Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director - Chapter 1

How a 23 year old gal from Brisbane ended up designing the world’s most popular kids show.

G’day,

For those who don’t know me, my name’s Catriona Drummond (pronounced Katrina), also known around the traps online as Goodsniff. I’m an Australian Visual Development Artist working in animation. Born and bred in Brisbane, but currently based in Melbourne.

I was the Lead Art Director on Bluey for Season 1. At the beginning of the production with direction from show creator Joe Brumm I designed the Heeler House and its rooms from scratch. As well as the overall style and colour of the show. Basically anything that wasn’t the characters!

A lot of hay has been made delving into every aspect of Bluey, but I’ve never spoken about my own experience in detail. I was there at the very very beginning in 2017, when the production team was just myself, our intrepid rigger Owain Emanuel and Joe. Crammed into a tiny co-work space at the Queensland University of Technology in Kelvin Grove. When I signed off in 2019, the show was already catching fire in Australia. But none of us expected it to be as big as it became. At the time of writing this it’s taken out every TV award you can think of, was the most watched show in the US in 2024, and captured the hearts of people the world over. I’ve seen my drawings on everything from diapers to Australian dollar coins. I’ve seen my design of the house turned into a stage play, a small theme park and an actual ‘for real life’ bloody house. The entire thing has been a surreal experience, to say the least.

With this little Australian Preschool show now plotting a course through film, as well as it being 7 years since its debut on ABC on the 1st of October 2018, the dust has truly settled on my time on the production. I thought this would be as good a time as any to take stock and recount for you my experience of working on Bluey.

As a Visual Development Artist, I would usually just focus on the nuts of bolts of craft and Art Direction. But it was such a pivotal time in my life, and means so much to so many now, that I thought people would enjoy gaining a more holistic insight into how it all came to be.

Over the next four chapters, I’ll lead you through what it was like to work on Bluey. For the fans, this will be a look behind the curtain you’ve never gotten. And for my fellow and beloved animation workers: I’ll lay bare what the expectations and realities are of working on one of those ‘dream jobs’ in animation we all aspire to. A dream that I thought I was doomed to always have pass me by as a kid studying animation in somewhere as far flung as Brisbane, Australia.

Before the Beginning

My time on Bluey started with this email

But we need to go back a little further than that! How did this email land in my inbox? Did I just get lucky? After this whole experience I would say that there’s no such thing as true luck. Rather, there’s a huge amount of calculated work and effort that can put yourself in a position for luck to occur.

We’ll circle back to that, first I want to paint you a picture of who I was, and where I was as an artist when I got this email. Actually no, I’m not going to paint you a picture. I’m going to carve this shit out of a pillar of salt.

It’s 2014 and I’ve graduated from Griffith University in Brisbane with a Bachelor of Animation. I had won best Animated Film at our graduation screening with my solo film ‘Pond Scum’, and even had the incredible opportunity to be shipped off with a few other live action film graduates to experience Cannes Film Festival. But despite all that, I was already despairing and jaded.

My grad film, Pond Scum

The graduate, with beer

The bachelor degree for all its opportunities, was like many other Australian art institutions: severely lacking in the technical draughtsmanship an animation graduate needed to work in the industry. I looked to overseas where my dreams lay and see, particularly the American crowd, slide into internships and jobs I could only dream of. It stung deeply because I’d absolutely killed myself at uni trying my best, seizing every opportunity I could, but I was so far back from the starting line. I wanted it just as badly as anyone, but my best was simply never good enough.

During my second year of year I had even gone to the US for an exchange. But since Griffith had such shit connections, the best I could net was going to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Definitely a HUB of animation! That said I wouldn’t swap that experience for anything. My six months there are still some of the most cherished memories of my life.

During that exchange I had even managed to fly myself out to LA for a weekend and terrorised the poor folks at Frederator Studios (the studio that co-produced Adventure Time), who were kind enough to let me into their office and ask a bunch of questions. In hindsight that was an immensely kind and generous thing to do. I was so young and such a fucking poindexter!

I wanted to reach my full potential. I wanted to be surrounded by the best, learning from the best. Being the best. I’d been sold a dream by the Bobby Chiu’s of the animation industry that my hunger for those things, and total creative fulfilment, would only be reached by working in the US animation industry.

It didn’t take much for me to buy into that. I looked around at the uninspired cohort I graduated with and couldn’t have left quicker. The large majority’s lack of passion and ambition was borderline offensive to me. And what was awaiting me in the Australian industry didn’t exactly inspire either. Especially up in Brisbane, where your prospects were restricted to working on fourth-rate kids shows designed to sell toys or podunk local advertisements. Or you could up and move away from your family and friends to Melbourne or Sydney, to work on second-rate kids shows and nicer advertisements.

So as I struggled away trying to work my way into the industry and up the ladder, I would see people 100 steps ahead of me, living out the dream. Working on the animated shows and movies I wished I could. To make matters worse it was the beginnings of social media in the early 2010s. If you followed your favourite artist long enough you’d start to figure out that their friends were usually…more of your favourite artists. Eventually you’d glean enough to spot friendship groups, or people who went to university with each other. The university you’d dreamed of going to. Meanwhile, I spent between 2014-17 skipping between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Taking freelance work where I could get it. I would walk home late at night after work in all three cities and feel like I was slipping through the cracks of other people’s lives. I felt bone crushingly alone.

I quietly grew to realise over that time that I was fucked. The US industry didn’t even look after its own starry eyed kids in the midwest, let alone some antipodean dope, who getting a work VISA for was not exactly a deal sweetener. Plus compared to all of them my portfolio was shit, my technical draughtsmanship abysmal. Sure, I was always going to keep trying. Keep improving, keep applying for jobs, keep trying to make inroads by attending industry expos like CTNx in LA. I didn’t want to give up. But I started to get this dreadful, pervasive feeling: That I was going to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time, for the rest of my fucking life.

As I got older I learnt that this was a story the world over in animation, and there was great comfort and camaraderie in that. But at the time I was alone in it, and it was soul crushing. You’d see person after person get their ticket called to work on or create some amazing project, or have just any opportunity at all, a crumb. But it was never you. It made you sneering and resentful in a way that was quite ugly. Must be nice to have mentors to guide you, or a well trodden path that gave you a direction through the industry.

This is all to say: I was never one of the ‘lucky ones’. The ‘right place right timers’ as I snidely started calling them. I knew how it felt to be passed up on no matter how hard I tried or how badly I wanted it. So how did I end up in the position, where maybe now, some aspiring animator is now sneering at ME? Must be nice to be so lucky huh? Like I said, luck didn’t have a lot to do with it.

I had known of Joe Brumm since before I graduated uni in 2014. Being an over pedantic uni student I had already compiled a list of every animation and advertising studio in Australia that I thought I had a shot at working at. His animation company, Studio Joho, was on that list.

His company did a lot of College Humour shorts and some small local ad campaigns. But in-between that there were personal works that immediately drew you in. The early internet smash hit ‘Dan the Man’ and eventually his short film ‘The Meek’ in 2015 being the two big ones.

Joe Brumm's previous works

Despite being relatively silly animations executed with lighthearted styles, both dealt with big, sweeping, universal themes. Love, death and the meaning of life. The irreverent videogame parody series ‘Dan the Man’ concluded its fourth episode in 2014 with a sperm penetrating an egg in pixel form played completely straight. Joe was always here to tell capital ’S’ stories, the medium of animation just so happened to be his native tongue. His secret weapon was that when it was combined with his dry Aussie humour, it never seemed contrived or cliche.

Anyway none of that registered to young Catriona. I simply saw a local Brisbane studio that wasn’t awful that I could one day maybe work for.

Fast forward to 2015, in a whirlwind I had come back from screening my film in Cannes in May, worked my first ever Big Boy freelance job at a studio (that I still ride or die for!) called Mighty Nice in Sydney in June, and then turned around to fly back down to Melbourne the second it finished. As my grad film had also been selected to screen at the Melbourne International Animation Festival. I wanted to be there, like any goody two shoes would, to ~NeTwOrK~.

Before the screening they had a drinks and nibblies in the green room with everyone who had a film screening. I was a very shy little baby graduate out of my depth in a room of big personalities and people I idolised. I spent that soiree hanging around the hors d’oeuvres nervously stuffing my face and doing everything but physically clinging to poor Alex Grigg; the living legend who had given me that first job opportunity in Sydney. But in-between flaky gobfuls of miniature breadsticks I spotted another familiar face. It was Joe Brumm. I plucked up the courage to go talk- PSYCHE. No I didn’t, I chickened out! I missed the opportunity.

BUT after the screening finished and he’d wowed the crowd with ‘The Meek’, I saw him outside and managed to spaghetti my way through an introduction. I prattled off everything I knew about his studio and made a complete suck-up of myself. But thankfully I think he saw through my nerves. We were both Queenslanders away from home, and that QLD underdog mentality that always pitted us against the southern states helped endeared us to each other.

For the next two years I would send Studio Joho an updated portfolio every six or so months. Letting them know when I was available for work. There were a few hits and misses where Joe would have a freelance gig for me, but I would already be on something else. I had been working mostly in advertising doing 2D animation and a little tiny bits of vis dev here and there. But finally we ended up back in each other’s orbits in 2017. First doing development at Ludo Studio for Daley Pearson’s show ‘The Strange Chores’, then working with Joe to finish up a College Humor webshow called ‘WTF 101’. All the while bubbling away in the background was this little show called ‘Bluey’ that Ludo and Joe were trying to get funding for. Somewhere amongst all this Joe sent me the pilot he’d made asking whether I’d be interested in hopping on board as Art Director.

It was a prototype that would become the episode ‘The Weekend’. It was fully intact in terms of tone and execution, and encapsulated everything that Bluey would become. Heartfelt and hilarious. Not bogged down by kids show tropes of dopey dads and hokey hammer-over-the-head lessons. With that perfectly formed personal voice, weaving in those universal themes Joe was already so adroit at.

What additionally piqued my interest was that it wasn’t just Australian, but intrinsically Brisbane. This would not be a gig where I had to portion off my creative identity. It would not be a gig where I had to spend half my time googling what an American post box, or a British road sign looked like. The scratch track for the intro was Custard’s song ‘Pinball Lez’. 90’s darlings from the Brisbane music scene that I already had an obsession with. The whole thing was catnip to me, I wanted in.

And sure enough, when the greenlight came from ABC, I was the first person he emailed.

As far as I know, at 23, I was about to become Australia’s youngest Lead Art Director for an animated show.

If I hadn’t tried to make the best grad film I possibly could, I wouldn’t have made it into that room at MIAF. If I hadn’t done my research, I wouldn’t have recognised Joe. If I hadn’t kept consistently maintaining that connection, and showing that I was serious about my career; I wouldn’t have been top of mind for him to offer me this role. I did get lucky, but I spent my entire career up until that point putting myself in the right position for that luck to occur. I will concede, I don’t think anyone was expecting that such a visionary storyteller would burst out of Brisbane in boardies and thongs. But though not a lot of people had been keeping an eye on him, I had. Nothing was an accident.

In a way it also felt like I was weirdly destined to work on Bluey. I loved Brisbane to bits. Since I was a teenager my ideal weekend was riding around on my bike by myself. Exploring the suburbs till I knew them like the back of my hand, drawing the ornamentations on the iconic Queenslander houses. Chasing a mystic feeling that when I stretched out just enough sailing through the suburbs and coastal swamps at sunset, I could graze with the tips of my fingers.

I didn’t inherit a form of spirituality from my upbringing and there was certainly nothing to be latched onto in the broader Australian culture. So in the vacuum one grew out of the formative memories of the country I grew up on. God was in the rolling afternoon thunderstorms and thick summer heat. Every house party would be turned into folklore. Every backwater blog or old youtube comment section whispered secret local histories that bewitched my imagination. Every band sung out searching for the same thing. My soul was inextricable tied to the Brown Snake for better or for worse.

I’m sure it didn’t hurt that a lot of my nascent personal work reflected this reverence for Brisbane, and that helped influence Joe pick me over someone else. In hindsight it was the first time I was picked for a job for my creative voice, rather than to be some cog in a machine. I was so doggedly career focused, that it wasn’t till well after Bluey that I truly realised that if you create what YOU want to create, the jobs and opportunities that will creatively satisfy you the most will come out of exuding that energy into the world.

At that time staying safe and employed trumped any creative need to express myself frankly. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that per se, but I had been so desperate to make it into the US animation industry, I was really pushing down the fact that I would never be truly happy unless I was telling Australian stories. I couldn’t bear to admit that to myself. It meant giving up the dream I had since childhood, my whole world would fall apart. Besides what awaited me if I did decide to truly express myself? At that time, some lonely path, probably semi-unemployed, in or outside the Australian animation industry. Never being part of that prestigious community of artists I worshipped that strived to a high level of skill and craftsmanship. Fuck that!

But as we started working on Bluey, a feeling grew inside of me. Softly and quietly enough that it didn’t bring my whole world crashing down. The work was creatively challenging, the community at the studio Joe created was thick as thieves. We were working on something we all deeply cared about. Things weren’t perfect, I still yearned to be guided by people more skilled than me, as my art skills were at that point were scrappily cobbled together from personal grit and online art courses. But this show was…actually good! I felt creatively fulfilled.

For the first time, it felt like maybe, it wouldn’t be a compromise to stay. For once, it felt like I belonged somewhere.

But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves!

This episode is called: Greenlight

Once Ludo Studio and Joe had secured funding we quietly hit the bricks. Moving into two tiny offices at the Queensland University of Technology co-work spaces. Initially explaining where I worked to people elicited a confusing rant on my part:

Ludo Studio was founded by Daley Pearson. Not a traditional ‘animation studio’ in that it had it’s own artists in-house. It was a production company that was building the Bluey team from the ground up on Joe’s recommendations from his own vast experience working in the animation industry both here and in the UK.

Daley and the gang were already sequestered around the corner on the same floor. While Joe, Owain and myself were in the front little rooms of the co-work space. In the good company of the local magazine Peppermint’s editors, a handful of start-ups and a few other people working in around film and entertainment in Brisbane that had hot desks there.

Looking back what is really striking to me is just how quick we locked everything. We weren’t at the co-work space for long, only about three months before we moved into the office in West End that would become our home for Season 1. But by the time we did the overall style of the show had been locked, along with the design of the exterior and most of the rooms of the Heeler’s home. In animation terms, three months to have a lock on a show’s style, basically on the first pass, and all parties involved are actually happy with it? That’s about as good as it can get.

This wasn’t a fluke though. Joe came in with a fully formed vision and extensive on-the-tools experience with both animation itself and his animation software of choice, CelAction. All this combined meant we completely sidestepped all of the pitfalls that can trip up less experienced Showrunners. There was no weeks of agony creating 100 versions of a character. ‘Pixel pushing’ trying to get an eyebrow right. Or too many cooks watering down an idea into a limp, cliched version of itself.

In my opinion, Joe possessed all the prerequisites that lead to all the best animated shows and films. A creator who has been in the industry trenches themselves, understands the production pipeline completely and has a singular vision about exactly what they want to make.

What also helped was we didn’t really have to seek too much approval from anyone. There was no hulking broadcasting company breathing down our necks. Our funding had come from good ol’ Aunty ABC - the Australian Broadcasting Cooperation, and the BBC. Neither seemed too fussed about a low budget preschool show and had the good instincts to leave Joe and Ludo alone to create what they had outlined to them. Thereby we thankfully weren’t beset by weird focus groups or requests that our overseas counterparts so often were. No making the eyes bigger and shinier to draw kids in until they’re like glassy pools you could fall into. Or making the colours so saturated they gave you a headache.

With that freedom to make the show authentically itself, and authentically Brisbane, I set off designing the show by myself from scratch for those next three months. I had started with the Heeler Home exterior to set the style. Since Joe and Ludo were happy with what I’d developed almost right off the bat, I spent those months just pumping out all the designs for the Heeler home interior and the backyard.

This is an uncommon situation in animation. An industry known for its collaboration, usually there would be a few artists spitballing designs at the visual development stage. But since our budget was so small and Joe knew exactly what he wanted, he put his trust in me to kick things off.

Joe was such a good director, and I had finally started feeling confident in my own skills after the last few jobs I’d been on as a vis dev artist. I didn’t feel tooooo much

Only a little!

Building and unifying an overall style had always come fairly naturally to me and something I enjoyed sinking my teeth into. I had always been a bit of a chameleon across projects and found what I was fascinated by the most outside of doing vis dev was the art of was breaking down a ‘style’ and communicating it to others so it could be replicated by a team.

I had started to discover most artists found it hard to quantify exactly what they were doing when they drew something. It was like asking a fish what water tastes like. As well as most Showrunners, because if they weren’t animation natives they lacked the language to explain what they wanted. So in developing the initial style of Bluey, it felt like I was finally coming into my own in terms of ‘Art Direction’. I loved the meticulous system of organisation in building a show style and turning it into a style bible for the rest of the crew to eventually refer back to. And I loved the matrix of things you had to consider when creating it. Not only does it look appealing, but is it what the creator wants? Is it functional across an entire world we’ll be drawing in this show? Will this be able to be replicated within the budget and schedule we have? As an Art Director you almost have to become a mind reader; anticipating what people want and guiding them to the right answer that’s the best for both them and the overall project.

I was confident enough at that side of things, but at that point in time I still felt my own technical skills weren’t up to par. I remember getting frustrated at myself at this early stage because I was still having trouble drawing as something as simple as trees and bushes. I couldn’t figure out how to map and organise foliage details and shamefully had to use Bluey’s very simple style to hide this fact the best I could. Not until I took a workshop in Los Angeles in 2019 with Ghibli background painter Yoichi Nishikawa did I find out the foolproof way to do this.

Definitely a case of faking it till you make it. It haunts me how bad I was at drawing trees and bushes is kind of hard baked into the Bluey style now. I just wish I could redo ‘em! However I think everyone who has been lucky enough to set up a show’s style has a few bug bears of that nature.

Later Joe had told me during this nascent time of the production he was incredibly nervous. You wouldn’t know it because he kept a cool head, but everything was at stake for him with this job. This was his first time showrunning and a huge amount of money and responsibility had been thrust upon him to create this animated show for Australia’s national broadcaster. This was the real deal, everything up to this point in his career had now just been the dress rehearsal for it. But he said when he saw the design of the Heeler House that I did, that was the first time he knew the show would be ok.

It successfully reflected his vision of how he wanted the show to look. Joe felt very strongly then and reiterated it many times since that Bluey hinged heavily on the visuals being ‘beautiful’. In his words, the show needed to be ‘enthralling and enticing to look at’. So it meant the world that I had managed to help him achieve that. Especially for a show set in the hometown that we both cared so much about.

Overall, I remember this time as the calm before the storm. On Fridays we would clock off at 4pm and shoot the shit with a few beers. A few more folks trickled in at the end of this period to help get the gears moving on Bluey on the rigging side and mop up what animation work was left on the College Humor ‘WTF 101’ show.

From the workspace kitchen day after day I would try in vain to capture the ‘passport shredder’ afternoon sunsets by painting it on my iPad. It was an everyday occurrence in Brisbane that the weather was so unbelievably good, you never wanted to leave. For locals it was the little secret we kept to ourselves: that Brisbane was the best city in the world. But in starting work on Bluey, we were really about to blow the lid on that.

Some iPad ‘plein airs’ from the period

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Next Week on Creating Bluey - Tales from the Lead Art Director

CHAPTER 2

Under the hood - Designing the Bluey Style

Enough yapping! Next week I’ll guide you through a step by step of the visual style rules that make up Bluey.