Flexercising

I watched a video, the other day, by a Youtuber I follow who is also a bit of an art geek. He has recently enrolled himself on a cartoon course and was relating the various tasks they'd been asked to perform on the course.
They reminded me of some of the drawing exercises I'd done over the years I'd been at uni.

One of which was making a series of quick 30-second drawings of random objects. I found a random object generator online and used a timer set at 30 second intervals to draw the objects listed.
Obviously they're largely imperfect and rough-looking, especially some of the things I obviously find more challenging to draw, but it's a good way to reacquaint myself with drawing, make quick visual decisions and learn what areas I should focus on for improvement.

30 seconds is a surprisingly short amount of time to draw some things, which you don't realise until you're doing it.

Started a new sketchbook

Using this to carry with me for sketching on the go. Had to do something garish, terrible and stupid so I felt less precious about marking in a fresh book.

Terry-ble at updating

I've been working for some time, on-and-off, on this silly little competition project. But I've been very bad at keeping anyone updated on its progress. There came a few stalls when I had some crashes and lost a lot of work - and some of it can get quite tedious to animate, so it's very demotivating to lose it. Additionally, I also intend to splice in some live action footage of an old book. Finding the right book for the job also hindered progress, but I have something now.

Here are a few images to show what caught my eye in the British Library's collection and illustrate the work I did to make them "animateable".

This, I believe, is the original, unedited version of this image that I downloaded.

Here you can see the edits I made to the base image itself...

...and this shows the embellishments and extra elements I added to animate the image.

Another of the images that caught my eye.

Side-by-side comparison of the original (right) and the edited version, with cut out elements in the centre.

Still of one live-action book shots, onto which I intend to superimpose the animations.

Gilliam's Wish Wellingtons

So, it was brought to my attention (by my good friend and fellow artist/animator, Sajan Rai) that the British Library have released a veritable digital treasure trove of old book illustrations that are now public domain.
Thus anyone can use them for any purpose without need for royalty payments and the like.

He suggested that he, I and another friend (Ben Wingrove) have ourselves a small competition to see who can create the best Terry Gilliam-style animation based on some of the imagery available. I'm quite excited by this concept and can't wait to dive in.

Immediately I'm getting ideas from images on the first page. I think I may go a little more towards the style of Mister Harpoon (as he is calling himself now) and the work he did on The Elegant Gentleman's Guide to Knife Fighting. It's an Australian sketch show, which I guess is a modern spin on Monty Python's Flying Circus (live action sketches interspersed with humorous animations).

Website Business

This Spielplatz job is taking far longer than I anticipated. I get very little feedback on the actual site design and inundated with requests for more functionality.
I'm more versed with the visual aspects...

I've decided that progress is going to halt if I rely too heavily on the client to provide details of the original site structure and use of third party sites.
The initial plan was to recycled the original wordpress site into an RSS feed for the news and events page of the new site.
Instead I have opted to create a brand new email address as well as a Tumblr account with two blogs and a Flickr account. These will all provide the necessary feeds for the events, property listings and photo gallery respectively.
That way, the client can update these regularly shifting aspects without having to fiddle with the code or (more likely) bring me back in to tinker for them.

I'm not sure about the video page (another addition that has been requested) or the shop. I think I may just have to link to an external Youtube account. I know there is a sort of playlist/gallery embed player Youtube provides, but I don't know if that will update automatically with new uploads.
Autonomy is the name of the game here. I need something I can leave in the hands of people, whose level of computer literacy is unknown, without issue.

Meanwhile I made a massive revamp to the site (making everything far less chunky) and attempted to make it more visually stimulating.
Once again I am awaiting feedback...

Still not sure about the colour, though I changed it a bit, especially now as a sun is involved.

Spiel Updates

It has been some time since I first spoke of my work on the new website for Spielplatz. It took a considerable amount of time for me to receive the go-ahead on the site, and once I did I was incapacitated with illness for a couple of weeks.
Nonetheless I am now full steam ahead with the project.

Unfortunately for me, I cannot seem to build the ideas that are within my head. The current version of the site-in-progress follows the initial plan I drew up well enough, but it doesn't match the vision in my mind.
I'm not sure as yet how I'm going to get there. But I shall try.

I also have very limited resources and a completely open brief as regards what is required. I am literally making decisions as wild stabs in the dark with the hope that what I produce will please the client. It doesn't please me, though.
Having said that, as I include more elements into the skeleton it starts to look less heinous and more like a proper website.
The unfortunate fact that a lot of it is feed-based means I'm hovering around deciding whether or not to just build the feeds myself and hand over the keys, or leave them open ready to discuss the idea with the client.
At the moment the homepage has a Yahoo news feed as a placeholder for Spielplatz event updates.

The iffy skeleton of a website I could one day not despise.

 I don't know why it's so green. I think I was going for "verdant". I might swap it to something more neutral. But I'm afraid the client will think it's "bland". "Interesting" and "exciting" were the closest to instructions I got. Also a tour of naturism websites.
Of course you remember the hideous yellow of the current website... I really hope I don't have to do it that colour.

Playtime

I was recently presented with the opportunity to redesign the official website for Spielplatz, a naturist community residence in Hertfordshire. The existing design left little to be desired - a basic Wordpress template layout, haphazardly thrown together:

The original website design, in all it's limited glory.

After an initial meeting with the site's webmaster - wherein we discussed the shortfalls of the current layout and compared it the websites of competing UK naturist clubs - I laid out some preliminary ideas and notions.
I drew up a basic layout plan for the homepage (which will also be used as a template for subsequent pages) and investigated the feasibility of some of the proposals.

Annotated layout design for the new homepage

Proposed features of the new design include: a large carousel gallery showcasing the surroundings at the grounds, a feed-based event widget showing the latest upcoming event being held, drop-down menu navigation buttons, more prominent location details and integrated feeds covering news, events, photos and properties for sale - each of which should be updateable independantly of the main site itself (not pictured).

At this stage I am awaiting feedback on these initial designs before I progress to further page design and a prototype build.