the time comes.

Here’s the first peek…

Many of the original artists from OOP 1 are back for Volume 2, but we also have a bunch of new artists (new to OOP anyway) who are incredibly talented and are raising the bar for the rest of us and adding their own energy to the mix.

The first of the new artists I’d like to introduce is Lizette Vega - an extremely talented young concept artist at Blue Sky whose story “Craw Daddy-O” just charmed our socks off. We can’t wait to share it with you!

Just wanted to take this moment to extend our hearty congratulations to David Gordon and Dice Tsutsumi who got work from their OOP 1 stories in the Society of Illustrator’s 50th Annual Sequential show.

In addition, Dice Tsutsumi and Robert Mackenzie had their work in the Society of Illustrator’s Book category, and Peter de Séve had several pieces in the editorial category! Way to go, guys!!!

I’ve noticed some common misconceptions about OOP in a fair amount of the press we’ve been getting, and I just wanted to take the opportunity to clarify a few things…

• Some have been under the impression that Out of Picture was a Blue Sky Studios project or some kind of studio sanctioned book. Simply put, Blue Sky had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of OOP in any way other than being the place where the artists met each other. OOP is the result of a lot of hard work by a bunch of artists who wanted to do something together outside the daily norm of their jobs. Nothing more. Nothing less. In fact, many of the artists involved in OOP work for other studios like Pixar and Disney.

• NONE of the stories in Out of Picture, Vol 1 are from story pitches or movie ideas that Blue Sky discarded. They’re all ideas developed by the artists for the book - some longer, some shorter - depending on what kind of time commitment each artist could make to the project.

• NONE of the artists in OOP are animators. Nope, not a one. We are all artists who work/have worked in the animation field, but none of us are or ever were - animators.

I think that hits the most common misconceptions about the book. I don’t think any of this really matters much to the content of OOP, but just for the sake of accuracy, I wanted to make sure we were clear about these points.

Jake Parker found this one for us. Thanks Jake! One more review of Out of Picture Volume 1 from the kind folks at Animation Magazine.