simon

Drawing Day

Today is international drawing day! I'll be posting pictures throughout the day

You can join in or follow here: http://www.drawingday.org


wooo SIMON! I forgot how much fun this guy is to draw.


I decided to challenge myself and draw something I hate(have trouble) drawing, "celebrities and women". I wont say who it is. Feel free to guess.

Lots of Simons

I've been working all day on a "Dash Dashing" run cycle that I hope to finish tomorrow. Taking a break from that I did a whole heap of Simon sketches that I coloured up fast in photoshop


I had to stop working on Simon due to me rethinking the story. I like my concept but I want to deliver it the best way possible and there are a few pieces that don't quite fit and there are a few pieces that are missing.

Anyway, with the 2011 priority shuffle (the dance of the year)Simon is my 'c' project. It needs to be done after everything else

dino character design

Here's my first go at one of the dinosaur designs. I goofed up a bit and gave him too many fingers as he should only have 3. The legs still aren't quite right (they are meant to be bending the other way..I'm not sure when I changed it). The weight and the volume is in where I like it and I like this arm style as it more fits in with the Simon design.

Simon iPad doodles

Like the title says these are a couple of doodles I did on my ipad while travelling or watching tv



A friend of mine, Christien Clegg has entered a toonboom competition to win a copy of toonboom. You may remember that he was responsible for this awesome poster of Simon.


So if you could support him and get him into the top 10 to win his copy of toonboom. I'm sure he would be producing 100 great animations a year and you life will become better because of it.

vote his entry here http://contests.toonboom.com/

The Manly Drawing Challenge!

Yes! the first Manly drawing

The picture was drawn by Air Patsarun. This man is so manly he doesn't just stink of man he is man stink!


WOO second picture! This time by Ben Grimshaw



So manly, he tames sharks and can smoke a cigar while in water. Super Manly!

Bam! two more entries this morning (26/11/2010) and these two are based off the Simon image.

The first one is by Andrew Buckley which is super cool


What's so cool about this is it was an image I've been meaning to draw for Simon, so now I dont have to draw it WOO (haha). I love the 'eye of sauron' eye at the top of the Dinosaur king and I love how the dinosaur drawings I've done are in the pile of dinosaurs that he's standing on.

Now this hilarious drawing is by Marta Tesoro


to quote Marta, "He bludgeons his enemies with a giant piece of meat and uses the blood as ketchup.  The only time he takes a shower is in the tears of the fleet women he has left behind in his wake"

haha! Excellent, that is super manly! I love how he holds up the drumstick in a 'power of greyskull' way haha.

TIME FOR SOME MORE MANLINESS!! (27/11/2010)

This one brought to you from my old friend Robert Lee



to quote Rob "He is riding a space shark on a mission to PUNCH EVERYTHING IN THE FACE!!"

haha I love the idea of someone being hit by this guy, "WHATTHEHELLLWASTHAT!!"
and their lady friend would reply, "I...I don't know...but he was so.....MANLY" *swooooon*


TIME FOR SOME MORE MANLINESS!! (29/11/2010)

A new super manly man by Christien Clegg


How awesome is this! To quote Christien "Imagine if Chuck Norris and Tom Sellick somehow conceived a child. He is standing on the remains of his enemies and he also plays lead guitar in a metal band."

That mullet, the handler bar moustache, the super muscles, the electric guitar and the standing on a pile of bones...dang you cant get more manly than that

and now there's another manly man this time by Daniel Luke


Beer in one hand chainsaw in the other... super manly. The 'king gee' out fit and the mullet also adding some extra manly layers. Love it!

check out Daniels blog as there is a short animation where he has grown from.

I've been enjoying these pictures way too much so I did this quick drawing while I was waiting to see a movie.


I quickly coloured it in photoshop just for fun. I love how in this picture and the other manly picture I've drawn the arms so very wrong, but hey eff it. This is just for fun.


Here's the drawing challenge guide:


1. photoshop or whatever paint the pencil work I've done (you could even just copy and paste the head of simon onto..I dunno a horse to make it more manly)

2. Or just come up with your own super manly drawing, like what Air did.


When you are done, either put it on your blog and write in the comments that you've done it or email me the image at mrmerks AT hotmail.com

City background pencils

Whoa this took ages, fun though. I always loved city drawings in comics like spiderman and films like Akira.


Well now I have to work out how I'm going to colour this. That drawing of everyone standing in a line needs to be composited in and that Simon poster as well.

Speaking of that Simon poster, that drawing challenge hasn't really worked at all haha. 0 entries, no one was man enough to take it on yet (although most people I know are swamped with work at the moment, so that's understandable). I'm going to give it until this coming monday before I call it officially dead.

Simon 'manly' poster

I made a mock film poster for a re-imagined "Simon"


I tried to make it as manly as possible, since that makes me laugh. I probably could have pushed it even more, but I do like the super serious face.

Anyway here's the pencil sketch


I thought I might put this out there, but just for fun, if anyone wants to have a go of re-colouring or even re-imagining this poster of a manly man Simon, I'd love to see what you come up with. You can treat this as stupid or as serious as you want, since it is just for fun.

When you are done, you can either post it on your blog and hit me up with a link on the comments or email me the image at "mrmerks AT hotmail.com"

Looking forward to seeing if this works

waiting for the movie

This is for the first shot of Simon. It will start in present time then go back in time to the dinosaur age.


This is just a crowd shot of people standing in line waiting for a movie. The drawings are blatantly stolen from a talented animator I worked with on 'Pixel Pinkie', Paul Newell.

Throughout the production he did these great caricatures of everyone on the production as well as some really funny comics. Roseline posted a few here


Some of these other people may be dinosaur food.

It was fun to try and draw in his style. It was something of a learning process as I tried to not directly copy but to understand the very clear simple shapes/structure, the rounded/soft line style and trying to add in my own specific personality and character into the drawings to make it feel natural.


This image will most likely be on screen for under a second and will be competing with the background and foreground elements. Heh, that's animation.

Simon's first promo image


Here's a promo image for Simon that will go with my 24hour Robot comic, that I'm supplying last minute to the patient person who is putting it all together (sorry Chris).

It should be a pretty cool comic with everyone who took part in the events work all thrown together.

Interior Simons Home

Ok here's a wip (work in progress) for Simon's home interior. This tree is actually quite big and the humans will be about as big as the pea sized smaller rocks. The tree is also damaged to fit a giant Dinosaur head


I'll update this as I go as well as the exterior shot in the post before this one. I'm actually having fun and remembering that making films is what I love to do (funny how easy it is to forget that)

*Update* 11th November

Ok here's the background in 2 states one where it's not broken and 2 where the dino has ripped open the tree.




I'm still working out ideas in how this film is going to be made and that is is halting me a bit on getting the animatic together

Simon's home WIP

Ok here's my working progress of where Simon lives. The good thing about this background style is I can work straight with my pencils and not need to do inking (might try this for the character animation as well)and I'm working with a small amount of colours so colouring is quite fast



This is only the midground of the scene. There will be 4 more layers. One problem will be erasing out around the trees when I'm compositing. The multiply layers are too hard to work with when compositing especially if I need to do some depth of field effects

Simon

Ok a lot of things have been happening but now this projects back in full swing and it will be my focus this month. The film will be made in parts and will be a narrated tale. I was calling this project "Jurassic foo" the last time but now it is called "Simon"

Here's the main character design of Simon for the first story


The colouring style will be scene specific but I'm going to move away from individual colours and just using minimal colours with attention to lights and darks.

I'm still playing around with the character drawing style, but my goal is to find a cross between Moebius, Tezuka and old mad magazine comics. The sketches at the moment are too restrained so I'm going to have to loosen up my drawing style




Ok this isn't all that much to look at for the moment but hopefully by the end of the week I'll have the whole first short deigned and an animatic completed.

You can view the other pictures by hitting the "simon" label or by clicking here

JurrasicFoo!

So this is another in development short film. This one's part of 3 films I'm planning to do, this is the only one with some production art behind it though. Basically the set of films are going to be about history, or stories about history.

A couple things I'm going to play with in regards to this short is maximum design minimal animation. The colouring style showed here is kinda what I'm going for. It will also be the first film of mine designed in a puppet style. It will also be my first film totally done in Toon Boom Animate Pro.

There's a few other things I'll be learning and trying but best I let this project develop a little more.



Oh yeah, there's going to be lots of dinosaurs so I'm having to learn how to draw reptiles. Kinda fun. I might take a trip to the zoo and do some sketches


In case you're wondering how many more things are still in development. Well there's a short film siting 85% finished on my computer (a collab with Roseline), the Dash Dashing stuff (there's almost a new pic drawn everyday for that series), a few bits and pieces for Porcelain that need to be added to the website and a trip out sequence I need to animate for my friend Eddies film.

So this year there better be at least 2 new films out of me. Hold me to it.