Icy New Year

The artwork for this strip without the word balloons.

Star atop the Tree

Summer in the City

I liked this sketch so thought I'd draw it a little nicer. I'm experimenting with rendering techniques too.

Musician

Two more Giraffes

http://www.olahelland.net/giraffes/

Impact

Hello to all my blog buddies! Just stopping in to announce that my dissertation is finally finished and submitted, and none too soon! I can now finally devote some more effort to my film. So, expect more of this in the near future!

(No inbetweens yet.)

Trooper Backgrounds

Some background art that I've been doing for Trooper.

Some of the more interesting ones anyway. There's a lot of close ups and alternate angles not worth posting. In fact I've been painting that last one from many different angles and have more to go. Man am I sick of it.

Summer in the City

I wish I had the confidence to draw in my sketchbooks more rather than doing all my doodles in MS Paint. I can't wait for them to get a drawing programme on one of those e-books...

Geri

A little something for One Million Giraffes. Do check it out and consider constributing!

More Life Drawing

Animation

Sitting on a couch watching a DVD felt like a waste of time, so I had to do something. Ended up scribbling all the main characters from my year's animated films. All sketched from memory except Arron's and Damian's characters which I had to have a peek at online. I don't want to see any original art now for fear of seeing all the mistakes I've made...

Trooper's Room

Nearly finished working on layout and I'm doing some background paintings. Thought I'd share this one with you all.

Trooper Background Test

This is the first proper background I've taken from layout to colour. Until this point I wasn't entirely sure how the backgrounds would be achieved - particularly when I had a 3D interior scene that needs to look like the rest of the 2D backgrounds. There's also the tricky matter of giving the backgrounds depth and lighting without making them overly detailed or painterly - which takes too much time and contrasts too much with the animation style. I'm happy with the results however. I may go in a tweak a few things, add a little more detail to some of the boxes, but it's more or less done.

Trooper Deep Shot

This blog is doubling as a production diary for my film at the moment, so expect lots more posts like these in the future.

I've been experimenting on the models (which Rob has built for me) to create the 2D style I want that should hopefully match the backgrounds in my film. This is early days, but it's showing that toon shading, shadows and fog in 3D can produce some promising results...


Everything here is the same shader at the moment but that will change. A lot of the smaller and more distant things (like guard rails and small pipes) will have fewer leves of shading (either solid or with one shadow) to stop them look too complex and 3D. And it needs to be coloured too, obviously.

Cannon Ball Smoke Test 2

Paul and I have been tweaking the previous test animation and have come up with this. It's looking much better. A lot closer to the concept drawing. Didn't use it as reference mind you so the colour's a bit different.

Concept:

More Poses

Biro

A sketch I found in my lecture notes that I rather liked. Some of my other lecture doodles will be uploaded on Spur of the Moment over the next few days.

More Toon Shading Tests

A few little bits in the models to fix so the lines draw properly and we're nearly done! Just a few textures to be added then we can animate!

Cannon Ball Smoke Test

Paul and I have been working for ages (or half an hour) on turning my 2D drawing into 3D. The cannon ball is going to be travelling and spinning in slow motion in the shot, so animating the gas/plasma it vents by hand would be tricky. Here's our first CG test...

Here's Paul's particle smoke:

And here's it again after I played with it in After Effects:

It's early days but we're on the way to getting a good 2D-style effect. I've devised a way to make it fade out like the picture, and Paul's working on getting it wavier.

Trooper Animation Test

My opening shot. If you haven't watched the animatic and don't want any spoilers, maybe give this one a miss ;)

Better quality version available here.

Trooper Updates

Some updates from the film I'm currently working on. Some stills, concept art, the works.

Rob's been doing the 3D modelling for me based on my designs. I'll update with some better pics soon, these are pretty early.

Turnaround:



Turnaround:

My first experiments with the toon shader on Rob's models:

Taxman

Character/prop/set design for a friend's animation.

Life Drawing - Sitting

Trooper Animatic

The updated animatic for my degree film...

Jenny Everywhere

My last-minute submission for Jenny Everywhere Day! Would like to have done more but time was against me so I just did a quick sketch and inked it.

After doing this I wouldn't mind doing some more Jenny Everywhere stuff in the future...

El Family

I got thinking about Elwood and the his siblings and before I knew it I was drawing this. Drawn with a brush pen and grey markers. It's amazing how fast this appeared on the piece of paper in front of me at this time in the morning after a few glasses of wine...

Wouldn't mind turning this into a complete piece in the future. I'm also looking forward to exploring Elwood's two other sisters and his mum in the strip...

Ain't as young as He used to be

I wasn't the only one who felt today's strip was worth colouring so I went to town on it. I'm quite please with the results!