Painful Progress

Finally, after an excessive amount of time, I was called in to a meeting with the board of directors to talk about the website.
At first I was expecting to just be discussing with the chairman, but walking in I was greeted by the entire board and expected to do a presentation with absolutely no prep.

It went surprisingly well, the only downside being my inarticulate explanation (literally no preparation, I swear to Moses) and accidentally clicking on nearly every dead link on the example site.
Thankfully they were all pleased and in agreement over the overall design of the site, so that means no tweaking from me and I can finally finish the bloody thing!

The only things they asked for improvement on were the main header logo. They wanted the sunburst more prominent and perhaps a change in colour to pick it out more from the rest of the site. But they liked it so much that there was talk of adapting all their letterheads and the like to match it.

Current header logo. A warmer colour palette may be in order to pick out the sun and/or highlight the whole thing.

Additionally, they also asked for a few more pages to be added to the navigation, and room to add login and member page functionality - which, at first, I thought was being asked in an attempt to trip me up. Thankfully, I kept my cool and managed to decipher what was required. Also I remembered I hadn't been briefed really on any of that, so it was hardly surprising I was taken off-guard by the request.

Hopefully, though, once I have completed these tasks it can be uploaded to the server to be populated by whoever is supplying the finished copy and photographic imagery. Then I shall be done with this whole shebang! Onto the next quest!

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.

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.