Hello!
I’m Margaret Trauth, and I’m thinking about having a second go at the Los Angeles animation industry.
Back in the nineties, I realized my childhood dream: I moved to Los Angeles to go to animation school. I learnt the basics of classical animation and entered the industry just as the post-Lion King theatrical boom was fading; I mostly ended up working on Flash cartoons under John K, which was definitely an educational experience in a lot of ways.
I left the industry and did other stuff for a while. Moved to various corners of the country. Drew a Tarot deck. Worked out some personal stuff. Did private commissions. Spent a few years drawing a graphic novel. Right now I’m in Seattle but am making plans to move out – LA if I can find full-time work down there, New Orleans if I don’t.
If what you see intrigues you, then get in touch, and we can discuss what projects I may be a good fit for. Right now I feel like I am mostly interested in backgrounds, color styling, and character design.
Perhaps you would like to see a formal resume [pdf] at this point.
Or perhaps you would like to look at some of my work? You can click on any of these images for a closer look.
Right now I’m in the middle of the first chapter of Parallax, a funny-animal space opera. I’ve been pushing myself on the backgrounds a lot, with a really big focus on creating ways to reuse my work without it being obvious that I’m doing so.
This crazy M.C.Escher spread is very much a work in progress but I’m sticking it in here anyway because I like where it is going.
A fragment of my personal, ultra-informal models, with a glimpse of the huge array of Graphic Styles I’ve made to help organize all this stuff. Some are just a flat color, some are several fills, strokes, textures, and effects stacked up together.
Prop/character design: the semi-biological spacesuits of a group of space dryads. Hungry and withered on top, bright and well-fed magical Miyizaki forest spirit on the bottom.
Each major character has a design that is coded “heroic” and one that is coded “villain”; these are some initial explorations for the villain version of the two cuties whose more formal heroic models are above.
loose concept for Villain Mode Olivia
Before Parallax, my main project was “Decrypting Rita”, a cryptic limited-color sci-fi story. It took about six years to do, from the first pages to the last few books getting shipped out to the Kickstarter backers. I’d say it was around four years of writing and drawing, and two years of web design, promotion, and self-publishing, with a few expensive lessons along the way.
Every time I look at this cover and see who I managed to get praise from I am kind of astounded.
There are four parallel realities involved in this comic. Each one has its own tightly-limited color palette, which helps the reader keep track of which is which. Unless they are partially color blind, which is something I’ll be more careful with if I try this trick again.
The multiple realities gave me a lot of creative whiplash sometimes. “Okay I just did an ultra-minimalist near-future living room, now it’s time to draw a dense medieval town!”
The big interior mall got reused a lot. Zoom in, change color because we’re in a different reality, take it apart and use the parts to show another perspective on the scene.
I have gotten a lot better at drawing libraries packed full of books than I really feel anyone sane ought to.
This is part of a climactic three-page spread that took six months to draw. It’s over here if you wanna see the whole thing in some kind of context. There’s a lot of stuff going on in here that I had to make up from scratch.
And here are a few of the G-rated pages from my prog-rock fantasy furry smut comic Five Glasses of Absinthe. Each spread was drawn in a limited palette of four tints of two or three colors, chosen to reflect the title character’s mood; one of these days I want to go back and do a contrast pass on the first chapter, and get back to working on the second chapter. Collaborating with yourself from a decade ago is always an interesting prospect.
color map for chapter 1 of Absinthe, you can see that a few pages evolved slightly different color schemes as it formed.
That’s it, you’ve reached the end of this little online portfolio. If you still want more then just browse around my site. Or drop me a line and let me know what you thought of my stuff, maybe start talking about working together on something cool.
Thanks for your time!
— Margaret Trauth