Sometimes older artwork does not need to be rescued. It just needs the right moment to grow into something more.

This section is a collection of personal experimental animation pieces built from artwork I created years ago, including illustrated studies of my daughter and other past works I wanted to revisit through a new lens. Many of these were not intended as large finished pieces. They were moments of exploration. Quick creative studies done over a lunch break while trying out new Photoshop brushes, testing mood, texture, and how much story could live inside a single image.

What makes some of these pieces especially personal is where that mood came from in the first place. Much of it was inspired by my daughter when she was kindergarten age, and by the bedtime stories I used to make up for her at night. Those drawings were never just technical exercises. They were small visual extensions of that world, full of wonder, innocence, imagination, and the kind of magic that feels completely real when seen through a child’s eyes, in this case mine.

Revisiting them now through AI, animation, compositing, and hybrid production workflows has been unexpectedly emotional. It feels a little like collaborating with an earlier version of myself, one who was just trying to make something meaningful on a lunch break and had no idea it would come back years later asking for a sequel.

This work is not about letting AI do the heavy lifting and then pretending that counts as art. It is about using new tools to continue a creative thread that started years ago and seeing how far it can go. Sometimes that thread becomes whimsical and heartwarming. Sometimes haunting. Sometimes it reminds you that a quick sketch made between meetings was carrying more heart than you realized. Which is lovely, and also mildly offensive to every over planned project I have ever started.

Dance of the Butterflies

This piece grew out of older artwork and became an experiment in motion, transformation, and mood. I wanted it to feel delicate, dreamlike, and alive, as if the original image had quietly opened up into something larger. The emotional tone was rooted in the same sense of wonder that inspired so many of the stories I made up for my daughter when she was little. Animation became a way to let that feeling breathe and unfold over time.

A particularly meaningful part of this project was the original music, created by my longtime friend Martin Spitznagel. His score brought emotional depth and grace to the piece, helping it become more than a visual experiment. It gave it a heartbeat.

Harry Potter

This piece began with a lunch-break study I created years ago of my daughter as a young witch casting a Patronus charm. At the time, it was part brush experiment, part storytelling exercise, and part attempt to capture the kind of magic that lived so naturally in the bedtime worlds we invented together. She loved sheep then and still does, so naturally her Patronus had to be a sheep. Some artistic choices make themselves.

Revisiting that image years later allowed me to build on the feeling that was already there, preserving the innocence, imagination, and warmth of the original study while shaping it into a more cinematic animated piece. What began as a playful image also opened the door to something more layered emotionally, touching on the fragile space between childhood wonder and the darker feelings that can begin to creep in as innocence starts to fade.

More to Come

More case studies are on the way, each one exploring how older artwork, personal studies, and past creative experiments can be reimagined through animation and AI-assisted workflows. Together, they reflect both a technical exploration and something far more personal: a chance to revisit moments that were once small, intimate, and fleeting, and give them new life.

I can make this one step tighter and more website-polished next, so it reads like premium portfolio copy instead of a longer artist statement.