Before a single frame of Finding Nemo hit theaters in May 2003, a team of roughly 180 artists at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California had already painted an entire ocean by hand. Not the final pixels you see on screen — the rough sketches, color studies, gouache paintings, pastel thumbnails, and digital maquettes that defined what the underwater world would feel like before any of it was rendered. That body of work, the finding nemo concept art, has become one of the most studied and collected bodies of pre-production art in animation history. And twenty-three years later, it still influences how studios approach organic environment design.
The thing most people forget is that Pixar had never done water before. Not like this. Toy Story gave them plastic and wood. A Bug's Life gave them grass and dirt. Monsters, Inc. gave them fur. But an entire film set underwater — with light refracting through a surface miles above, particles drifting through every frame, caustic patterns dancing on coral walls — that was a technical problem no amount of existing code could solve. The concept art team, led by production designer Ralph Eggleston, had to paint solutions before the engineers could code them.
Diving In: Pixar's Research Trips That Shaped Every Brushstroke
The art team did not start at their desks. They started in the water. In 2000 and 2001, Pixar sent groups of artists and technical directors on research dives to the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia — the same reef where the film would eventually be set. They also made repeated visits to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, where they studied the behavior of clownfish, blue tangs, and reef sharks up close. Photographs from these trips filled binders that concept artists kept at their stations, and several of the aquarium's exhibits directly influenced the design of the dentist's office tank in Sydney Harbour.
Ralph Eggleston, who had previously worked as an art director on Toy Story (1995) and created the short film For the Birds (2001), approached the underwater environments with a specific mandate: the ocean should feel warm and inviting near the reef, then shift to cold and oppressive as Marlin travels into the open water. This emotional color mapping — warm oranges and corals for safety, deep blues and grays for danger — became the backbone of the entire concept art package. Eggleston's color scripts, sequential paintings that chart the film's visual mood from opening to closing, ran to over 150 individual panels, each roughly the size of a postcard but packed with enough lighting information to guide every downstream department.
"We wanted the audience to feel the temperature of the water change. When you're on the reef, it's like a tropical vacation poster. When Marlin hits the open ocean, you should feel the cold seep into your bones just by looking at the screen."
The research dives also produced an unexpected discovery: real coral reefs are loud visually. The Great Barrier Reef, spanning roughly 2,300 kilometers and containing over 400 types of coral, is a riot of competing colors and textures. Early concept paintings that tried to replicate the reef's real density looked chaotic on screen. The art team had to selectively simplify — reducing the color palette in background elements, enlarging certain coral species for readability, and inventing a visual hierarchy that guided the viewer's eye toward the characters. This selective realism became a defining characteristic of Pixar's concept art philosophy: paint what the audience needs to see, not what is actually there.
From Thumbnail to Tank: How Nemo's Design Evolved Over Hundreds of Drawings
Nemo looks simple. That is the point, and it is also why he was one of the hardest characters Pixar had ever designed. A clownfish — Amphiprion ocellaris, to be precise — has a body plan that does not lend itself to expressive animation. No arms, no legs, a fixed mouth, and eyes on the sides of its head. Concept artist Ricky Nierva, who handled much of the character design work, went through an estimated 300 to 400 thumbnail sketches before the team locked in the final proportions.
The earliest drawings gave Nemo a more angular, cartoonish body with exaggerated fins. Some versions had him with a noticeably large lucky fin (the underdeveloped right pectoral fin that becomes a plot point), which the team eventually dialed back so the disability would read as subtle rather than caricatured. Other early sketches experimented with giving Nemo eyebrows — a standard animation shortcut for conveying emotion — but the art directors rejected it. Fish do not have eyebrows, and the team wanted to solve the expression problem within the constraints of a fish's actual anatomy.
The solution they landed on was eye shape and body tilt. By slightly elongating Nemo's eye and allowing the animators to tilt his entire body forward or backward (a movement real clownfish make when swimming), the character could convey curiosity, fear, defiance, and joy without any anatomical cheating. The concept art for these expression tests — sheets showing Nemo in twelve to fifteen different emotional states — are among the most reproduced images in The Art of Finding Nemo book.
Marlin and Dory: Two Design Problems, Two Very Different Solutions
Marlin posed a different challenge. As the adult protagonist, he needed to read as both a believable clownfish and a neurotic, anxious father. The concept team achieved this by making Marlin slightly more elongated than Nemo — his body is about 15% longer relative to his height — and giving him a downturned mouth line that defaults to worry. His color palette in the concept art also shifts depending on his emotional state: the warm orange-and-white of his clownfish markings dims to a muted, almost grayish coral when he is afraid or depressed, a trick the painters developed to let the environment reflect the character's interior life.
Dory was the wildcard. Concept art for Dory went through what the production team called "the memory problem" — how do you visually design a character whose defining trait is that she cannot remember anything? Early drawings made her look confused, with crossed eyes or a tilted body, but those approaches made her seem impaired rather than endearing. The breakthrough came when someone on the art team (reports differ on who) suggested that Dory's design should be the opposite of forgetful: sleek, confident, forward-pointing. Her blue tang body — naturally angular and arrow-shaped — was emphasized in the concept paintings, making her look like she is always moving, always arriving somewhere new. It is a design that hides her sadness under speed.
Building an Ocean: The Environment Concept Art That Broke New Ground
The environment concept art for Finding Nemo can be roughly divided into three zones, each with a distinct visual language that the art team developed over roughly 18 months of pre-production.
The Great Barrier Reef — This is the film's visual anchor. Concept paintings for the reef lean heavily on warm corals, burnt oranges, reef turquoise, and sunflower yellows. The paintings emphasize light shafts piercing through the surface, creating a cathedral-like quality. Eggleston's team studied how sunlight behaves at different depths: at 5 meters, the full color spectrum is visible; at 15 meters, reds disappear; below 30 meters, the world becomes blue-green. These physics informed the color choices in every reef painting, and the technical team later built custom shaders that replicated this depth-based color absorption in the final renders.
The Open Ocean — The mid-film sequences where Marlin and Dory cross open water required a completely different approach. The concept art here is sparse, almost minimalist. Deep cobalt blues, gray-greens, and an overwhelming sense of emptiness dominate the paintings. Several of these concept pieces were done in watercolor rather than gouache or digital, giving them a loose, almost impressionistic quality that the final CG renders tried to preserve. The jellyfish forest sequence — one of the film's most visually striking set pieces — began as a concept painting of translucent pink bells against a deep blue field, and the painting was so effective that the final animation hewed closely to its color values.
Sydney Harbour and the Dentist's Office — The third zone shifts from natural to artificial. The dentist's office aquarium concept art is a study in fluorescent lighting, glass reflections, and the weird, kitschy aesthetic of a 1990s fish tank. The concept team painted multiple versions of the tank interior, some with elaborate castle decorations and plastic plants, others stripped down to gravel and a treasure chest. The final design settled on a "tiki bar" aesthetic — a miniature underwater luau with a plastic volcano that erupts bubbles, which became one of the film's most memorable visual gags.
| Zone | Dominant Palette | Primary Medium | Key Design Challenge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Great Barrier Reef | Coral orange, reef turquoise, sunflower yellow | Gouache, digital paint | Reducing real reef chaos into readable visual hierarchy |
| Open Ocean | Deep cobalt, gray-green, muted pink | Watercolor, digital wash | Conveying vast emptiness without boring the audience |
| Sydney Harbour / Dentist's Office | Fluorescent white, teal, tiki warm tones | Digital paint, photo reference composites | Making an ugly office aquarium feel like a character's home |
| East Australian Current | Bright cyan, seafoam green, gold highlights | Gouache, speed-line sketches | Visualizing water speed and turbulence in static paintings |
The East Australian Current sequence deserves its own mention. Concept artist Jason Deamer painted the EAC as a swirling highway of light and sea turtles, borrowing visual language from surf culture and California freeway aesthetics. The paintings show streaking lines of bioluminescent color against deep blue, with Crush and his crew riding the current the way longboarders ride a wave. It is one of the few sequences where the concept art looks more abstract than the final render, and it remains a fan favorite among collectors.
The Art Book That Sold Out Twice: The Art of Finding Nemo
Published by Chronicle Books in 2003, The Art of Finding Nemo (written by Mark Cotta Vaz) is a 176-page hardcover that collects the most significant concept paintings, character designs, storyboards, and color scripts from the film's production. It was part of Chronicle Books' "Art of" series, which had previously covered Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Monsters, Inc., but the Nemo volume stood out for the sheer volume of environment work it contained.
The book is organized chronologically, following the film's narrative from the reef to the open ocean to Sydney. Each chapter opens with a brief essay from a member of the production team, and the reproductions are printed on matte stock at a quality level that makes the gouache textures visible. Early printings retailed for $35.00 and sold out within the first six months. A second printing followed in 2004, and the book has since gone in and out of print multiple times. As of 2025, used copies in good condition typically sell for $40 to $75 on Amazon and eBay, while first-edition copies in like-new dust jacket condition can fetch $100 to $150 from specialty booksellers.
What makes the book particularly valuable to art students and working concept artists is its inclusion of failed designs. Entire pages are devoted to character explorations that did not make it into the film — a pelican with a more realistic beak structure, a version of the shark Bruce that was twice as large and considerably more menacing, early concepts for the anglerfish sequence that leaned into horror-movie lighting. These rejected pieces are often more instructive than the final designs, because they show the boundaries the team explored before settling on what worked.
What the Book Does Not Include
Collectors should know that The Art of Finding Nemo does not cover the full scope of pre-production work. Several significant pieces — including Eggleston's complete color script panels and a series of "mood thumbnails" that measured only 3 x 5 inches but captured the emotional tone of key sequences — were excluded for space reasons. Some of these surfaced later in the Pixar: 20 Years of Animation exhibition catalog (2006) and the Pixar: The Design of Story exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt museum (2015–2016). A handful have appeared in auction listings through Heritage Auctions and Sotheby's, where original production concept art from Finding Nemo has sold in the $2,000 to $8,000 range depending on the piece and its significance.
Collecting Finding Nemo Concept Art: Prints, Auctions, and What to Watch For
For fans who want Finding Nemo concept art on their walls without spending auction-house money, the landscape breaks down into a few tiers.
Disney Fine Art lithographs and giclées. Disney's licensed fine art program has released a limited number of Finding Nemo concept art reproductions as numbered giclée prints, typically in editions of 150 to 500. These are produced on archival paper with pigment-based inks, and they generally retail between $150 and $400 at release. A few — particularly prints featuring Eggleston's reef color scripts — have appreciated in the secondary market. Cook & Haley Gallery and other authorized Disney art dealers have historically carried these, though Finding Nemo prints are less common than Lion King or Snow White pieces in the Disney Fine Art catalog.
Poster and art print reproductions. Companies like Mondo, Bottleneck Gallery, and various Etsy sellers have produced Finding Nemo–inspired art prints. These are not production concept art — they are new illustrations created by independent artists — but several of them pay direct homage to the concept art color palettes. Mondo's Finding Nemo poster by artist Kevin Tong, released in 2016 as a tie-in with the Finding Dory premiere, sold out its 275-piece edition in under four minutes and now trades for $300 to $500 on the secondary market.
Original production art. The rarest and most expensive tier. Original gouache paintings, pastel color studies, and pencil character sheets that were actually used during the production of Finding Nemo occasionally surface through Heritage Auctions, Sotheby's, and private dealers. Prices vary enormously: a small thumbnail color study might sell for $800 to $1,500, while a large, fully realized environment painting of the reef or the jellyfish forest can reach $5,000 to $12,000. A production-used character design sheet of Nemo, featuring the final locked proportions and expression tests, sold at Heritage Auctions in 2019 for $7,500 (including buyer's premium), according to the auction house's published results.
- Tip for buyers: Verify provenance. Legitimate production art from Pixar films should come with a certificate of authenticity from Disney/Pixar or a recognized production art dealer. Pieces without documentation are likely fan art or reproductions.
- Watch for fakes: After Finding Dory (2016) boosted interest in the franchise, the market saw an uptick in counterfeit "original" concept art sold through online marketplaces. If the price seems too low for a genuine production piece, it probably is.
- Preservation: Gouache and pastel works on paper are light-sensitive. If you own an original piece, frame it behind UV-filtering glass and keep it out of direct sunlight. Conservation framing with acid-free matting runs $150 to $300 at most framers.
The Technical Painters: When Concept Art Becomes Engineering Specs
One aspect of Finding Nemo concept art that rarely gets discussed is how much of it functioned as technical documentation. The environment paintings did not just set a mood — they specified exact values that the shading and lighting teams used as reference targets. When Eggleston painted a coral head bathed in afternoon light at 10 meters depth, the technical directors would measure the color values in that painting and then calibrate their render shaders to match.
This was not a trivial process. Pixar's rendering engine at the time, a heavily customized version of RenderMan, required the team to develop new subsurface scattering algorithms to simulate how light passes through translucent objects like jellyfish and anemone tentacles. The concept art paintings essentially served as the "ground truth" that the engineers optimized toward. According to a technical paper published by Pixar at SIGGRAPH 2003, the team developed a new caustic lighting model that could simulate the patterns light makes when refracted through a wavy water surface — a feature that appears in roughly 65% of the film's frames. The concept paintings were the benchmark. If the render did not look like the painting, the painting won.
This workflow — concept art as engineering specification — was not invented on Finding Nemo, but the film pushed it further than any previous Pixar production. The organic, fluid nature of underwater environments meant that the margin between "beautiful" and "murky" was razor thin, and the concept artists' color sense was the only reliable guide through that gap.
What Finding Nemo Concept Art Changed for the Industry
After Finding Nemo won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2004 and grossed $871 million worldwide (on a $94 million production budget, per Box Office Mojo), the film's visual development process became a case study. Animation programs at schools like CalArts, Ringling College, and Gnomon began incorporating Finding Nemo's concept art workflow — particularly the emotional color scripting and the selective realism approach to organic environments — into their curricula.
DreamWorks, which released Shark Tale in 2004 (an underwater-themed film that was already in production but had to contend with Nemo's shadow), reportedly overhauled portions of its own visual development pipeline after seeing the reception to Finding Nemo's environments. Blue Sky Studios, working on Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), cited Finding Nemo's water simulation research as a direct influence on their approach to the film's flood sequences.
But the most lasting influence might be the simplest one. Finding Nemo proved that concept art for animated films could stand on its own as gallery-quality work. The paintings from the film have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (as part of the 2012 Pixar exhibition), the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Nagoya City Art Museum in Japan. They are not just production tools anymore. They are art.
Frequently Asked Questions About Finding Nemo Concept Art
Who was the main concept artist for Finding Nemo?
Ralph Eggleston served as the production designer and led the overall visual direction, including the color scripts and environment concepts. Character design was primarily handled by Ricky Nierva, with additional character and environment work by Jason Deamer, Bob Pauley, and a team of roughly 20 visual development artists. Eggleston passed away in August 2022 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, and his work on Finding Nemo remains one of the most celebrated achievements in his career.
Where can I see original Finding Nemo concept art in person?
The Pixar Archives maintains the production art collection, and pieces rotate through traveling exhibitions. The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco periodically features Finding Nemo concept art in its Pixar-related displays. Major auction houses like Heritage Auctions and Sotheby's occasionally sell original pieces, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles has included Finding Nemo production art in its animation galleries. Your best bet is to check current exhibition schedules, as the collection travels frequently.
Is The Art of Finding Nemo still in print?
As of mid-2026, The Art of Finding Nemo (Chronicle Books, ISBN 978-0811839525) is out of print but readily available through used book dealers. Amazon, AbeBooks, and eBay typically have copies listed between $30 and $75 for standard used copies, with first-edition, first-printing copies in fine condition commanding $100 to $150. There is also a digital edition available through Apple Books and Kindle that includes some additional concept art not found in the physical book.
How much does original Finding Nemo concept art cost?
Prices range widely. Small color thumbnails and rough sketches sell for $800 to $2,000. Medium-sized environment paintings and character studies typically fall in the $3,000 to $8,000 range. Large, fully realized hero paintings — the kind that appear as full-page spreads in the art book — can reach $10,000 to $15,000 at auction. Heritage Auctions has been the most active venue for these sales, with their Animation Art auctions running twice per year (typically spring and fall).
What medium was used for Finding Nemo concept art?
The team used a mix of traditional and digital media. Most environment concept paintings were done in gouache (opaque watercolor) on illustration board, which was Pixar's standard at the time. Some open-ocean pieces used watercolor for its loose, fluid quality. Character design sheets were primarily graphite pencil on animation paper, with color versions done in marker or digital paint (Photoshop on Wacom tablets). Ralph Eggleston's color scripts were painted in gouache at approximately 4 x 6 inches each.
Did Finding Nemo concept art influence Finding Dory's visual style?
Yes, but with significant updates. Finding Dory (2016) benefited from 13 years of rendering advances, so the final animation was far more detailed than the original. However, the concept art team — led this time by production designer Steve Pilcher — deliberately maintained the color language established in the first film. The reef is still warm, the open ocean is still cool, and the artificial environments (the Marine Life Institute) use a new palette of institutional whites and clinical blues that extends the original film's design logic. Several of Eggleston's original color principles are cited in the Art of Finding Dory book (Chronicle Books, 2016) as foundational references.
The ocean is a hard thing to paint. It moves in every direction at once, it changes color with the weather, and it swallows light the deeper you go. What the concept artists on Finding Nemo accomplished was not just a set of beautiful paintings. It was a working system for translating the chaos of a real ocean into something an audience could feel in their chest — and then handing that system to 150 engineers who turned brushstrokes into pixels. Twenty-three years later, that system still holds up. The reef still feels warm. The open ocean still feels cold. And Nemo, drawn with nothing but eye shape and body tilt, still looks like he is about to say something important.
