To Kill a Dragon: Don Bluth.

Don Bluth is a famous animator and character designer, best known for working on films such as Secret of NIMH (1982), An American Tail (1986),The Land Before Time (1988), and All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989). He also worked on the video game Dragon's lair.

As a child I really enjoyed the movies that Don Bluth helped to create, the characters he created were always memorable an fun to watch. I really like how through simple poses and 2 sentences, he has fully explained the character above.

I also really like the style of drawing that Don Bluth did; very simple and cartoony figures but with a lot of range for poses and emotion. It is quite close the to the style of drawing that I am doing for my character.

Don Bluth was excelent at producing storyboards and character sheets, I hope to be able to make something like this for my own character.

On Valkyries: Raita Honjo

Raita Honjo Is a character concept artist most notably known for his work on Valkyria Chronicles.

I am personally not a huge fan of the anime style, no doubt because I have seen it so many times and can look bad when done over the top. However I really like Honjo's work in the Valkyria Chronicles games.

I really like the use of watercolours (and how they kept this in the games) as well as the variety of character archetypes on portrayal for each character. The style is quite similar to my own cartoony stlye, though with superior colouring and more realistic proportions.

Location Location Location

I needed a location for The Witch-Doctor.  something that suited his rich upbringing but also demonstrated his evil character.

I began looking into mansions and elegant interiors. My plan was to take a very rich mansion and corrupt it with The Witch-Doctor's evil. I looked into haunted mansions and dark areas. Quite fitting considering it is Halloween!

I then produced some quick sketches of what the mansion would look like, also making a quick floor plan for the room.

  

I first made a very quick and rough sketch, mainly to be used as a general guide.

I went over this guide in a a lot more detail and using a cleaner line. This would be useful as I could colour this in very quickly and easily.

I then added the base colours for each element in the room, the majority of the room is white and clean.

I then produced the final piece. Adding more detail in the colours, lighting, rug details, blood splatters and evil smoke comming from cracks in the room. I think this came out alright and suits The Witch-Doctor very well.

 I also made cleaner versions of my floor plans, giving more details on measurements.

The Illusion of Movement

Here is a flipbook animation that I made for my ANIMATE module.

It is 20 frames long at 12 FPS. I tried to get as many principles of animation as I could, specifically anticipation and easing in and out.

Before I made this I made a small storyboard of the keyframes.

 I wrote small explanations of what was going on for each frame, I was going to use this on it's own but I decided to do something more detailed.

I produced another storyboard featuring all 20 frames. I did this because I wanted to make sure I got all of the movements I wanted in the limited frames I had. I am quite happy with this animation, though I would of preferred to have polished the drawings a bit more.

Seasons Greetings: Alphonse Mucha

I wanted to look into some artists that were working round the time my character is set (WWI and before), as before now I have only looked at contemporary artists and would like to see some more historic art. While looking into artists, my Brother suggested I look into the art of Mucha.

Mucha was an Czech Art Nouveau artist who worked during the late 1800's and early 1900's. He produced a lot of posters and designs, mainly featuring women. One of his most famous pieces of work is a poster featuring four women representing the four seasons (shown above).

I really like the style that Mucha draws; it is realistic but at the same, stylised, using large outlines and swirling patterns for hair and plants. I feel that the style shares similarities with classic fantasy, with the women pictured    reminding me of elves form Lord of The Rings.

The large outlines and flat colours remind me of my own character designs, albeit on a much lesser extent, I would love to be able to produce some character designs in this style but I am not skilled enough to even imitate it. 

The adventures of PHOTO BEAR!

For the last two weeks we have had photography inductions to get us used to the SLR cameras the college has. For this induction we had to bring a 'treasured item' to take pictures of, I chose the teddy bear I have had since I was 6 (Ted!).

In the Induction we learnt all about shutter speeds, aperture sizes, white balance, lighting and depth of field. Once we were taught about these technical terms on a camera we were told to take pictures of our items, here are the six favorite ones I took!

Here I used a wide aperture to get a small depth if field. I also used the cameras focus points to keep Ted in focus. Totoro looms in the background, waiting...always waiting.

Here I used a strong studio light on the left side of Ted to create some strong shadows on him.

I used a wide aperture and the camera's built in monochrome picture style to take this black and white photo. Ted is all alone. ;_;

I used a wide aperture to focus on the leaf in front of Ted, making him out of focus in the background.

I used a Narrow aperture here to get a lot of the foliage around Ted in focus. I also used a white balance suited for the cloudy weather outdoors.

Here I used a very slow shutter speed and shone a small blue LED all around Ted, the effect is a ghostly neon blur which looks really good!

I learnt quite a lot in these inductions, no doubt I will be utilizing these techniques for future projects.