Merry Christmas blog-o-sphere!

Hello everyone! Apologies for the silence since CTNX but I'm sure you're all in the same boat that it has  just been crazy busy on the run up to Christmas. 

I stupidly decided to make all my Christmas presents...so between that and a new job I've have no time to post anything new...actually, no time to even draw something new! 

Yes! New job! I'm now working on the new Mr Bean: The Animated Series as an Art Director for all of 2014. It's gonna be tough but a great learning experience and hopefully I'll be even more motivated to keep up the character design in my spare time  since I won't have a chance to do it at work. 

So I will see you all on the other side of the holidays! Refreshed and ready to design like a boss! 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!!! 

X

New Character Sketchbook!

 Yey! My new book is now available to buy from my Etsy store! 

 
I put this book together in preparation for CTNX back in November and luckily it seemed to go down pretty well. I managed to sell all the books I had taken with me (aside from the ones I used for swapsies!).  

Now Ive ordered another load in, so those of you who were interested but couldn't be there at CTNX can now grab yourself a copy on my Etsy store, just in time for Christmas! 

It's full of lots of new designs as well as some old ones, zoo sketches from my time in Paris with Joe Weatherly and life drawing sessions from work. 

You can also treat yourself to a little bundle dealio of both my books to save on shipping!   

 

New Job and Teaching at Bournemouth...

Over the last couple of weeks I was back at my old University in Bournemouth to teach the 2nd years animation students a bit about my approach to character design. 

 We begun with generated a bunch of random types of characters and hobbies. Together we came up with a Little Samurai Girl and an Old Lady Baseball Player. 

I showed them how to do quick silhouetted thumbnails, flesh out a favourite silhouette, pose out the character, explore expressions and squash and stretch in the face and turnarounds. 

And in other news, I'm working on a very exciting project with Passion Pictures which I don't think I can tell you too much about yet..but it will be revealed in 2014!

Nate Wragg's Character Design for Production

Over the summer, I have been taking Nate Wragg's second character design course on CGMA and it's been brilliant! I highly recommend it to anyone interested in filling up their portfolio to a more professional standard and learning a new approach to going through the steps involved in character design and model packs. 

The course takes you through 8 weeks with one character, exploring poses, facial expressions, turnarounds, story moments and a hero pose. In addition, Nate also gives you feed back to each assignment and 1 hour each week for a live Q&A where he answers pretty much anything you ask him (anything animation related of course!)

The character I came up with was a big rugged fisherman who had a secret passion for theatre performance. 

Below is a bunch of sketches I went through on the course. I will be adding all the final work to my portfolio soon, so stay tuned!  

And good luck if you choose to take either of his courses!

CGMA

 

Nelly the Elephant packed her trunk...

The first of a few characters I'm working on. Can you guess the theme?! 

CTNX 2013!

 Eeeep! It's only a couple of months away now and things are starting to come together. I've got a brand new table buddy, Craig 'Kegg' Knowles, a fellow British character designer and animator. We'll be over at T-27 near some amazing talent (Justin Rodrigues, Brett Bean, Chris Ayres, OMG!) 

I will be selling a brand new character sketchbook, as well as some new prints. 

I look forward to meeting some news face and seeing the old ones! 

Find us here:

At-Issue

About a year ago, my lovely friend Drew Roper from Yamination Studios kindly offered for me the opportunity to design the characters for his upcoming stop-motion short, At-Issue. 

Being the super talent that he is, Drew won the Sky Futures Fund prize and has been working away on making his ideas materialise into a real stop motion film. Not an easy task, Im sure you know. He has been amazing at bringing together a whole bunch of talent and bringing Bartholomew to life! 

You can view a short video about what he has done so far on the Sky Arts website HERE.  Definitely worth the watch! What a fantastic achievement and he's not even finished yet! I cannot wait to see the film piece.

Below are some exploratory poses to find his character, early colour ideas, expressions and secondary character designs. They were done over a year ago but I'm still quite happy with them. I guess that's thanks to Drew's creation of a believable character

 

 

And here's the man himself...Bartholomew!

Yamination Studios 

Website

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Don't Ask...

Pirates!

 

Joe Weatherly Animal Workshop Paris

This week I was lucky enough to spend my time in Paris, at the Jardin des Plantes Zoo, with a group of talented artists, as we were brought together to learn from animal master, Joe Weatherly. 

It was a challenging week!

We had to strip back our animal drawing to the fundamentals, the structure, perpective, weight. All those important things that I sometimes forget about because I'm too keen to make a character design out of them. 

Here's a bunch of sketches from the week. First I've showed the monkeys I drew, to compare how I was drawing before to how I was drawing by the end of the week (and I managed to sneak a bit of character in there too...)

BEFORE:

AFTER:

We also spent a day at the Palaeontology Museum, studying skeletons, which helped the zoo drawing so much! Get down to your local bone museum and do a few hours! It'll help you loads!

 

A study with some notes from Joe on top: 

 

You can see the work of the other folks on the course here:

Trevor White

Shannon Beaumont

Fabian Fernandez

Pierre Rougemont

Mansoureh

 

Big thank you to Joe for coming all the way to Paris to teach us. Ive learned so much and I cant wait to get to character designing some animals using the fundamentals he taught us. 

He's got a load of books on animal drawing, one instructional and 3 that are just inspirational! So check them out at:

joeweatherly.com

 My most recent Weatherly purchase :)