Beyonce

Just a quick warm up exercise looking at trying to capture the resemblance of a celebrity without going into extreme caricaturing.

Spinning Geisha

After having a very slow (not my fault, I promise!) start to the year i'm trying to get back into things slowly with the aid of Stephen Silver's wonderful 'Character Design Shuffle' app. I think in future i'll group a couple of these together per post but i'll start with this one as it's my favourite one so far. 

The words in the shuffle were:

Human - White
Female
Geisha
Spinning

Soak it Up

A little, late night cool down sketch before bed. Trying to strip things back a bit and develop a clean, simple technique for more quick character pieces from life.

Life Sketches - Moped Lady

Over the weekend Dan and I drove from London, UK through the whole of France and down through the whole of Spain until we reached my new apartment on the Costa Del Sol. Over the last five days I have seen so many great characters out and about. I'm going to try and use these characters as nice bite sized warm ups to get settled back into the groove of things after moving house (and country!). Here's a very large Spanish woman who was in front of me today on a ti
ny moped, it really was a wonder she kept her balance.

Summit Plummet iPhone Case

Unfortunately, a few weekends ago, after nearly three wonderful years together my beloved iPhone4 was stolen while I was in a bar in London :( Massive sad/frustrating/angry emotions gave way to the realisation that I needed a new phone. Off I went to my first ever trip to the Apple store where i walked out with a shiny new iPhone5 (that I will now be guarding with my life). I'm one of those people that won't take my phone out of the house without a bullet proof case and a perfectly positioned screen protector. Hence, my iPhone4 was in beautifully mint condition after nearly three years *cry*

The long and short of this anecdote was that I decided to illustrate a design that could be printed as my iPhone case. I wanted to make something that makes me smile, as i'll be looking at it a lot - as my phone's always on me. I also wanted to play on the longer, thinner shape of the iPhone5. All this culminated in Summit Plummet. If you have no idea what this is have a read here: https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/parks/blizzard-beach/attractions/summit-plummet/

It's not spot on the reference as I wanted to adapt it for my purpose. It's also a more graphical style than I usually go for but I thought it'd work best :)

Here's some photos on it on my phone!

Merlin and Archimedes

This is an illustration, done as part of my portfolio project, showing Merlin and Archimedes together with their final designs. I've done a lot of development work with these two and I'm glad they seem to be working together. I'd like to think I've finally got these guys down now! Time to move on to the next task! :)

Bowling Couple

These two were part of a painting that, unfortunately, just wasn't working. I got to the point where I felt it was better to just scrap it and start over. I quite liked the characters though, hopefully they'll be developed and seen again.  

Merlin's Hut

Here's some more design work for my portfolio project of a Polynesian re-imagining of The Sword in the Stone. I'm really much more of a character designer but I'm trying to develop my skills in other areas. The bottom image was done a few weeks before the final image (top) I wasn't happy with the relatively flat composition so I went back to doing a few thumbnails with more dynamic camera angles. I moved the hut back into the edge of the jungle to make it more integrated with the environment and also used a bolder technique which I prefer to the original image. Overall I'm much happier with the final piece! 

 Final Image

Thumbnails

Original Image

Merlin Expressions

Some expressions for my redesign of Merlin as a tiki witchdoctor. I loved doing these! For more information have a look at this blog post. 

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone! I hope the Easter Bunny bought you many chocolate eggs :)

Merlin the Witchdoctor

Warning: Barrage of words coming up! Scroll down for arty stuff :)

At the beginning of the year I embarked on a big personal project to work on in between freelance gigs, that in the process will hopefully form my new portfolio in time for CTNX. As part of my 'Audacious Accomplishment', that I'm completing with the guidance of Chris Oatley, I aim to produce a visual development portfolio and redesign an established film in a completely different world. 

After many film nights and reading around, I settled on ‘The Sword in the Stone’. A film I haven’t watched since I was tiny, I revisited it after reading up on my Arthurian tales and thinking ‘hey, old legends and stories would be a great basis for this project!’ I'm referring to the 1963 Disney version. I also watched ‘Excalibur’ but I found it a far more complex explanation of the story, i‘d like to keep things relatively simple (story wise) for this project. I don’t fancy having to tackle all of Merlin’s history! I'm going to set the story on a Polynesian island, Merlin is a witch doctor and the kingdom rules over a tropical island…much different to England. Archimedes will be a more exotic bird and Arthur will be a small tribal boy.

I don’t intend to change the story beyond very small details. I’m no writer; the sword is still a sword and it’s still stuck in a stone. I love the focus on Merlin’s journey with Arthur and his lessons. I think Archimedes is a brilliant character, he is perfect as an owl but I’d find it a fun challenge to redesign him. Merlin, the eccentric witch doctor would be great fun too. I really feel more could be made of Madame Mim, I’d be tempted to make her more of a darker villain character and really add some more drama to her duel with Merlin.

Onto some artwork! I won't post all of my development work here, just final designs. So here's Merlin - the eccentric witchdoctor.