House and Garden: BTAS storyboards by Ronnie del Carmen

This months it's 25 years ago that Batman: The Animated Series premiered on television. An amazing show, one of my all time favorite things ever. One of my most treasured possessions is the art-of book: Batman: Animated. It is filled with great character designs and background paintings, but most importantly there is an enormous collection of beautiful storyboards in there. 

Obviously there are some great storyboards by show-runner Bruce Timm in there, most notably the storyboards for the legendary opening sequence, but the book also features a lot of beautiful boards by Ronnie del Carmen. 

The great thing about this art-of book is the size of the images. Most art-of books are a lot smaller than this one, and as a result the art featured will be reproduced on a much smaller size. But here not only is the book of a larger size, there are also less images put together on each page. (The stunning design of Batman: Animated was done by the renowned designer Chip Kidd. The guy who designed the Jurassic Park logo.) There are multiple storyboard sequences that are reprinted over multiple pages. Awesome stuff for any (aspiring) storyboard artist!

I especially love the boards Ronnie del Carmen did for a sequence from the episode House and Garden. in this sequence Bruce Wayne is being threatened by some kind of plant monster. The sequence is rendered in beautiful chiaroscuro, with very bold, black shadows. (RdC recently mentioned on twitter: that if they had time, the storyboard artists would ink their boards like they were comic-book final art.) This is exactly the kind of vintage, noir style that made me fall in love with this show.

Below are scans of those storyboards. (One of these is used as the header of this blog.)

The caption reads: Bruce Wayne at the not-so-tender mercy of Poison Ivy’s cactus-man hybrid. Artist Ronaldo del Carmen gives a dose of Hitchcockian suspense to this storyboard sequence from ‘House and Garden'