April Liu

aprilliu1994@gmail.com | (512)909-7878

Visual development artist in Los Angeles with 3 years of in-house experience in feature animation. Familiar with story beat painting, environment and prop design, character painting, crowd design, and color styling.

Professional Experience

  • Paramount Animation | Canceled project | Visual Development Artist                                                          Mar 2014 - Nov 2015
    • Worked under oscar winning director John Kahrs; production designer Jeff Turley
    • Contributed 7+ story beat paintings for the director to use during pitches to executives
    • Developed concepts for environments and sets, characters, and story moments 
    • Designed all the houses in the film (60+), the foliage, hero props, and 2-3 landmark environments 
    • Given the opportunity to learn all aspects of visdev thanks to the small size of the team
    • Promoted twice from Visual Development Trainee to Professional Visdev Artist
    • The movie featured animal characters, so I became familiar with designing animals for animation
  • Base FX | Wish Dragon | Visual Development Artist                                                                                            Dec 2015 - Current
    • Became proficient in producing and packeting artwork for the modeling team in production
    • Worked under Croods visdev artist Arthur Fong and director/visdev artist Chris Appelhans
    • Painted story beat paintings for director to use during pitches to executives
    • Worked with a foreign Chinese team, because the movie was animated and distributed in China
    • Created the final designs for environments and sets, generic characters, and props 
  • Nickelodeon | Monsters Abroad | Freelance Background Designer
    • Sketched concepts for buildings/environments

EDUCATION

  • CALARTS California Institute of the Arts | Character Animation                                                                       Sep 2012 - Dec 2013
  • Concept Design Academy | Digital Painting | Landscape painting                                                                                  2014 - 2015

SKILLS

  • Prop Design
  • Environment design
  • Story Beat Painting
  • Model design
  • packeting artwork for 3D production
  • Trained in Adobe Photoshop, cintiqs, and traditional medium like gouache, watercolor, and oil 

 

Letter of Recommendation