Portrait Practice

Heres a portrait study. My classmate/ housemate decided one night he needed more practice painting portraits and I thought I'd join him to push both of us. This was fairly fun, I think Im learning more and more about rendering flesh which is something I thought was always tricky business.
My grad film is going well at the moment. Listening to rough pieces of the music is exciting for all the team, we are getting some animation done, and the layouts look on target. Everyone looks happy and we're not too stressed out yet :P
Have a Merry Christmas everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Way of the Intercepting Lines

The Christmas break is near!!! I almost finished drawing all the line drawings for the film. Just 5 more to go. Progress on these has slowed a bit as I started to put more of a focus on finishing the dissertation which is due in first thing when we return from the holidays. Here are a few samples of the line drawings.
Next year, there will be what ever remaining from the line drawings to finish off as well as the 30 paintings left too. Hopefully with those kept at a manageable rate, I can start working on some side projects. I'll speak about those once something is done about it :D

Production Still

Getting into the exciting stage of the production. We are now out of the pre-production stage and into the main production, animating! The trip so far was filled with ups and downs, highs and lows. But overall, the project is looking good and I remembering to how exciting this is! Sometimes you can get too caught up in the work you have to do that you forget to have fun and enjoy this experience.
Well, heres the production still for the film. TJ drew the characters, special thanks to him for his great efforts. The background was fun and took some time actually. One night I stayed up till 5am painting it, dunno why, just felt like it:P
Enjoy!:)

Studying the Master

I recently befriended an artist (Pao) who is soon to be on my course as a foreign exchange student from Esag, Paris. When we have time, we try to do some artist studies together. This time looked at Craig Mullins. This one took me 1 hour 20 minutes. Recently Ive been very busy with school work so its been hard to try fit these studies in, but I hope to get more time in to these since I really enjoyed this one and probably gained some new ideas from it:P
The grad film is going well. Soon we can begin animating. The animatic/ storyboard has changed slightly. Mainly the ending. It got some issues according to the tutors and so we came up with another solution which apparently works better.
Collaborating with people of other areas like musicians, editors, sound designer and model makers has been interesting so far. Our little team seems to be growing all the time!

In Secrecy

Sorry guys, the grad film blog is now private and restricted to only a few people for now. My tutors wanted me to keep the big stuff secret so no more animatics and animation for you to see for a while! Film is going well and kind of on track. A few unexpected bumps here and there but overall going well. We have responded to the feedback we recieved from the tutors and soon we can begin animating. The project is looking exciting, Im enjoying collaborating with people from different departments. Looking forward to seeing how the finished film turns out :D

Working in Progress

Moar layouts! Film is going well with a few bumps. One of my tutors suggested should make the layouts lighter and to fit in with the mood of the animation. The animatic is timed out and the storyboard doesnt need to be changed. However we need to get the timing for the animatic spot on to avoid over-animating which I will work on with our editor. Character designs are completed by my teammates and we can begin animating in 2.5 weeks time.

The Start of Something Big

Today is the first day of uni (officially)!!!!!!!!!!! Final year! Big excitement! Big questions, how will they be answered? Today, let me celebrate the beginning of this grand adventure of creating a short animated film with this painting of the opening shot of the film. I wonder how would look back at this in a year's time...

Backgrounds for My Grad Film

University hasnt started yet but Im trying to get ahead with the layouts since it looks like Im on my own on this task. This is going to be one big year! Lets hope Im still standing by the end of it...

Colourkeys For Grad Film

Monstrous year ahead of me. I may have shot myself in the foot with this ambitious grad film. Ive planned 41 backgrounds to be drawn and painted. And theres the dreaded dissertation on top of that! And theres plenty of other things for me to worry about... But Hey! Bring it on!!!!!!!!

Face Sketch

Heres a painting Ive done today. Got a bit bored of working on the layouts for my grad film so took a break painting something else. Photo referanced but I deliberately didnt allow it to dictate what the painting should be. Pretty fun stuff maybe there will be more of these stuff in future?
Oh, and uni is about to resume. Im quite excited!!!!!!!!!!
(Oh, and Liverpool beat Man United today... my throat's a lil soar still from my wild celebrations :))

Heres a sketch I did a while ago and forgot about.

He Who Follows the Wind

Something I did whilst being caught up in the olympics hype. The news that Liu Xiang was forced out of his competition by injury was pretty devastatng. But he is still a great hero of the games.
I tried a few different techniques on this piece, which was referanced. I think I learnt a thing or two more about lighting. Painting skintones is something I need to get to grips with better though I think I picked up bits about it in this study. Played around with some filters on this too :P

A Journey to the East

Inspired by a recent trip to Hong Kong and China. I tried out some new ideas here. I dont use adjustment layers much but thought it would help here and the experimentations helped me to discover some new things. Whoop Whoop!

ChoW #116 The Host

Here I again tried a different approach.

ChoW #107 Steampunk Penguin Professor

This one had been my biggest success in the ChoW competition so far. It came second which was a major suprise to me. Before this I was hardly ever in the races. So I hope this signals a turning point for myself. The technique I used was less 'tight' as I would normally do. This one was taken more as experimenting, but it really payed off. Someone got in contact about the availability of the image to use for his company but they never got back to me when I said that its not for free!

Grad Film Pitch

When you reach the end of the second year of my course you get the chance to pitch an idea for a potential graduate animated film that you will work on next year if you get picked. The pitching takes place infront of the whole course with a voting system that happens at the end of the week when everyone has pitched. Fortunately I did go through, but now I will have to make the thing! But I will be doing so with a talented crew beside me which gives me hope:) Above are a few of the character designs I did for the pitch.

This is the animatic I showed during the pitch. It took a lot of effort to draw all the panels and for some reason I rather enjoyed staying up at crazy o'clock working on them.

This is the latest version of the animatic. Though since the time I made this one, there has been a few changes to it. Some shots were unnecessary and just added more time on an already ambitious task. I hope the finished film will not fail to deliver what it promises. We'll see in a years time!

ChoW #111 Children Book Character Design

It was in the middle of the run up for my pitch for a potential grad film but I couldnt resist having another pop at another ChoW. This time the brief was less on finished illustration but more kinda like a model sheet. The brief synopsis of the characters and story was given and we had to simply design them. Yep.

More Digital Love

A personal piece. Robots are fun to paint!

This one is a collaboration between me and my friend, Dan Burgess. We both have a strong interest in digital painting and concept art so we have been planning to join forces for some time. Anyway, he did the pencil drawing for me to paint. Very fun experience.

This was an old ChoW entry that I repainted. Looking back at old work I usually see mistakes and areas I should have done better in. So one time I actually thought I'd correct some of those mistakes.

ChoW #99 Herald of the Queen

An activity on conceptart.org that enjoy taking part in is the Character of the Week competition. I wont bother to show ou any previous entries Ive done, they suck! So heres number 99. It sucks! Haha!

Highwaymen

Another old piece. It was a more serious take on the grad film I worked on last year.

Matte Painting

One night I felt the urge to try a bit of matte painting. So I dived in. I found that you really need to build up our library of resorces for this. A lot of times I found the perspective of different photos were... well... different! So compiling them together and creating one image out of them proved tricky. Good fun though :)

WANTED!

These are a sample of the backgrounds I painted for a grad film. During the second year you get the chance to work on a third years graduate film and be a part of the production team. Its a valuable learning experience before you make the jump to the final year. The linedrawings of the painted work are done by another team member.

Sketches

Various sketches on location. From the Annecy animation festival to the Body World exhibition in Manchester. Drawing from life is a great way for me to relax and refresh my skills at the same time. I enjoy drawing with friends and other artists, its so inspiring to be amongst other creative people.