Since graduating from Kansas University in 1991, Dawn Brown’s career has gotten red hot. Actually, it’s become Little Red Hot.

The artist has found success in two different mediums. First, as a creator of her own comic book named Little Red Hot. Second, as a set designer on a multitude of major Hollywood films, including “Ocean’s 11,” “Solaris,” “A.I.” and “Charlie’s Angels.”

Brown is returning to Lawrence on Monday to speak at the Spencer Museum of Art as part of the Hallmark Symposium Series.

“As an artist, the stronger your design skills are, the more valuable you’ll be,” Brown says. “One of the things about working in the film industry is we are asked to design crazy stuff really fast. No one can be an expert on drawing a spaceship because it’s so interpretive.”

Brown is phoning from Montgomery, Ala, where she is working on the set of “Big Fish.” (“It’s a big, epic story, kind of like ‘Forrest Gump,'” she says of director Tim Burton’s period adaptation.)

This latest job is typical of her schedule: spend months on a movie, then months on a comic book.

“One definitely led to the other for me,” she recalls. “A lifelong fan of comics, I was lucky enough to work on a lot of comic book-type film projects — ‘Batman & Robin,’ ‘Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman’ and an earlier incarnation of the ‘Superman’ movie with Nicolas Cage. I met Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, on ‘Batman & Robin.’ It was very inspirational, so I started playing around with the idea of doing my own comic.”

Brown’s idea eventually became her signature publication, Little Red Hot. The Image Comics series centers on Chane, a gorgeous, uncompromising bounty hunter whose missions are so remarkable they entangle her with both God and Satan. (Visit her Web site at www.littleredhot.bizland.com to see more.)

“Getting Little Red Hot out there has been the career highlight, if only for the fact that it was such a personal project,” she says. “That’s 100 percent me. Every once in a while I’ll get an e-mail from someone in South Africa or Finland or Australia who picked up the book and said they liked it. That means more than anything.”

Dawn Brown returns to KU to discuss her career as a Hollywood set designer and creator of the comic book Little Red Hot.

In addition to the Little Red Hot series, which also includes spin-offs Bound and Chane of Fools, she also did a four-issue run of Vampirella last spring.

“Basically, it all starts with the script,” she says of her process. “The writer spells out fairly clearly what needs to happen in each panel on the page. I do quick, rough layouts of what I think that might look like. Then I send the layouts to the editor. When that’s approved, I shoot models in the poses of my layouts. Based on the models and whatever research I can find, I do a clean, final line art. Then I scan that into Photoshop and paint the artwork digitally.”

Entry to Hollywood

Brown grew up in Prairie Village and graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School in 1987. While studying design at KU, she found one more artsy arena to dabble in: playing drums in a band called Electric Jesus.

“It was myself and three architecture students,” she remembers. “We hit the bar scene all over Lawrence — lots of Bottleneck and Outhouse gigs.”

Brown's comic book technique is revealed in these panels for her spin on the character of Vampirella.

Brown graduated in 1991 with a BFA in illustration/graphic design, which she said helped her “build a good background in composition, balance and movement.”

After she graduated she moved to Los Angeles to try and get into the field of animation but ran into a brick wall finding employment. So in order to pay rent she became a production assistant.

“I ended up on a TV show called ‘SeaQuest DSV,'” she says. “Remember that, Roy Scheider and a submarine? That was my first show where we had an art department and real sets — some pretty cool sets. That was when I figured out that if I want to stay in this movie business I better learn some skills that make myself more valuable, so I picked up drafting.”

Brown credits “a lot of very patient art directors and set designers who showed me the ropes.” Eventually, she assembled a portfolio of her own drawings, which were impressive enough to get her into the set designers union.

Grand design

So far Brown is credited on 10 different features, working with directors such as Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh. Her craftsmanship can be seen in the futuristic “A.I.,” specifically in the design of the Dr. Know chamber and other aspects of Rouge City. But Brown believes her best compositions stem from her three collaborations with visually innovative filmmaker Tim Burton.

Dawn Brown recently launched a new series involving her signature character: Little Red Hot Bound.

“‘Planet of the Apes,’ for example, takes place in such a fantastical environment that we have to literally design everything,” she says of the 2001 remake. “You can’t go to Sears and buy a dining room table that’s going to work for a gorilla general.

“Tim’s movies in particular are so stylized and illustrative that I think it really helps to have those skills to come up with something that would be appropriate for that type of world … He’s a wonderful illustrator himself, so he’s pretty hands-on in the art department.”

On the flip side of that is her experience with Joel Schumacher, the notoriously tacky director who inevitably finds ways to inject his own alternative-lifestyle leanings into mainstream blockbusters. Case in point, the reviled “Batman & Robin.”

“I was hired to draw custom furniture,” Brown recollects. “There was a scene where Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) gets thrown into Arkham Asylum. He’s brought in inside a giant refrigerator. The only thing that’s in the room is a sink and a cot. I had designed this large, steel bed with a wire mesh mattress. It was all rusty and scary-looking and kind of kinky. Then Joel asked for that to be taken directly to his house. We never even shot it. It just went straight to his home. So the decorator had to throw that cot in there to replace the bed.

“I don’t know how you go from Tim Burton to Joel Schumacher.”