Life Drawings

____The following are from 3 Life Drawing classes I took when I had time in my final year at University. Now I know how important they are for animation and for general drawing skills, I wish I'd made time to do more and to abuse the aspect that they were free!

I quite enjoyed them (which I really wasn't expecting to!) and was quite pleased with the results.


Class One








Class Two








Class Three

Edited Drawings

____The following images you may recognise as the drawings from my previous post, but edited in Photoshop using a Threshold/Stamp effect to capture just the darker features of their faces and make them almost silhouette-like.

I was experimenting with this a while back and decided to put bright, block colour backgrounds behind them, which gave them a Punk-esque feel to them. Since I had several of them, I decided to stick in a quote for each and make them collectively the Seven Sins.

Drawings

____I suddenly had the urge to do some more sketches today, so I am going to do some more at present. I remembered I had a bunch of face sketches, tonal drawings and Photoshop coloured drawings too, so I thought I'd put them on here. They're all on DeviantArt though, but I haven't updated it much recently.

I think I did these over time from 2006-early 2010. All of varying detail/varying precision, but I feel they get better over time. Much bigger versions of each drawing and more can be found here.










Moving onto Photoshop-coloured drawings..
These were done as simple line sketches (some with more tone at first perhaps), and then in Photoshop had colours and tones/highlights applied.



The above was the first one I ever did, and I still believe (annoyingly) is the best one I have done so far. The tones just seem to click straight away and work much easier than the rest.

One Dot Zero "The Disappearing City"

____The third project of my final uni year. This brief was very open in that the only guidance we had was to create a motion piece interpretting "The Disappearing City" in any way you wanted. I ended up reading it as something about Deforestation, although I wish I'd gone with other, more direct, ideas.

I created an advert raising awareness of deforestation, although I wish I'd concentrated more on the message at the start. Once I'd finally come up with an idea on what I could do it about, it was a rush to get the thing finished!



Overall, I actually was pleased with the style of animation most. I spent too long trying to work out how to make a nice pop-up book, which contradictingly needed more time to develop it.

Advertising: HIV Awareness

____Another little project I just uncovered was a self-directed brief from my first year of uni. Quite similar to my 'toast' brief, I made up one that would aim to raise awareness of HIV.

The originals I did at University follow, but I wanted to show the more recent remakes of this project first.



Given more time I would redo the photographs, incorperating the red ribbon into the actual photos themselves which would make them easier to Photoshop the colour. This would also give me the opportunity to experiment with where to put the ribbon, for example, tying the two holding hands together.



These are the originals I came up with in June 2008.

Again, much like picture-taking time in the Gamecity project, my friends were not amused!







(excuse my dreadful Photoshopping skills from previous, I am a little more refined these days I hope..)

I originally did the snake/poisonous textures to link to the disease being deadly, and I wanted something visual to show despite the fact saying people were unaware they had it..

*uses brain*

I recently found time to edit these posters. I loved the copyline and the fact that went with it, the imagery and the colour scheme too.. so that just left the Photoshopped imagery. I suddenly remembered how based on a striking but a simple colour palette this is, and then recalled that the HIV ribbon is red..









.. and that it can be the visual that is everyone is "unaware" of.

I admit I got influence from my own work back at college when I did the 'debt' posters in black and white, with the offending item in red!

But never the less, I feel it's a big improvement, and the snake thing probably would have offended people. Why's it on a toilet door? I figured people might need something to read..

If I had thought of this idea originally when taking the photos, I would have tied real ribbons around my photo-victims and then left them red. However, since after graduation everyone has been scattered to the edges of the Earth, I am forced to improvise with Photoshop!

College Work

A blast from the past, a couple of pieces of work that I'm still fond of from college (2005-2007).

One piece of college work I rescued before it disappeared into my wardrobe forever was this..



A simple poster for the Leeds Royal Armouries (doy) but I wanted to remember it as I really like the textured and imperfect paint effect gained from silk-screen printing. I also like the use of a limited colour pallette: less is more.


The below illustration was something I did in a sort of side "art history" / "experimentation" class, if I recall correctly. In this piece I wanted to capture still as well as movement, so drew in detail what remained still, and clearly (or not), the motion objects such as vehicles and people, became mere shapes and blurs.

Older Motion Pieces

____Just a couple of stop-frame pieces from earlier years of University.
The first was done in my first year in a group of 6 people, with 4 days to come up with the idea, film it, and edit it! We had to choose a topic to advertise out of a list of about 10 options. We chose shoes/trainers.




____The second was shot in my second year of uni with just one other person, a genius named Gemma Hurst.. We had to create a motion piece for a radio station, hence, Heart FM. Whiteboard animation.
The music may be blocked in this video as Lovely Day by Bill Withers is apparantly too lovely to share with the world.