Mr Gough

Mr Gough in Winterland

This post will be about a painting I'm working on.

So far I have this scribble


So this above drawing was based on an earlier sketch that I unearthed while I've been moving house


I had been doing a few sketches in photoshop trying to plan out the image but nothing really felt that great. Like the Mr Gough world that exists in my head so it was great to come across this image.

Here are some of the earlier photoshop sketches. You'll notice the fishing monster was the one thing I was happy with.




The second one I was almost ok with. Having a Mr Gough floating in ice. I did like the tree zombies I created but I couldn't work them into the new image.

Oh I should give a little backstory. Mr Gough was a small little comic that was born in my sketch book. I really liked it and I ended up making an animated short with him. The short won quite a few awards so he's stayed a favourite character of mine. He usually makes cameos in my other films as well.


I added in the little orange monster from the short on top of the round trees. No Monkeybears though

So I tweaked and changed that original drawing in photoshop but it's going to become a painting so this is how I'm transferring the image onto the canvas.

After printing the image I attached one of the sides to the canvas turned the image over and covered the back with black charcoal


I then folded over the paper over the canvas



Then using a blunt pencil I traced over the lines



This hurts my hand as I have to draw without leaning on the page. When I finish (I haven't yet) tracing all the lines I can fold back the paper and see the image has been transferred. Here's what it looks like so far


I'll spray that with some fixative to hold the charcoal and then it will be time to begin the under painting (at least I think that's what I'm doing)

Ok so here's the finished transfer


Which is pretty close to the original drawing. The paper buckled a bit and moved some of the drawing around but nothing too drastic.

So now I'm beginning to tone the image. Because it's winter I'm using blue tone for my under paint. Actually I'm not sure if this is really "under painting" much like when a client asks if we could "storyboard" the idea when he really means brainstorm the idea or calling a corporate video a documentary (my favourite term misuse).


I'm trying to work really light and that means using more turps than oil paint. I noticed that some of the transfered areas aren't dark enough for me to see details (such as the tree behind the rock on the right) and I'll need to let the oils dry a bit and maybe pencil the lines a bit darker.

Will oils you have to build up the paint a bit otherwise you'll have the white of the canvas showing through and that looks crappy. This canvas I'm using is a bit iffy as well. Some areas were hard and it was repelling the paint a bit.

Anyway still a heap of stuff to do. I'm also trying to jump between this, some writing and some flash work. This tree I've been slowly working on for a week or so now (I get distracted too easily these days)


Here's the final painting. It took awhile to get teh colours I wanted and there's probably a few colour's I'd like to photoshop change haha but that's the fun of non digtal art. The rawness of it all


Break achieved!

Woo Roseline and I finally had time to take a break.... actually no we didn't have time and now I'm working 3 times as hard to catch up... freelancing sucks.

Anywho I'm jumping the gun a bit. Before I left I hammered out this animation for loopdeloop in about 3 hours



Basically I had finished packing and I had a spare few hours and the deadline was that night so I came up with this short. The theme was 'spooky' and this is something that really bugs me(scares the crap out of me) when in a horror/suspense film a character walks backwards down a dark corridor.

"I KNOW SOMETHING IS GOING TO JUMP OUT JUST DO IT ALL READY!!"

I hand drew all the animation frames and background in separate layers on my scribble pad (10x15cm white pad). The wall was a google image search wall. I scanned and cleaned the drawings and set them up in photoshop and then brought them into toonboom animate. I also for the first time imported the images and vectorised them and I was very surprised by how clean toonboom handled that. Once I timed out the animation I added some after effects gloss to punch a little more mood into the animation. I then hit my 'Existence' sound folder for the sound track.

Next months loopdeloop theme is 'Condoms' to tie in with World Aids Day on December 1st. I'm wondering what to do with that one haha

The day after I made this loop Roseline and I were on a boat headed to the WA holiday island Rottnest. Named after these guys who inhabit the island which they thought to be rats ('Ratnest')



These bros aren't rats though. They are quokkas and they are so gentle and innocent. I've never met such a mellow wild animal before. They were very cool

Also what was cool was how beautiful the beaches were.



Our beaches in WA are really something special. It's only when I go away and visit say Hobart with it's dirt grey sand and ice waters or St Kilda in Melbourne with it's polluted smelly waters and beaches that I realise how lucky we are over here... although I should point out the first day we were there all the beaches were locked down due to a shark attack and we had shark hunting helicopters flying all over the island.. SO THERE'S THAT...haha

What was great was we hired bikes (as there are very few cars on the island) and rode around the whole island. I haven't been on a bike in years and boyyy it took some getting used to and awww man there were some hurt muscles that haven't been used in years. It was good to feel that pain again since the last few years I've been trapped trying to make this animation thing work. Roseline has done a better job at keeping her fitness up (she killed me on the bikes) and I only seem to get a good walk in every now and then. A lot of my friends do the gym thing but that isn't for me. I definitely have to work and keep up my fitness though. I've been having the worst kind of trouble with my back over the last few years and honestly once your back goes animation is the hardest thing in the world.

Well enough old man Merks gripes. While I was over there I found some time to get some drawings in. I posted a bunch of these on my twitter (facebook and g+ as well) via my xperia play smart phone which was a new fun experience. My younger self loves all this new technology. I'd love to travel back and show the super mario world game that awed me as a kid that I can now play on my portable phone I carry in my pocket. I did at one stage flirt with being a purist, antitech, prefer it all original person but seriously this stuff is amazing. Take a smart phone, how many minds, how much history, evolution and genius is behind the technology it floors me.

Enough with the words here's some of the pictures I drew



I wanted to do more studies of the environment but I was enjoying just being there. Roseline has done a whole bunch of great ones and a lot of the time I just loved watching her work


This was her late at night doing a water colour pass on a sketch she had done.

I wanted to loosen up my drawing arm and draw some full scenes. I only drew 2 pictures but I'm pretty pleased with them.



I drew that last mountain scene picture at the dome cafe on the last day we were there. 2 cups of coffee (you can see some coffee stains at the bottom) and a whole bunch of time to spend on it. I thought of it as a platform game and just started from the bottom left and worked up.

and one last scribble featuring the Bacon Bros


Well the rest was great and as soon as we returned home we had work phone calls and emails immediately to take care of. It's good to be a busy freelancer I guess but dang that Quokka life looks appealing.

Holiday sketches

Ahhhhhh sweet holidays nothing much to do other than just sit around drawing.

Here's a sketch I did today. It was a bit of fun even though the pens I had kept running out. It started at that guy looking over his shoulder which I feel is a bit stilted but I started loosening up and the drawings came a little easier. Godzillas in the background in love with a new city to smash. I'm sure he gets pretty excited everytime he comes to the surface and goes, "OMG they rebuilt tokyo again woooooo!!!!!"




Speaking of Godzilla, I came up with this idea on my break that I might make into a little internet series or something, not sure yet.



Roseline is a big fan of "So you think you can Dance" and she likes to watch it when we have dinner that or 'Survivor' or 'Mad Men' (mabye those series will come into it aswell to make Rose really like it). So I ended up watching it and found myself really enjoying it.

My pitch is "Monsters from all around the globe compete to become the number 1 dancer". It is pretty much like the show with all the monsters entering with their own dance style (examples Gamera: hiphop, Godzilla: Contemporary, Mothra: Ballet) and are coregraphed and their performances judged. Apart from this idea making me laugh, it would be a fun way to studying different dance movements and transfering that into quite awkard characters. Anyway it will have major problems with various copyrights (maybe ok if its just a free parody) and that it will require a lot of work, still it may be my next project on the horizion.

Finally there's this picture that I want to do more with. I want to try and make a few of these 'Mr Gough' pictures as he is a really fun character and I really love his world.




Well that is it for today. I hope to do a few more pictures this week since I have the time and I'd like to put more effort into my blog next year. HEAPS AND HEAPS OF STUFF, more cartoons, more comics and more illustrations.

Bird apartments

Today is a public holiday so since I was home from work I made this.


I drew the picture on a writing pad Rose bought me. I then took a photo from my back window. Did a little photoshop compositing, coloured in a few things and I ended up with this.

Waffle Winnings



I won some coloured pencils from that 'Waffle' film. I haven't used coloured pencils for ages and forgot how much fun they are. I might do a few more drawings before going to bed.



A crappy 'Special agent Dale Cooper' and my Robot character. Might get something to eat and try another picture.

Here's my final picture of 'Mr Gough' riding a whale. Part of my 'Great Whale Race' experiment.

It was heaps of fun using the coloured pencils. My good friend Regan Gallagher is a genius with this medium. I might have to spend some time looking over his shoulder to learn his techniques.

Sorry for the lack of new posts lately but both Rose and I have had our heads down this week working on 'Porcelain'. For the last 3-4 weeks we've been working on the same sequence! That's the wonderful world of animation :P

Mr Gough Comic

(cover final ~ paint by Roseline Lau)



(cover sketch)



(page 1 sketch)


(pages 2,3)


(pages 4,5)


As I mentioned before, Roseline and I are working on a new comic for you to buy and hold in your grubby little hands. The comic will be about 48 pages in length. You can read a little about Roseline's story and see some of her pages here. (I've seen her roughs for her complete story and it is very, very awesome.)

As you can see my comic will be mostly double page spreads filled with crazy little details. I've tried to put a lot of effort into designing the creatures, props, scenes and the landscapes to take you into a 'Mr Gough' world.

Some cool NEW stuff!

Well I guess I should post up some new stuff. Posting just these old animations looks like I’m not doing anything productive just living in the past (man!).

First up Roseline and I have just finished (pending client approval) a mobile phone worker recruitment animation that is intended (I believe) for the web. The storyboards and character design were done by my ex-animation lecturer and fellow ‘Dogstar’ employee Todd Millias. For a short web animation it was a little bit more complicated than we were expecting. Especially the opening shot that is a track down from the city into a dungeon where there are a whole heap of these ‘bean’ characters working. I think Todd threw that in to give me a challenge haha.


(camera moves down from city to bean worker word)

Roseline and I split the work up so that I would do the backgrounds, effects and the animation in the dungeon scenes and she would do all the character animation in the cloud 9 scenes. Working for the web it’s really important to reuse as much as possible and after spending a year working on ‘Dogstar’ it was hard to change our wasteful ways of creating millions of new symbols. Rose did some really beautiful character animation of the main ‘bean’. He looked like a character out of those old 30-40s informational cartoons with his wide happy smile. My ‘beans’ looked more like my ‘Mr Gough’ stuff with their dopy spaced out eyes.


(my dopy beans)

(Roseline's beans in Cloud 9)

Speaking of ‘Mr Gough’, Roseline and I attended another comic ‘draw-off’ with fellow comic artists that took part in that 24hr challenge that happened last year. It was supposed to also be another 24hr comic but I wanted to do something a bit more planned and executed than ‘Kinetic’ and Roseline also wanted to bail early for her own reasons. So we both did about 3-4hrs which was a little weak on our part I hope the other guys did better (sorry yo!). Anyway Rose (check here) and I are doing two separate comics that we are going to combine into one AWESOME!!! large comic. My comic will be about ‘Mr Gough’ it will loosely follow where the short animation finishes off and it will all be done in full page and double page spreads. With this comic I’m putting a lot of effort into the design aspect and trying to make a ‘Mr Gough’ world. I’m taking some of my influence from what I remember ‘Super Mario World’ being like and also a bit of ‘Dr Seuss’ surrealness. There is one spread that Roseline and I co-wrote where a couple of characters (a fisherman and a frenchman) do a little song and Roseline is going to guest draw this as she will draw the singing poses very funny.


(first page)

Another comic that I’m sure you thought I have forgotten about ‘Vicious and Faust’. Since the webcomicnation comics have now caught up to where I left it here on the blog, there will be new issue put up every Saturday over the next few weeks (I’ll probably stick to only doing 13 episodes per series). I’ve already pencilled out 2 eps and it’s now a bit more character comedy like the first season. I’ve been reading John K’s blog a lot and he did a post a little while back about how artists seem to always be doing the same expressions that they should try and look for more interesting faces. ‘Vicious and Faust’ has always been my comic to experiment and try new things so I’m giving this a go and I’m pulling funny faces in my mirror and trying to sketch them.


(issue 17)

(issue 18)

And finally ‘Porcelain’. Roseline and I are pushing to get this film out of the way. We’ve got a whole heap of stuff we’d like to move on with but we can’t touch that until this film is done. That isn’t to say we are going to rush out whatever, we’ve spent ages on this film and it has to be worth it. Hopefully by next week we’ll begin putting all our work into flash and I’ll start posting some more progress on this film.


(layout for scene on bridge)

Well there’s an update on what I’m up to. I hope you enjoyed all this new stuff. Tomorrow I’m going to put up a very old stop motion film Rob and I put together so stay tuned!


Tim

Kicking back in 98

So my cpu has a busted motherboard and I need a new one. So for the moment I'm back using my old cpu. It feels so clunky!

Anyway I found this picture on it and I kinda like it. Oh there still will be a new film on Tuesday. It's a good one!




lata
Tim

Check out:

  • The anime "Eureka 7". It has some really beautiful character design and wonderful facial expressions and animation. Done by studio Bones who produced the Cowboy Bebop movie.
  • Music "The Roots: Game Theory". A very cool album. The song that suprised me was "Atonement" where they sampled "You and whose Army" by Radiohead. very cool
  • The movie "The Fountain". It was very cool. Although I must admit I really wanted to see more of the spanish soldier story and the future story had some cheesy moments. All up though it was a great trip.

EDIT: This doesn't deserve a new post so I'll drop it in here. For "Porcelain" progress check here on Roseline's blog. She's been posting up some of the cleanups. I'll start posting images when we start putting stuff into Flash.