Final Dash Dashing promo piece

Well here's the last image I did for my application to tell and give some feeling on who the characters are. Originally I was going to do that with a character line up but I always feel they don't really sell your work


Still Rush bugs me. That is not a good drawing of her. Her face isn't pretty at all, her neck feels too long and overall it lacks charm. Ah well, at least everyone else looks great and the overall style I'm really happy with.

Down here is the character lineup made from all those earlier drawings. I'm pretty happy how well they all go together. They actually feel like friends which is nice.


This was included in the application of course. I like how the non costumed characters contrast to their superhero personas.

This weekend Roseline and I are participating in the 24hour comic challenge and it should be a lot of fun. you should be able to follow how that goes right here

http://24hcdperth.wordpress.com/ 

I'm looking forward to add to my comic tags over on there on the right

Tank Macho character design


So here's the last character design of Tank Macho. Tank is loosely based off Guld Goa Bowman from Macross Plus. I always loved the idea of an alien living side by side without it ever being questioned.Tank and Bowman share the same skin and hair colour but motivation wise they are completely different. As Tank has no real motivation.

Tank is the strongest member of the group, the superman, but he really has no interest in being a superhero and would prefer just to bum around. He kind of reminds me a little of Mondo from generation x. His beach clothes are loosely based off Kazuma from Yakuza 3 and his hair curl is adapted from an early drawing that Christien (check his blog here)did of him


So you can see the development process from what it was to what it is. I have much love for Christien's drawings

Well that is the last main character. I might compose them all into a shot now

Rush Lovable design


Here's Rush Loveable. A really difficult character to lock down. It's so easy to be lazy when designing girl characters and just doing stereotypical things. I've done something I didnt want to do and made Rush's super suit pink. Originally it was more green but it didnt really suit who Rush is. The more I tried other colours the more it didnt feel right so for now it is pink but it mayyyyy change again. The other design which might be a bit controversial is she is going to have short hair. There's 2 reasons for this, 1 is that her ability is to change costumes and take on their powers so I figure she'd be wearing a lot of wigs and 2 I wanted her to come across as European. It's not just the short hair but she'll wear a lot of scarfs, hats, sunglasses.... ok basically she's a lazy cliche of european women, so much so I based her on Jean Seberg in Breathless. haha but she was a great character, a very strong women (I swear everyone designing a female character has referenced breathless...so lazy).

The things I'm not entirely happy with are the super suit's colours, her mouth style and that beach costume pose could have been better. The things I like are the red knees and cheeks, the eyes are feeling right (they have to be right otherwise she'll look like a boy), the beach costume, the hair colour (seriously hair colour is so hard to get right) and hair style.

Tank Macho is next!

Black Mantis character design

Here is the design for Black Mantis in "beach chillin" clothes and "super suit" (guess which is which)


When I'm designing I'm thinking about how the character is going to move, how I can use them in shots (how their silhouette works for example), their personality, little extras in their costumes that could be used for story points, ease to draw (cutting back detail where possible), their turn arounds (Mantis' head piece thing is a challenge), strength and weight and how they are going to match or complement the other characters. There's a few other things but those are some of the main ones.

This vampire one I did shows how I designed for a 48hr animation comp. It was designed that he would float (cuts animation down incredibly), simple to draw and that the model was loose (meaning it was ok to draw it quite differently depending on the shot). His face especially was designed for large expressions


With Dash Dashing a unique focus of my design is with the characters eyes. Each character will have their own eye style. This may more suit my own animation style which is pretty close (extreme close even) to camera that I'm putting a little more detail into the face. I am however trying to make sure that the characters aren't just detailed heads on stock bodies. Doing that life drawing has helped a lot to understand how the muscles and body parts work.


So yeah 2 more main character drawings to go. Oh one last tip when doing character design, flip your drawing constantly. You do this to combat your drawing lean and you'll end up with a more solid/grounded character

Dash and Mantis final


So here is the final image. I decided to add in a spaceship to add a little bit more to the composition. It's both a little over worked and a little under worked in a lot of areas. This problem usually turns up when you don't know exactly what you are wanting to do with the image.

Dash and Mantis WIP 2

Ok so I'm still working away at this picture and as you can see I'm working with a background. There was obviously no real layout done so things might still need to move around. Once I'm a little bit happier with the layout I'll go into the detail more.

I had a reference location to work from. This is an inlet at Peacful bay. I wanted to make it a little bit more cartoony, this still feels a little too realistic. I might add in a few more things like what Dash is sitting on. What I really like about this, is it isn't a cliché beach scene. I think it helps to actually go to different places and explore rather than relying on reference books and google image search.

My Workstation

Ok you may need to click to enlarge to see all the details but this is where I work these days since my contract on Dogstar series 2 has finished up.



I always found looking at other peoples working areas was interesting so that's why I photo-merged mine together. I wrote some notes over it to give a little more insight.

It's very clean and organised at the moment. Hopefully over the next few weeks it will look well used.

Dash without costume


So here's my first go at Dash Dashing not in costume. I've got to do the other 3 characters as well. This is Dash's beach wear since they begin the story in Peaceful bay.

I'll have to design some other outfits (since they wont always be on the beach) plus their super suits have stages, an ultimate mode and a space mode.

The hardest thing though is I have to give them all real names as well.... naming characters is always a pain

Dash and Mantis WIP

Just been working pretty hard so I haven't really got up to much. I decided to go back to these guys and get this "Dash Dashing" ball rolling again.


Just a sketch so far but I'll start adding to it throughout the week. I've been looking in to adding more 3dness to my drawings, trying to add a bit more volume and shape. I want to make the characters feel like they're solid and have real weight. Hmmm this sketch was based off a loose drawing I did in my notepad at work. The notepad sketch has a bit more character... I might have to rework this drawing a bit more and loosen it up a bit.

Well an old co-collaborator friend of mine, Mr Dean 'Mendoza' Swanton, has finally just started a blog. He even threw up some great Dash Dashing pics he did. You can check his blog right here

bed hair

I woke up the other day with mad scientist bed hair. I took a photo of myself to send to Roseline but it was all blurry. So I thought I'd do another painting experiment.


I don't feel I captured the expression that well but this is my first go at doing a digital portrait and for my first go I'm pretty happy with it. Nice and crazy.

Roseline and I had a 'discussion' about what I wrote in my last post and I thought I should expand on that. If you're working on a style based show then you got to keep within the design guidelines, I think when you start out you should test the fences a bit and push the design but once you're in the thick of production you shouldn't make it hard on the people above you. It will be a waste of everyone's time if you have to redo stuff. It can be hard and not that clear to work out what those boundaries are. I usually try to work out where the show is drawing inspiration from and have some of those artbooks around as a guide but even that isn't always a great idea. At the end of the day you're part of the team and you don't want to be a stubborn jerk, as that wont inspire anything great and will just cause friction.  Best to be positive and always put in that little bit extra effort.

Ok enough of that stuff. I'm trying to get my motivation up to start something a little bigger. I still need to produce one more film by the end of the year.

Fancy Adventure EPIC BATTLE!!!

Well here's a fan picture of my friends comic "The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon"


The idea behind the picture is they are fighting each other for page time in Jamie's comic.

A quick background on Jamie was we worked together on the series "Pixel Pinkie" as character animators. Both of us really tried to push as much character as we could into our flash puppets. Pushing the models expressions and poses to the maximum of what we were allowed to do (mind you there was a hidden folder bigger than the entire series of what we weren't allowed to do). We did this partly to crack each other up but mostly because we believed that this was important to do for the show.

Working in animation is really hard with how technical and conservative it has become. It's less about the purpose, reason and feeling behind why something/someone moves and more doing it as simple and as cleanly as possible to make sure nothing is noticeable/that stands out, basically keeping it as normal and techincal as possible. I could write a whole book on my problems with this stuff but I'd like to keep working in animation.

Oh I shouldn't undersell the need to try and crack up the person next to you, a lot of people frown on this as it being an ego thing or not being professional but character animation is performance, you're performing for reactions. From my experience if you make people laugh it improves to moral of the entire studio and makes people actually like working in animation and try to make you laugh with their shots. I'm sure this leads to producing something greater.

Anyway it was a great experience working with Jamie, and my character animation imporved a hell of a lot with the feedback and ideas we'd throw back and forth at each other. You should check out Jamie's comic, he's been updating it for ages now. Every Monday and Friday without fail for the last 2(?) years. Great characters and quite the interesting story.

check the comic here

More life drawings

So This has been sitting unfinished on my computer for a couple of weeks. It was my favourite drawing I did so maybe I put to much pressure on myself.

I decided to paint this one different by painting in shades of black and white first before adding on the colours. This was an interesting idea but it seemed more work than it needed to be. Once I finally finished the girl I went crazy on the background. This was fun as I was trying to channel what I remember of Jack Kirby style space scenes.


It's not perfect but I like some of the ideas. Such as the colour pallet reminds me of 'Marvin the Martian' or those other Chuck Jones space shorts. Anyway I feel I'm getting better with this stuff but more practice is needed.

A couple of my friends have been doing the same and digitally painting up their life drawings. check Marcus' stuff here and Andrew's stuff here

Well that was the last image I planned to paint so here are the original drawings


So last Wednesday we had another Wanimate lifedrawing class and here are the sketches from that.


Now these next two sketches were done using sketchbook pro on my iPad.


This is really hard to do since you draw with your finger. I found with the second image that if I kept throwing on layers and just painting rough instead of trying to make it look like something, I got better results. It was a fun experiment.

Well I've got another life drawing class tomorrow after work. This constant drawing feels good

WAMBAM 2010

the 48 hour animation comp has begun. I've got a pretty awesome team made up of people I'm working with on dogstar series 2. I'll update as we progress, for now here's some character designs

New Life drawings

Here's a few more of my results from the life drawing classes I've been doing. We had a pretty good model but man I was struggling to draw. I just couldn't do anything right. I can tell when this happens as the face on the drawing gets darker and darker as I scribble more and more into it. These are a few of the salvageable pics


Now here's that idea I was playing with on the last set of life drawings of putting a character on the model. So for this model I chose Roseline's Rush Loveable. I have 5 more pics done that I'm going to clean up like this.

I'll post the pics in this post once I finish them. I only spent 30minutes doing that above one so maybe I'll do a new one every day.

26/June/2010 update

not too happy with this one. Hopefully the next ones turn out better

30/June/2010 update


I'm a little bit happier with this pic. the colours looked great on my cintiq but then they kinda lost their charm on my monitor

Update 3/7/07

I did this one a little quicker since I had to go out. I liked the hair on this one. My original sketch she looked like an old women. It's still got a bit of that. Well one more drawing to go. I'll also post up the original sketches so you can see what thy looked like

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.

Soldiers

So here are some sketches for an unnamed webcomic that I'm planning to do.


I wont tell you the story behind it all yet, but i think it is pretty funny.

Rose and Tim Jams

Just some old page drawing jams done with Roseline. These are fun to do


Here's some old characters drawn by Roseline


Some cat and rabbit drawings by me


So at the moment I'm still posting sketches. Maybe I should maybe put something more polished up so it looks like I can finish things :P