Teaching =)

Last week I was kindly invited back to my old Uni to give a talk on Character Design. What an honour! To be considered good enough to impart my bit of knowledge onto vulnerable students!

To help illustrate the points I was making, I took an old design from my graduation film and completely redesigned him. 

 

And this is how he looked 5 years ago!

A good improvement I hope! 

Ive not included all my notes but maybe you can get what I'm on about from the images below. Let me know if you found this useful at all!

Boxy design.

 More boxiness throughout the design.

Curves are important too, for volume. 

Asymmetry. 

 

Posed.

 Shape Language.

 Leading the eye.

 Using costume to describe the form.

Silhouettes, even within the form.

Negative space.

 Silhouette.

Thanks to all the Bomo students who listened to my talk. I hope it was of some use for your upcoming film pitches!

Sailor shanties.

 This weekend was semi-sunny and my friend from home was in town, so we went to a market I'd never been to in Hackney called Broadway Market. I've been living here for over a year and I'd never been!? I knew a lady who's whoopie book I have has a stall there, so I hunted her stall down and ate a beautiful salted caramel cupcake while drawing a group of 4 (what I presume are ex-sailors) singin jaunty little sea shanties. 

I like to think that they co-ordinated their outfits before the left the house that morning...

Meet Ze Artists in Angouleme, France

 Last weekend, I was lucky enough to go to a tiny village in France, called Angouleme, (the comics capital of Europe apparently). An event was being held there called 'Meet Ze Artists', organised by Tigobo Studios. 

Several artists from the world of animation (alot from Dreamworks) were giving talks on their choosen fields. Including, Sylvain Deboissy, Florian Satzinger, Christophe Lautrette, Arthur Fong, Stephane Chung.

 Above: Lucien Hoare, Celine Choo, Mazz Brewster, me, Nana Li.

The Mind Candy masterpieces!

Florian Satzinger and me in his character design workshop.

Two elephants designs I did in Florian's worshop. Could see a new project coming from these guys!

Character designs I did in Sylvain Deboissy's character design workshop. I should draw more animal characters! Twas fun!

Taking a bite by the river in the lovely French sunshine.

 Arthur Fong workshop on Colour

 Angouleme!

Torch Girl

Another collaboration project from me and Matthew Timms. 

Design: Me

FX Animation: Matt

:)

Bitey 2D FX Torch from Matt Timms on Vimeo.

Crusaders

Trying to push my shapes a little more with these characters. 

What d'ya think?

Herrerio

Finally!  A new design project! Yey! 

The wonderfully talented Matthew Timms, FX animator extraordinaire, and I are collaborating to make fun, simple animated images to exercise our character design/FX animation skills. Here is our first attempt, Herrerio.

Facebook

Happy belated St Patrick's  Day!
Hope you didn't get too messy...like this guy...


Hello blog goers! Not a big post today, just a wee one to let you know that I also have a Gillianimation Facebook page, which tends to get updated much more often with smaller doodles, life drawing and other artist's work I like to share. 

So if you're not already a follower but you like my stuff, mosey on over and hit that nice big LIKE button to get more regular info from my art page. 

Slick Rick

We had a fun evening at work last week, generating random word combinations and drawing what we could from the words that inspired us. For decency reasons, I can't tell you all the words we came up with...but I used SLICK as inspiration for this dude. 

The Night Light Monster

 This time last year, I returned from a short position working on the short film "The Night Light Monster" in Luxembourg. It was directed by a friend of mine, Nicola Coppack and she kindly invited me to do some character designs for her. 

You may have already seen some of this stuff in my portfolio but here are some earlier images that I havent shown yet, of the little girl and the shadow monster that captures her...dun dun duuuuun!

Below are some production stills from the final film. The lovely backgrounds were done by the Director herself. You can see more work from the film HERE.