A Coin in the Hand

just in case you’re wondering how reddit is doing

TFA’s lead art director Derrick J Wyatt, unexpectedly passed away this month. I was told beforehand, but his close friend and colleague Josh Perez made the statement on his Twitter.

I could not believe it, and I still don’t want to believe it. Derrick was a big inspiration in my art, I still carry elements of his style in my work. He’s helped me become better at character design. And I can’t say how grateful I am in having the opportunity to even know him, as a mutual friend, and getting to work on collabs. I’m deeply saddened but I won’t forget him in being part of making my childhood whole.

Astro Boy by Derrick J Wyatt.

I have something special to share today. I’ve kept this for over 10 years and nobody else has seen it. 

Derrick J Wyatt was the character designer on a number of animated TV series, most notably Teen Titans and Transformers Animated. He was a guest at TFcon a number of times, including in 2009 when Transformers Animated was hot. This was the first year of the Faction Feud trivia game, which my team won and I was the last surviving member. Derrick watched from the audience and hung out with us a bit after it was over. It was at this time I asked him if he could draw for me his interpretation of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, and he thankfully obliged. He drew it with a ball point pen (you can see how he tested it out in the upper left corner) and told me Astro was a challenging character to draw because he’s basically made out of circles and Derrick never really did perfect circles. For all I know, this could be the only time Derrick ever drew this character and gave it to someone else.

original url http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Taping/3505/

I talked about this with someone from Discovery for Ready Room, and I was thrilled to find out that their bridge crew does the same thing I did: we made up sequences for different things we did regularly, like impulse, warp, emit an inverse neutrino pulse into the heart of the anomaly, and whenever the script called for us to do whatever the thing was, we used the same sequence each time.