Detailed Profile and Art Analysis on Alex Kirwan

Alex Kirwan is one of the most valuable artists working in the US TV animation industry. His skills in art are extremely versatile, being able to nail plenty of different art styles. His drawings, designs, and paintings are often incredible to say the very least.

Alex Kirwan was raised in Duluth, Minnesota, being the son of the acclaimed artist Dave Kirwan. With his dad's influence, the young boy exhibited an natural talent for the arts. When Alex was just a teenager, his father took part and won in a international storyboard contest for Hanna Barbera. The next year, Alex participated in the contest, and was disqualified based on him being too young for the contest. But vice president of Hanna Barbera, Larry Huber was so amazed with Kirwan's boards that he and Fred Siebert hired Kirwan from school to be an employee of Hanna Barbera. Kirwan's first job in the industry was to draw storyboard clean-ups for Johnny Bravo. After the first season of Johnny Bravo, Huber and Siebert formed Frederator and encouraged Kirwan to pitch them ideas for Oh Yeah Cartoons.

The resulting three cartoons Alex Kirwan made included 25 Cent Trouble, Thatta Boy, and Magic Trixie. Truthfully, these shorts do not hold up that well today to a number of reasons, and as such are not a true indicator of what Kirwan is capable of. Magic Trixie is the last and the best short out of the three as it succeeds the most in having a distinctive style.

While not working on his own ideas, Kirwan found a peer in the form of Rob Renzetti. Kirwan and Renzetti held very similar interests, so much so that they worked on each other's pilots. Kirwan was responsible for cleaning up Renzetti board rough's on his cartoons. One of these cartoons was My Neigbor Is a Teenage Robot, which was greenlit to be a show by Nickelodeon. When production started a few years later, Renzetti took Kirwan with him to develop the show further. Kirwan was the show's most important collaborative besides Renzetti himself. It was Kirwan who suggested the idea of using 30s Art Deco posters for the show's art direction. Teenage Robot was also the first show where Kirwan provided informative and detailed character design style sheets, which he would continue to do so for the remainder of his career.

Since Tennage Robot ended, Kirwan has been on a number of great shows, the most promient of which has been Art Director on Wander Over Yonder. Once again, Kirwan provided amazingly detailed style guides that detailed the ins and outs of the character designs. Kirwan took charge of the character, color and background teams, making sure the show looked beautiful. The show's art direction is indeed one of the best in terms of this decade in American cartoons, a high feat considering that there was a very high number of designs to be completed for each episode, considering the ever changing settings of the show, which dictated the design of new backgrounds and characters constantly for every episode. It is perhaps for this reason why Browngardt decided to seek Alex Kirwan and make him in charge of the art teams for the highly demanding series of classic Looney Tunes creations. Alex is second only to Pete in terms of authority for the new series.

But enough about his history, I've been hyping this guy up to be one of the best, so let's see his artwork, shall we?

The use of color is great here. The busy scene at the top with the ghosts contrasts wonderfully with the ordinary human family at the bottom. The shape variety and the striking colors of the ghosts contrasts with the normal shapes and duller colors of the humans.

These designs show Kirwan's skill of versatility in art styles. He nails each of these styles with grace.

Some gorgeous Happy special poses from the Mighty B!. Terrific, specialized acting on the dog as he suffers over being hungry. Kirwan can nail the cartoony style down well with elegance.

An page from the character style guide that Kirwan make from McCracken's models. In here, Kirwan shows his vast knowledge and attention to detail over the subtleties of Wander's design. He looks simple at first glance, but Kirwan shows the very easy and subtle mistakes that storyboard artists could make that could lessen his appeal.

An analysis of how Carl Barks drew Donald in comparison to his regular appearance. Massive props to Kirwan for noticing so many of the little quirks and nuances that nobody else would bother to notice that differ Barks's Duck from normal Duck. Kirwan is so good at breaking down unique artists for other artists on the production below him. This guide was for Ducktales 2017, but unfortunately the production took on a different design direction.

This superhero painting Kirwan did has a clever concept in demonstrating the various powers of the best known superheros through only their arms and hands peeking out through the portraits. Very well done.

Onto some more disturbing designs, because Kirwan can pull that off well also. This is the design for the clone of Dipper from Gravity Falls that got stuck in a paper jam while being formed. Kirwan does an ecellent job showing the results of that event, with the clone's face being severely folded like paper to create an unsettling, off-kilter variation on Dipper's design, with another fold in his mouth that makes him have the appearance of a hand puppet.

A series of concept design of a witch for Gravity Falls. Rad disturbing designs with weird spaced out eyes, bandaged hand feet, big thumb nose, elongated wrinkly and bumpy hands, the hand patterns on her robe and what appears to be saliva in her mouth in two of the concepts. Just delightfully wicked.

Did you know Kirwan also does sculptures too? The sky's the limit for him.

Frankenstein picture with good use of purple and pinks to elicit a psychedelic feel to this.

Really nice, stylized dark Pinocchio painting.

A visual deveopment piece for Destination Imagination. Alex Kirwan shared an Emmy award with other major contributors of the special. Absolutely surreal and insane piece.

To see more of his artwork, check his Instagam at https://www.instagram.com/alexkirtoon/, Tumblr at https://alexkirwan.tumblr.com, and portfolio at https://alexkirwanportfolio.com.