More than draftsmanship, de Seve infuses his drawings with personality and heart which have made him a recurring favorite on the cover of the New Yorker. This poignant cover of little children on the first Halloween following the 9/11 attacks stood out in a field of artistic responses that were mostly political, or cerebral, or anguished.
For Howard Pyle's generation, painting magazine covers was as prestigious a career as an illustrator might hope for. But 100 years after Howard Pyle, illustration offers all kinds of new venues for an artist's talent. A digitally animated feature film requires the collaboration of hundreds of artists, writers and computer engineers relying on millions of dollars of corporate funding and a multinational distribution network. But at their core, animated movies depend upon a few individual artists with a special talent for facial expressions, body types and personalities to design the characters that other artists implement.
The movie industry quickly recognized de Seve's abilities and has summoned him to work on a number of feature films as a "character designer."
He won the Emmy Award for outstanding character design on Sesame Street's Abby Cadabby's Flying Fairy School and a Clio award for a Nike commercial. He worked on films such as Mulan and Finding Nemo, but mostly he is known for his character designs on the Ice Age series of movies:
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| De Seve works out faces for his characters |
De Seve once said, "I'm an old fashioned illustrator... I love strong, firm craftsmanship... The funny thing is that for all the studios' technical expertise, I'm still the guy who is drawing on paper."
These and other original works by de Seve will be on display at the Delaware exhibition.
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