Omchat

Updates on the illustration I did for the Omcha tea labels. My work has started rolling out on the products!

I got some beautiful official product photos from owner Meg, and it's really amazing to see my images sitting within context on a real product. That people can buy!

photos provided by Omcha.

Get That (Tea) Bag!

 It's been a lengthy time chipping away at the list of designs - but the Omcha label project is finally complete!

I have yet to see any of the images in print or packaging - but I will share as soon as I get any updates.

It was a lovely project and I'm happy to have been commissioned to make them.

Do please buy some tea from Meg, if you are so inclined. Depending on when you're reading this - it might even come with one of my illustrations on it!

Omcha.co.uk - people and planet friendly teas and events.

Oh, Be-Hiive

Online creative magnates, Hiive asked if they could display some of my work at a venue for one of their Swarm parties. I said they could and they sent me some photos of my images on display.

Tiny Twelve

It has been some time since I've heard from the company that requested this test commission, so I'm assuming I have not been selected.
To that end, I am publishing my design.

It's a likeness of Peter Capaldi (in costume as the Twelfth Doctor) in the established style of the company. I'm quite pleased with it, even if they obviously feel it's not enough to hire me over.
 

Sibling

An offhand comment on Twitter lead me to draw this stupid portrait of my brother.
It's not perfect, and you can tell I put more time into the face than anything else, but it's a good exercise in digital drawing.

 

Face Off

I applied to a company that creates stylised likenesses of celebrities for use on a variety of products, their response was to request that I demonstrate my capability to create imagery in their established brand style.

I have begun working on something.

Having tweeted it without context, people have managed to identify the individual in question. Which is a good sign.

Comical

Inspired by a project called Twitter The Comic, wherein a group of artists illustrate selected tweets and turn them into short strips, I have decided to practice my comicbook illustration by producing fully-fledged comic pages based on tweets I find amusing.

Below are some preliminary sketches based on two tweets I saw today.

 I'll post more when I've collated some finished pages.

Book It

I just finished the final touches to my "Gilliam Animation", which I've tentatively titled Book - for want of a better name - and uploaded to Vimeo.

(You can see it here.)

It's taken me far too long to complete, what with laziness, tedium, losing a load of work and being put off and having to find the right live-action elements to include. But it's done.

It's almost ironic that the part of the process I knew the least about and had never attempted before, took me the least amount of time. I started this morning and finished a short while ago. (That was compositing the animation with the live footage of the book.)

I think it worked out well too, considering I took the lazy approach and avoided using After Effects and masks - instead winging it with the limited effects in Premiere and a prayer that the clumsy edits won't be noticeable during viewing. (I don't think they are.)

I'm actually incredibly pleased with how it's come out. Especially how well I managed to make digitally animated scans, combined with footage of a blank page, look like closeup shots of an actual book.
It was challenging given the inconsistent colouring of a lot of the source images (that I probably should've corrected at the first stage rather than last) and I ended up using a lot more and far different effects than I imagined when I first conceptualised it.
In particular not being able to chroma key the image backgrounds and having to add digital shadows to mimic those of the page-turn to make them more seamless.

Below are some screenshots to pique your interest/allow me to show off.

I had to write a load of nonsense to make the scenes look more like real book pages. They're not even complete sentences; there's nothing before the left edge of the shot.

I'm not going to pretend that I don't think I'm a genius for adding a layer of mirrored text to emulate the look of the adjoining page showing through the paper.

I think the overall effect is convincing. I'd believe this is a photo of a book page, and I KNOW that I made it.

 

Machinations

In my last post, I mentioned my film The Machine.

It's a dark animated short based on Franz Kafka's story "In The Penal Colony".

There is a complete version of it, that I have submitted to festivals, but I personally think it's too short and unfinished (the time constraints of uni, necessitated severe edits to the script).

At the moment I wish to extend it to the level I think is the bear minimum for release, and then hopefully add a little more until it is "properly" finished - at which point I'll release it again as a "director's cut".

Just so you know what it's like and it exists (many people haven't seen it) here are some screenshots I've taken at various points of production.

 

 

 

 

An exasperating issue I noticed during early stages, that I posted on Twitter.

 

An early version of one scene. The linework was criticised and so I moved to the style shown in the other images. (This was part of style that was to incorporate additional heavier use of comicbook-style shading.)

B&W screenshots as part of the festival submission.

The submission also required a poster, so this is a rough design I threw together to fulfil that demand.

Stephen Lives!

Since its inception, I've wanted to revisit one of the films I created for my 2nd year of animation during my degree.
The film was called Stephen and it was never fully realised to the level that I desired. I recently poured through several of my old harddrives, pen drives and other storage in an attempt to recover the original .fla file with which to continue the film.

Unfortunately all I could find was the final, unfinished export of the film and an even further unfinished .fla file. Half the final version was missing, but yet I still had the exported version taunting me and reminding me that it once existed.
I had all but resigned myself to the notion of having to painstakingly recreated all the scenes that I had watched over and over as part of the final export.

The world may never know about this chap's weird muffin obsession.

However.

I got in contact with my father and convinced him to let me borrow his old external harddrive to search for it. It was a long shot, but low and behold, it paid off!

I'm now in possession of the rough early edition of Stephen! Ready to roll into production...

Just as soon as I finally get that damn Terry Gilliam-inspired short out, and also finish the director's cut of my final year film The Machine...

Got my work cut out!

Full scene list from the recovered version of "Stephen". The tick shows the half finished scene I had at the end of the only versions I could find before.

Faces in Places

I've been doing a fair bit of travelling recently; taking my sketchbook about with me to practice sketching during my downtime. I realise now why there's so prevalent a cliché of illustrators drawing on trains.

Sleeping woman on a train to Birmingham

The challenge is getting faces without people noticing you staring at them. Easier when they're further away, but harder to see details.

Workmen on a break outside the station

Travellers waiting at the station

Figures on the left were on a train, chap at the top in a cafe.

A Foot Note

I drew this critter on a whim, late last night.

I noticed his hands and feet were quite catastrophic. I've been meaning to work on my hand and feet drawings (it's something a lot of people struggle with) so I started doing studies from image and live references.

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.

Yes I Kafkan

My final year project is partially an animation project. For it, I am adapting one of Franz Kafka's short stories In The Penal Colony. It's set on a remote island, where an explorer is being introduced to the strange archaic methods of torture and capital punishment being used in the land. The characters are a zealous Officer of the old regime that is very much behind the process, his soldier assistant, the explorer who is against it but feels torn between his morals and his ethical need to not interfere with foreign cultures and the unwitting prisoner who is to be put to death. The machine that is to carry out to procedure is also a major feature.

A rough storyboard capturing the scenes I see in my head and the major plot developments.

Preliminary sketches of the machine. The design on the right is the one I prefer, but carefully reading the descriptions in the text, it will probably end up looking more like those on the left.

 

More Carter

At this stage in the project, the overall layouts and imagery have been finalised, but there are 3 potential stylistic options for the final imagery: Handdrawn linework, Vector graphics or Inkwash drawings.
The ink drawings were definitely the first intended final images, but the simplicity of the line images is much clearer to read. Unfortunately they're not as clean as the vector graphics, but the latter have a stale quality to them.
I'm not sure I really like the way this project is panning out.
In addition to the images, I drew out some hand-rendered lettering for the story to be written in. The one I chose is based on ornate, slightly gothic-looking serif typefaces I looked at.

The lengthy passages mean I had to convert the letters into an actual font, so I could just type out what was needed, rather than assemble it by hand. It's called CarterScript and it's not a functional typeface, per se, more just a means of creating large volumes of readily formatted words in the letters for me to edit.

 

Examples of the vector versions of the scene elements I'm using to illustrate the story.

Bloody Ange!

More work on The Bloody Chamber. The final image elements will be scanned in and edited/assembled digitally. Several of the images were dropped and other changed to reflect the more subtle approach.
The theme of black & white with red highlights still remains, though.

Some of the red ink splatters used to make the bloodstains.

 

Page layouts for the final images, including the excerpts of copy I selected to illustrate.

 

Carter Catharsis

Working more on the Carter brief, looking at animal footprints for various critters named in the story. Wolf is of particular importance, obviously.

Research pages

Worked up some of the roughs into ink drawings (scenes/elements). The paw severing panel may be too extreme. Better to go with more subtle imagery.

Clean line drawings of the animal prints.