My very first job out of art school was working in LEGO's Concept Lab in Los Angeles in 2002, and my very first big job in Concept Lab was cooking up ideas for LEGO FUTURE KNIGHTS, which would eventually become the LEGO's Knights Kingdom line of 2004-2006.

As we were leaving work one night in early 2003, the boss asked us to take a look at the prototype FUTURE KNIGHTS characters, see if we could make them look cool, and bring in sketches for the following morning. I knocked out the above image overnight, and it ended up landing me the job as main illustrator for Knights Kingdom for the next several years.

(The other guys in the group left LEGO shortly thereafter and each became hollywood bigshots in their fields, while I stayed behind to draw toys all day, so maybe the joke was on me.)

This wasn't the final design for the Vladek character - FUTURE KNIGHTS was originally targeted at ages 9+. As LEGO gradually toned down the first-year launch all the way to a 6+ (and briefly, a terrifying 5+), we lost the harsh lighting, tribal armor decals, jagged weaponry, and image texture in favor of a more first-grade-friendly style. Still, this original Vladek is my favorite.

The early playset concept called for a transforming castle (met with endless "it transforms into a building?" quotes from Big), so in another overnight job I mocked up a quick animation in Maya and did paintovers of the start and end frames. (You can even see an early version of Sir Danju in the "good" castle - he originally wore gold rather than purple armor, until the kids in the market research groups kept insisting that gold armor made him the king of the other knights.)

While the totem animals for Vladek (the scorpion) and all the knights (hawk, wolf, bear, and monkey) had already been decided, the king was still animal-free. I think this lion-themed castle was where his totem animal was decided. Not that it was a big stretch - LEGO being a Danish company, the kings have always been lions, so it was mostly inevitable.

Once again, the age reduction (to a generous 7+ rather than the 6+ of other sets in the line) meant we couldn't make the model this advanced, although it would have been awesome. We toned it down to what eventually became the transforming Castle of Morcia, which went on to win some of the highest awards offered by the toy industry.

As the Knights Kingdom theme shaped up for its 2004 release, it quickly turned into one of the most story-driven lines LEGO had ever made (a fact that led to an unusual mention in Dragon magazine that summer), and so I got tasked with drafting up story illustrations to include with each of the Knights "Constraction" figures and minifigure playsets. The style went over so well that we ended up making a series of trading cards to follow up; this turned into an adventure when the design agency we hired to assist dropped the job completely two weeks before the print deadline.

Luckily I went to an art school whose students pride themselves on the lack of any sense of self-preservation, and so I called up Jessica Lo, Eugenia Chen, and Jeff Nentrup, and we banged out the eighty trading card illustrations in the space of two weeks, though it almost killed a couple of us. These three continued to lend support through the rest of the Knights Kingdom run through 2006.

LEGO was still new to the art of story IPs, and the Knights storyline didn't communicate itself especially well through the toys. For later lines like Chima and Ninjago, we wised up and paired them with animated TV series, but for Knights we relied on wordless comics and crossed our fingers. The constraction figure story pages were added to the end of the instruction booklets in the constratction figure sets, with a couple of unique pages for each character.

The minifigure comics were added to the ends of the playset instruction books, with a greater focus on the playest-focused parts of the story. By combining the playset and constraction figure comics, you could get a schizophrenic version of the complete story.

For web-based and magazine promos, rascally Rascus and serious Santis made the perfect comedy pair. They'd become better friends in 2005, but Santis spent all of 2004 wishing he was in comics with Danju instead.

In 2005, Lord Vladek collected enough pieces of the shattered Shield of Ages to create the evil Vlad Mask, making him and his armies invincible. King Mathias gave the hero Knights magic armor to compensate, and the quest was on to lay siege to Vladek's realm of Ankoria (seen briefly on President Business's map in the LEGO Movie, east of Bricksburg and north of the Forest of Obsolete Products) and destroy the Mask. Knights' Kingdom 2005 was the darkest Castle theme since 1997's LEGO Fright Knights.

With no new characters to introduce, 2005's trading cards focused on the fortifications and siege engines of the playtheme, and the constraction figures' new twist-action sword and shield attacks, some of which resisted explanation.

2005's storyline was told through more playtheme and constraction figure comics panels, supplemented by more traditional full-page comics in LEGO Club Magazine. This year, the Knights' job was to infiltrate Vladek's realm, discover his plan, and breach his impregnable fortress before defeating him in final sword-to-sword combat.

They may be bros now, but that doesn't stop Rascus from continuing to torment Santis. I got to give a brief Knights Kingdom Q&A session to the fans in December 2005, and I drew this scene up as a quick process demo.

Note especially the face of the bear on Santis's chest - I tried to work that expression into as many LEGO comics as I could during my first couple of years. At some point it became the official LEGO symbol for getting shot in the face.

In 2006, Jayko was now King Jayko with a new generation of knights to train: Sir Kentis the Stallion, master of medieval kung fu, and Sir Adric the Bull, master of bashing through obstacles. Lord Vladek, meanwhile, was deprived of his Shadow Knights and had to rely on two new Rogue Knights: the cruel Dracus the Dragon, and the sneaky Karzon the Snake.

In 2004, the Knights Kingdom story managers tried to give themselves a little job security by writing up cards promising upcoming story developments. It didn't work - LEGO declined to renew their contracts, and nobody knew what we were supposed to do with this Sorcerer, Gargoyles, and Rogue Knights foreshadowing.

Like most of LEGO's home-grown IPs, Knights' Kingdom was only designed to last three years before being replaced with a fresher playtheme (although the popularity of Bionicle and Ninjago forced LEGO to make some exceptions). 2006 was the year to tie off all these loose ends, and so Vladek got some Rogue Knights, the Sorcerer was trapped in a crystal on the Mistlands Tower, and the Gargoyles were reduced to two bitey heads guarding a bridge. Not exactly what the cards foretold, but Knights Kingdom wasn't a flagship theme anymore in its third year, and our resources were limited.

Knights Kingdom 2006's illustrations were limited to the constraction comics. There were trading cards, but they just re-used the package renders, and there were no playtheme comics, despite an awesome boat.

Far and away, my favorite part of the 2006 line was Dracus's ship, the 8821 Rogue Knight Battleship, despite being a relatively bare-bones 100-piece boat in a tiny set. Junk-rigged dhows are my favorite style of ship, bar none; we'd see the same idea fully realized in 2013 in the LEGO Lord of the Rings set 79008 Pirate Ship Ambush. In both cases, these are bad guy's ships; LEGO Castle hasn't yet evolved past that regressive fantasy trope where you know the good guys are good because they're all generically Western European and you know the bad guys are bad because they pull from all the generically "oriental" stereotypes in the most offensive sense of the word.

Cringeworthy cultural baggage aside, junk-rigged dhows are awesome. For some great examples, see Seth Engstrom's production designs for Dreamworks' Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003).

The other great thing about this ship is that it's a callback to the 6057 Sea Serpent, an iconic ship from LEGO's 1992 Castle line belonging to the Black Knights faction. Like Dracus, the Black Knights were dragon-themed rogue knights; the printed dragons on their shields are roughly identical to the molded dragon on Dracus's, and the characteristic crenellated forecastle and poop deck and the dual steering oars of the Black Knights are repeated on Dracus's ship. The major update, of course, is the use of dragon wings for sails, rather than just the dragon heraldry printed on a square-rig sail. The Black Knights would gradually evolve into the Dragon Knights in 1993 and 1994, and Dracus the Dragon Rogue Knight is their apparent heir.

All of my Knights Kingdom artwork was work for hire without limitation, which meant that LEGO could re-use the artwork in any way they wanted - in no time my work was all over board games, video games, and storybooks, although I usually didn't find out until years later. LEGO has no process in place to let employees know how or whether their work is used; you either see it on a store shelf the next year or you don't. (For instance, I only found out I have a Game Boy Advance game fifteen years later in 2019 in the middle of writing this paragraph.)

LEGO's choice of licensing partners wasn't always the best. They licensed the Knights Kingdom board game out to RoseArt right as the company was being bought up by our archnemeses at Mega Bloks. The result was a disaster that ended up on a bunch of BoardGameGeek's "worst games of all time" lists, a mishmashed pastiche of copy-pasted elements of my art mixed with other artists' attempts to copy it. (I don't know who did that Jayko on the cover, but those parts are not LEGO standard.) After spending my whole childhood dreaming of breaking into tabletop games, that's how I got my first board game credit.

For the children's books, on the other hand, we made the insightful decision to partner with Scholastic instead of choosing a rival company actively invested in our destruction.

For the 2004 line, the children's book illustrations were handled by Mada Design Inc., with a distinctive art style of their own. A year later, at the grocery store, I passed a bargain bin full of remaindered books and saw the new 2005 titles. This time the art was 90% pasted out of my 2005 constraction comics, with only an occasional filler piece by Mada. And that's how I discovered I was now a published children's book illustrator, in the deli section at Ralph's.

And so for 2006 I signed up to do the filler pieces myself and avoid that jarring style mismatch.

Towards the end of the year, Scholastic released the Battle for Morcia Magnetic Adventure Book with the characters as detachable magnets and the pages as the illustrations' empty backgrounds for the magnets to adventure in. With no words anywhere in the book, my name was the only book credit, and for years, through no effort of my own, I was listed as a published author at some of the big booksellers. Most of them have corrected it now, and the author is listed as "Scholastic" if it's listed at all, but there are still a few holdouts.