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2011-11-04T03:33:00.000-07:00

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2011-11-03T11:21:00.001-07:00

fighting bird demon

2011-11-02T13:17:00.001-07:00

multiple arms inspired by asura's wrath

inluenza map

2011-11-02T05:43:00.000-07:00

Kaiba (Madhouse, 2008) - One of several shows that serve to epitomise that "deep" (note quotation marks there) brand of anime that presumably gets produced when some experienced director with a few successful projects under his belt gets the urge to pitch a batshit crazy plot/art style and the execs just roll with it. Kaiba is difficult to explain, but I like it because a) it's set in space in an imaginatively altered future b) it seems to contain plot elements that in a vague way talk about loss, love and transience c) its art style is chubby and characterful, kind of like Wind Waker but a lot more organic. I'd like it a lot more if it was a bit more coherent, but it's relaxing to watch so you can just sort of zone out and concentrate on the overall mood rather than worrying about the incomprehensible story.
Final Fantasy IX (Square, 2000) - When I was little I got bought the art book for FFIX by my mum (this was well before I ever even played the game), and I read and re-read the shit out of it. Even with only a cursory knowledge of the plot I found the characters and environments really interesting. I think it was my first defining example of the setup that a lot of shows use, that sort of magic-plus-steampunk vibe that means you can almost define it as both fantasy and science fiction simultaneously. It also has a nice balance between "cute" and "serious" design (the cute stuff isn't like panderingly cute and the serious stuff doesn't take itself so seriously that it's easy to parody). It's Final Fantasy and comes with all the setbacks of the series, but it's without a doubt my favourite one.
Dave Cooper - Dave Cooper crossed over this strange line in my mind a while ago where before I thought he was just one of those weird pervert cartoonists like Joe Matt or Dan Clowes (I'm still not massively keen on Pip & Norton, it seems like a comic to market vinyl toys), and then suddenly I read a few issues of Weasel and saw his more recent paintings and I realised he's actually an amazing artist. He takes this thing he's visually and psychologically fascinated with - the physical mass and volume of female anatomy - and has this amazing way of just building it up, sculpting his flabby pygmalion on every page with his tiny pen- or brush-strokes. It also feels like he's actually developed his approach to it, too - the paintings in his more recent book Bent often don't even look like women any more, lovingly caricatured beyond recognition as jelly-like, transluscent, almost foetal creatures. There's something primordial about it. I could look at them for hours.
Iain M. Banks - I'd read a few science fiction short stories in comics before but my first initiation in literary sci-fi was back in my foundation year when I spontaneously decided I wanted to read more. I read Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, a huge space opera spanning several vast human empires and thousands of years, which for a long time was pretty much my favourite book. This sort of segued into me reading the books of some other famous SF authors - Peter F. Hamilton (overrated, trashy, prone to oversexual self-insert main characters) and Iain M. Banks. Banks has an incredible sense of scope and some fucking crazy ideas (for me the main thrill of good SF) and a penchant for weird, sudden, downer endings. Quite often characters will be faced with insurmountable odds - and then die. Sometimes it feels a little lazy, but there's a concession to realism in Banks' work that makes you feel like you're reading a historical account rather than a fiction sometimes. My favourite book so far is probably Matter.
Stanley Kubrick - particularly talking about A Clockwork Orange here. I love Kubrick's overall cinematography, his approach to the source text, his choice of music, pretty much everything. I know fans of the book are often irked by how much it's overshadowed by its filmic sibling in terms of a place in popular culture, but I think it's everything an adaption should be: an interesting and personal interpretation of a story. However, I share Burgess' frustration at the final chapter being cut from the film - I think it might have confused viewers a little, but it might have mitigated some of the fallout from the film's controversy as it sort of retroactively colours everything else that happens in the plot.
Harvey Kurtzman - I haven't got a lot to say about Kurtzman other than that he was one of those cartoonists alive during a very interesting cultural and political period, and I think he's something of an unsung master of the medium. I really like that his capabilities included both the gritty, first-hand depictions of World War II and the crazy, spare-nobody parodies of MAD magazine, and the fact that he has this expressive, brushy style that spans both. Probably one of the best illustrators I'm aware of.
Alan Moore - Literary genius of our time. It's kind of a shame he seems to find it so easy to put across that "angry old man" image - if he eased back a little (and maybe one or two fewer magic lesbians per story) more people would like him. I think maybe twenty or thirty years after he dies people are going to realise how amazing he was.
Satoshi Kon - About two decades ago, if you were into japanese animated films, chances are you were probably either a fan of Hayao Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon, or both. Kon's first film that I remember people in the west becoming aware of was Perfect Blue, which I think grabbed people because the box described it as "Walt Disney does Alfred Hitchcock", which thrilled people because the west had never really gotten the hang of "adult" animated films. He later directed several other films and a television series, Paranoia Agent, which I think is my favourite out of all of them. Kon's stories really go for the notion of hyper-reality, of impossible things happening in a mundane, japanese world (often "bleeding in" from fiction or fantasy until the two become indivisible), and Paranoia Agent is a good example of this. Lots of crazy stuff in the directing, lots of fourth wall breaking, difficult to "get", but by the end of the series (in a bizarre climax that divides the fanbase a bit) you'll look back and have an overall "feel" of the kind of things Kon was trying to say. I find a lot of Kon's stuff pretty emotional, which is now compounded by the fact that he actually died of pancreatic cancer last year, his latest movie unfinished. You can read a letter he wrote shortly beforehand here.
David Mazzucchelli - I'm putting Mazzucchelli here on the merit of just two books that I've read - his adaptation of City of Glass by Paul Auster, and his most recent standalone graphic novel, Asterios Polyp. The former is another great interpretation of an interesting story, and given the whole theme of isomorphisms and translations in Auster's work it seems curiously apt to try and make a comic out of it. The latter, however, is where Mazzucchelli really shines - the book is very obviously a labour of love, and if at the start you have any dislike for the curious approach to design or the rather luminous, screen-printed look, you'll have an appreciation for it by the end. It's one of those books that should be held up to demonstrate what a graphic novel should really aspire to be - it has a complex story, competently told, which exploits both the capability of language and abstract imagery to communicate with the reader in a unique way that marks Mazzucchelli out as a great author/artist.
FLCL (Gainax, 2000) - As ubiquitous it may be, I'm surprised this anime isn't better known by more people. It's not as careful as Kaiba and not nearly as soulful as Kon, it's just loud, abrasive, beautiful fun, featuring a young, sexually neurotic male, a series of aggressive and often incomprehensible girls, horrifying giant mecha brought to earth through a portal to another galaxy, guitars (lots of guitars) and a yellow vespa. Describing it any more is pretty futile. Great design/animation, fun plot, around five half-hour episodes. What the fuck are you doing?! Google it right now!
Shintaro Kago - Kago would be just another guro manga artist if his comics weren't so darn amazing. The thumbnail shown above, from his story Abstraction, starts off as a banal six-panel romance story, when suddenly our point of view shifts and begins to turn around the comic, and we realise it's actually a sort of 3D shelf that we're looking at, with different panels revealed on each sides. We continue to orbit, our point-of-view revealing absurd shapes and creatures made up of different panels overlapping which begin tearing themselves out of their confining panels and running amok. Kago's work is disturbing and imaginative in the extreme (and there are far more shocking examples than this one). Again, google him if you don't know him.
Chris Ware - Pretty much the first comic book artist I properly fell in love with. Jimmy Corrigan is still one of the best books I've ever read and the Acme Novelty Library continues to spin a complex webs of misery among his characters. Especially interesting is his approach to time and generations, demonstrating a disdain for normal storytelling constraints and often leaving the reader with a bewildering feeling of almost zen-like holism. If you've ever read Slaughterhouse Five, Chris Ware's books seem very much the kind of thing Tralfamadorians would like to read; rather than being a succession of moments within a time-frame, each story is its own "giga-moment" to be understood as a whole though patient study.
Bone (Jeff Smith, 1991-2004) - Bone, again, strikes that great balance between cutesyness and seriousness, starring these amorphic 1940s blob characters cavorting around in a world likenable to something like Lord of the Rings. It's telling this epic story so it has direction (it's not just a gag comic) but at the same time it's got Fone Bone and his cousins to show that it's not to be taken too seriously. This to-and-fro is something I really like in fiction - light-heartedness really increases the punch of serious stuff, and vice versa. Plus, Jeff Smith can really, y'know, draw. Which (not to get on a high horse or anything) is something that's maybe a little rarer these days than it should be.

Good job if you read the whole thing. A little self-indulgent, I know. Original template here. You should do it too!

noche de brujas

2011-10-31T15:03:00.000-07:00

beware the chupacabras tonight

league of league of league of league of legends

2011-10-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

So now that my interest in playing SC2 beyond something like a gold level has waned like the tide (although recently piqued by the new announced units/features for the upcoming Heart of the Swarm expansion) the game I have been mostly playing is League of Legends, or LoL for short (a weird acronym at first, but you get used to it). I just wanted to mention it because it's developed quite a following in several online communities I frequent.

The distinctive MOBA-style map used in LoL (get used to the acronyms, gentlemen)

I actually don't think LoL is much to write home about gameplay-wise. Starcraft I can pretty honestly describe to non-videogamey friends as "fast-paced chess" because at competitive levels it's as much about using your brain as your hands, and there's a lot of theory. It has a rich metagame which has evolved over a long time, and I think this separates it from a lot of other games.

LoL also has an established metagame, but the incredibly long game length (20 minutes is considered a short game) means that for a lot of the time it's just "push-button-recieve-pleasure" gameplay as you sit there "farming" (an actual game term) vast swathes of enemy minions, who explode with a satisfying chink of coins as they die. I have less respect for this kind of game than I do for, say Starcraft, or something more immediately cerebral like Portal - it's a style of play that's knowingly addictive and the reason World of Warcraft still imprisons millions daily.

But it is fun, so I play it with friends most days. It's also free, and a quick google will let you download it should you be the proud owner of a windows-running computer. What I have more of a gripe with is the artwork of the game; literally every single character is a second-rate knockoff of an established fantasy/scifi icon (or if you're unfamiliar with the originals, they're just painfully uninspiring and often revoltingly coloured). The worst possible one, though (which almost makes me want to hit up YouThoughtWeWouldntNotice.com) is this demon called Cho'Gath:

I mean, this is probably only a personal thing, but when I was twelve I used to really like Spawn, and this thing just looks like the fucking Violator:

And look at this artwork of one of Cho'Gath's alt costumes! Have you no shame, Riot Games designers?!

That's bullshit. Anyway, to end this tirade, this character is actually really fun to play and has a neat mechanic where he can literally eat other player characters and grows bigger and bigger every time he does so. He also has a bunch of spike-related abilities, none of which are reflected in his design at all. So lazy! I wanted to try out some digital painting (partially inspired by a recent acquaintance who is very good at that sort of thing) so I thought I'd do some more fanart:

the "shiny" flesh is pretty simple to render and it doesn't have too many colours/layers, but one must start somewhere. Also the composition is a bit rubbish. Oh well at least i did something fuck you.

qwatz qwatz qwatz

2011-10-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

Also this video has been breaking my heart recently:

nsfw, obviously

it's like... marjane satrapi meets junji ito and the two are fused in a mass of writhing horrific faces communicating profound fundamental truths about the human spirit

2011-10-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

A panel from a four-page comic I submitted to the Jonathan Cape Graphic Short Story competition. It was really fun to just churn out a story in a week, it felt like I was back at uni (in a good way, short creative projects kick ass). I should try and do this kind of thing more, yadda yadda yadda

i dont want to live on this planet anymore

2011-10-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

billions and billions of fuck

2011-09-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

some stuff for a music video I hastily dipped my artistic proboscis in today.

odolwa: masked jungle warrior

2011-09-11T11:51:00.000-07:00

Inspired by my friend's recent Majora's Mask fanart and my girlfriend playing the game for the first time. Might do some more, the bosses in this game are pretty and I feel like doing more fanart.

I used to give Majora's Mask a lot of props over its elder, more mainstream sibling Ocarina of Time (that name sounds more stupid every time I read it), but I think after a while I started worrying that my rabid appreciation for the notably "edgier" MM was probably just a contrary sort of nostalgia. However! I'm watching Blanca play it now and it's been just long enough that a lot of the character design (and the design of the story in general) is actually really appealing to me.

Most of the character design in OoT is simple and recogniseable (princess looks like a princess, bad guy looks like a bad guy, Link looks like... Link), but the incidental characters you meet just around in towns and stuff could sometimes be pretty funny (or creepy) in a way that makes them stick out a little bit. Majora's is a famously sidequest-heavy game, and what's more it doesn't have the standard fairy tale Princess/Hero/Bad Guy triad (which the other games go so far as to fucking canonise), which essentially removes all of the boring characters (except Link, who is well-known to be a characterless player vehicle). They take some of these weird little side characters who would usually stand around forever in town X continuously repeating the same line (then they go and design a lot of new ones) and then give them this amazing groundhog day cycle to play around in.

I can't really stress how good an idea this is - by simply adding a restriction to the timespan of the game, by putting it in parentheses, this actually gives the characters such a vast amount of life, it allows them to move and change and fight and trade and get married and do a lot of the things people actually do. It doesn't matter that the whole story is only three days long - it rids the game of that weirdest of tropes that almost all videogames by necessity fall prey to - the paradox of infinite time, something that I feel is possibly one of the most well established and subtlest ways to kill peoples' immersion.

But yeah, the character design is also fucking amazing, the lack of pressure in this obviously being a B team title completely freed up whatever artists worked on it and they just went crazy and it's just beautiful to watch. And it's funny how much the gamecube incarnation rips it off, especially since Wind Waker pretty much holds the sole status of "artsy game" among the Zelda brethren.

some amazing videogame sprites from blazblue

2011-07-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

These are from Blazblue, a current-gen game available on PS3 and XBOX. I think you can buy it for your computer, too. Anyway, its main claim to fame is that its an HD descendant of 2d sprite-based fighters, most notably Street Fighter 3 and Guilty Gear (it's known as a "spiritual successor" to the latter).

These days the majority of fighting games (and big-budget videogames in general) tend to be rendered in 3D (makes sense to make use of the entirety of processing power and your disposal) which may label games such as Blazblue as something of a novelty. However, it's not like Braid or Super Meat Boy where the use of 2D mercifully limits the amount of art and tech that go into its creation, this is a big game designed by a big Japanese studio. And I mean, literally, BIG. Look at the sprites below - full sized they probably take up a sizeable portion of your computer screen (for contrast, have a look at the resolution on this sprite from the last popular 2d fighter, SF3 - pretty astonishing when you compare the two). The whole idea with sprite art is to be completely economic with the resolution you have, you never want to squander it needlessly. Blazblue takes the (huge) resolutions of modern TVs and monitors and uses every pixel it can to give you a crisp image of a character that might have come straight from your favourite anime (which is, of course, what this kind of game strives to emulate).

The ordinary character sprites and animations are already luscious enough, and you can search youtube for some very pretty fight videos with all the characters. However, being the stickler for details that I'd like to think I am, I was looking at some sprite sheets of the characters and noticed how beautiful the "electrified" frames are - these are frames of the character that will flash up intermittently for no more than a few fps when the character is struck by an attack that's designated "electric" in nature. The skeletons are knowingly cartoony and often include details that you maybe wouldn't notice in the ordinary pace of play - take a look at the weird little idol inside Colin's top hat, or the unhappy fish apparently secreted in Taokaka's claw-sleeves. Besides that, the poses are nice and the general design of them (outline, form, colour) I find really appealing. See what you think.

einar

2011-07-22T03:45:00.000-07:00

espen

2011-07-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

character from a story i'm trying to write. trying to get comfortable with linework again, lazily I either make it really fat and vague or I just resort to the pixel-wide thing. also trying a bit harder with character design. lazy lazy lazy.

cartoons

2011-07-06T06:39:00.000-07:00

I even do fanart

2011-06-22T15:48:00.001-07:00

I never do fanart but here's some sketches for a couple of drawings of the main characters of Panty & Stocking, a bizzarely drawn and incredibly lewd anime I happen to like.

The basic premise of the show is that there are these superhero angel girls whose undergarments can turn into divine weapons, which they use to fight legions of ghosts. If you're not too embarrassed to sit to the end of the above scene there's actually some satisfying animation, too.

it got kinda famous because it uses this weird style that reminds people of famous "western" animations by people like Craig McCracken (Powerpuff Girls, that sorta thing), the kind of "apple core" character design that John K bitches about (where most of the lines in the character are concave, making them look flat and angular). It's crazy and irreverent and it looks as though it was a lot of fun to make, and although nine shots out of ten it's a complete visual clusterfuck it's still strangely watchable.

Also apologies to jonathan for nicking pictures from his post about this from last year because I am too lazy to take my own caps

it's the chase that I love

2011-06-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

a billion miles from here

2011-05-24T16:31:00.000-07:00

urg

2011-05-15T16:24:00.000-07:00

poor little blog, I haven't abandoned you....
actually seriously I'm working on something pretty cool right now, something comic-related, something I wrote (I think I just gave it away huh) which will be up soon. but not on this blog. hrm.

2011-05-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

"In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

OH SHI-

2011-05-04T06:08:00.000-07:00

hanging golem

2011-04-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

kidda visuals animation tests

2011-03-31T06:26:00.000-07:00

currently working on some live visuals for kidda, along with the rest of colour club. have some animation tests all thrown together!

house

2011-03-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

one of those evenings where i just gotta post something before i go to bed or else i'll feel lazy... this is some art from a little point and click thing I was working on a while back...

ragnarok

2011-03-24T04:18:00.000-07:00

rocket rodeo

2011-03-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

unused design thingy for some visuals. more soon!

a bloo bloo bloo

2011-03-05T17:14:00.000-08:00

ugh so relaxing

the guy in the middle is called "mecha monk"

̴ı̴̴̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡*̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡͡͡ ̲▫̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ̲̲͡▫̲̲͡͡ ̲|̡̡̡ ̡ ̴̡ı̴̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡̡.

hex titan

2011-03-05T16:01:00.000-08:00

streeessssfull week, drew this in a complete hurry to relax

also if any of you want to play me at starcraft 2 I pretty much have it up and running now (computer needs fixing so it sometimes crashes). such an enormously good game! the more I play of it the more highly i think of it as an overall achievement for blizzard (which is a hard thing for me to say being a valve fanboy)

lovely crazy inbetweens

2011-03-02T03:03:00.000-08:00

courtesy Bob Clampett!

watch the whole thing here, his stuff is strange and amazing.

a wandering giant

2011-02-28T15:15:00.000-08:00

part of something i've been working on, trying to get some ideas for visuals for a musician's live show. not sure if they'll go for it but I quite like it nonetheless.

FROG PUNCH

2011-02-25T11:44:00.000-08:00

i love jojo's bizarre adventure so much

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggg

2011-02-20T18:16:00.000-08:00

"...o sieh, wie klar das Weltall schimmert!
Es ist ein Glanz um alles her;
Du treibst mit mir auf kaltem Meer..."

Design-A-Character Shape Challenge January 2011

2011-02-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

Here's my contribution for last month's Design-A-Character challenge - basically a page on deviantart that posts little challenges for you to stretch your character design muscles. Mine are admittedly puny right now but I'm hittin' the gym so to speak!

In case ya haven't put 2 'n' 2 together yet, January's challenge was to take a series of five shapes (download them from the link above) and doodle a character fitting the outline of each one. The rules aren't strict, there aren't any prizes - it's just a little thingy to get your imagination a-flowin'.

also I have been listening to so much Groucho Marx lately it's untrue. If you read up a little on his life and maybe watch a few marx brothers movies it should give you the context to be able to get into just listening to the guy talk. he's like a verbal machinegun, even though a lot of his stuff is scripted he was obviously a super witty guy.

six more

2011-02-15T17:40:00.001-08:00

Yasmin the Light - Infamous liutenant to the Dark Lord. A deadly shot with her Iron Bow.
Ultracroc - A terrible creature that haunts the eastern swamps. Even the most experienced hunters avoid it if they can.
Rocket Vampire - An ancient, if stupid, custom for those without a carriage to carry dead relatives to the graveyard involved paying a priest to strap a rocket to its back instead. A terrifying method of corpse-delivery.
Dangerous Pig - Woe to those who cross this pig.
Abstract Devil - Called through by mathematicians from Calabi-Yau space, these mischevious demons enjoy crafting frustratingly logical puzzles to perplex the living.
Distraught Sailor - This man suffered a breakdown upon coming to the realisation that after a lifetime of swashbuckling he had made little impression on the world at large. He eases his constant sadness by beating others to death with a damp oar.

---

Some more of the same. Trying for a different colour pallette and attempting to get the lines a bit cleaner than they were.

dragons

2011-02-11T08:40:00.000-08:00

from a current job.

seventeen

2011-02-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

cat king - Not actually a monarch of cats, but a charismatic thief wearing a stolen crown. Chief among the rebels fighting the Lord of Nails.
cat shaman - An evil cat with supernatural powers bestowed by a magical hat. Only concerned with the accumulation of power for selfish gain.
? ? ? - A living stone found at an archeological dig, capable of flight. Does not speak. Origin speculated to be some ancient megalithic structure of unknown design and purpose.
cat - Possibly the only cat in the world known to have evaded the Lord of Nails' control. However, this was probably by accident, as there is absolutely nothing special about this cat.
cat mummy - A weak-minded cat for whom the Nail Lord's control meant utter loss of will. Zombie-like in behaviour.
rook knight - A mighty rook warrior who protects the sky-palace of the Crow Captains. Wields a small but finely crafted pick-axe to deadly effect.
chlorophyll ghost - Strange, globular creatures observed in forested areas. Known to move about in unpredictable patterns.
steampunk zebedee - Steam-powered mechanical soldiers built by kingdoms past who were keen to avoid the complications of sentient militia. Now more often found repurposed in the posession of private individuals looking for a fighter without pity.
astronomer trismegistus - High scientist-in-residence at the sky-palace. Works for the crows but has his own agenda. Particularly interested in stars and planets.
violent hare - A common thug in the wastelands beyond civilisation. Unintelligent but revels in the joy of combat - a fine unarmed fighter.
hot pot hellion - A diabolic heat-based demon probably created by a mad scientist or a chef. more trouble than it looks.
smokewing tarragon - An extremely rare creature which flies on wings of pure smoke from two flaming jets on its back. Scars the sky with flames as it flies.
blue-furred immortal - A creature which can take infinite amounts of punishment and always survive. It is skewered on a magic sword which binds it to do the swordsman's bidding. Its blood will heal any wound.
zombie hooligan - The dead body of a mischevious child animated by a fell moon. The people it kills get up and kill! It wields a cursed cleaver.
lord of nails - Legendary lord of darkness and current ruler of all of cat-kind. Has an unusually high blood iron content causing iron nails to sprout from his body like hairs. He hammers these through his subjects to exert his psychic domination.
dreaming businessman - A wandering dreamer from the world of man. his unconscious mind has manifested physically and drags him to some unknown destination.
bad astronaut - a doomed space-traveller from another dimension. he seems to have been in some kind of accident.

...

Moving sprites coming soon! I started this in frustration at not being able to attend the GGJ 2011 due to other work but I'm thinking of making a personal project out of it. I've pretty much been doing one a day so far, and I think they get better as I go along.

new stuff coming (finally)

2011-02-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

I bet you all thought i died or gave up art or something i havent posted in ages

2011-01-15T09:42:00.000-08:00

since christmas I've been working on a couple of jobs, things seem to be going okay. Dungeons & Drawings guest week is almost over, which means next Saturday i'll be back to the old routine. Blanca and I agreed that, due to the guest week occupying a full seven days (technically giving us two weeks to work on the next drawing) we'd both do short animations - I'm going to finish up that walk cycle I animated a few weeks ago of the Rust Monster. You can see the way I'm going about it in the drawing above - I've worked it out structurally and now I'm trying to add the detail on top.

MTV GONZO IDENTS

2011-01-11T03:37:00.001-08:00

Some fun idents commissioned by MTV Rocks to be broadcast on their relaunch of GONZO. Produced by COLOUR CLUB members over the course of about a month.

DUNGEONS & DRAWINGS GUEST WEEK

2011-01-05T01:47:00.001-08:00

OK
for the week beginning Monday 10th January...
Dungeons & Drawings will be uploading one image per day!
each day's image will be drawn by a different guest contributor.

be sure to check in every day to see more original interpretations of D&D monsters!

BIG RED MACHINE

2010-12-30T16:58:00.000-08:00

ON SECOND THOUGHTS I PREFER IT LIKE THIS

is it possible that a latent inability to feel completely at ease with the world around you will eventually result in the attaining of some sort of happiness, more hard-earned but somehow more worthwhile than the average person? i should probably do more of this kind of stuff, but better.

Action Comics #234: Superman fights a skyscraper (and presumably wins)

2010-12-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

Cover art by Curt Swan

bodies in flight

2010-12-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

Marsha Hiltibrand - Portland, Oregon, 1972.

Clarence Sims - New York, New York, 1952.

Looking for some reference photos the other day, my dad lent me this book entitled "Violence In Our Time", which is just a sort of odd history of violence in the 20th Century told in black-and-white photographs.

Unknown - Brunswick, Germany, 1964.

A whole chapter is dedicated to suicides, but it's dealt with with surprising sensitivity. None of the people you can see photographed here are actually dead; each photograph has the (most likely unintentional) serendipity of capturing one of the split-second moments where the subject is in flight towards the ground.

Calunda Mora - Sao Paolo, Brazil, 1968.

John Wards - New York, New York, 1949.

If any of these were accidental I don't think I'd like looking at them, but all of them are apparently suicides.

Joseph Slavin - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1962.

I thought about it and I don't think this is disrespectful in any way, or not enough to bother me about posting these pictures. Hopefully you guys will find them interesting rather than disgusting.

Merle Bibbs - Indianapolis, Indiana, 1952.

A NICE PAGE FROM DAN CLOWES' WILSON

2010-12-26T03:51:00.000-08:00

i read this a while ago and considered reviewing it on my LJ or something but I didn't.

dan clowes - wilson

ECCCHSSSMASS

2010-12-24T14:27:00.000-08:00

HATERS MOST ASSUREDLY GONNA HATE

HOPE YOU ARE ALL HAVING FUN

waddle

2010-12-23T13:32:00.000-08:00

WADDLAN
METAL EATAN

RUST MONSTER GENERAL

sam quantum, page 3

2010-12-10T03:38:00.000-08:00

E SPACE

2010-12-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

FLESH VERSUS MACHINE
MORE COMIC STUFF COMING

page 2

2010-12-01T11:48:00.000-08:00

page 1

2010-11-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

it smacks too much of penny arcade but i'm hoping it will get more original as i go along...

hnggg part 2

2010-11-28T16:03:00.000-08:00

I've been fascinated by this sequence in the simpsons for the last couple of days:

it's when homer has a heart attack in front of mister burns. there's something about heart attacks I find significant, if i ever properly had a panic attack in the past i would convince myself my heart had stopped. I still worry that with my rampant stress levels it'll be a likely way for me to go. my grandad had a few of them!

You should look at this if you want to see the real breadth of artistic talent that went into the simpsons over the last twenty years. the whole scene is a crescendo of homer's physical tension, and is accompanied by this cute little cutaway of his heart in the bottom right.

the poses start out pretty powerful to begin with (crazier than you'd get nowadays at least) but then something just clicks, and the final spasm is this fast, complex little dance that involves some amazing extremes and lots of silly smears.

"You know that feeling you get where a thousand knives of fire are stabbing you in the heart? I got that right... now..."

sorry about the low quality and occasionally visible "play" buttons, the scene's so fast it can't really be helped, and I'm sure as hell not shelling out for simpsons dvds.

early simpsons has this weird aura for me, the whole yellow skin thing always seemed strangely significant although I could never work out why or how.

i used to play this game in an arcade as a kid, it's pretty bizarre.

sorry about the recent frequency of posts, just trying to get stuff out of my system in a roundabout way.

2010-11-28T15:09:00.000-08:00

agape is probably my favourite word for love in most languages. although ai gets points for being kind of shoutable.

i did this when i should have been doing dungeons and drawings

2010-11-28T11:11:00.000-08:00

HNGGG

2010-11-25T16:27:00.000-08:00

RIGHT GONNA POST MORE ILLUSTRATION

EVEN IF I JUST DRAW THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER ITS BETTER THAN NOT DRAWING

sleep

2010-11-25T14:53:00.000-08:00

Happy 250th post

2010-11-20T06:26:00.000-08:00

here, have a screenshot from my Minecraft map. Blanca and I finally bought it the other day and it's really incredible. Notch gets a lot of hate but it's a really well put-together videogame.

The game randomly generates the world, so none of the geography you can see above is designed, but generated by the programming. The little glowing thing in the bottom right is my fort, which has lots of lit torches on it so I can see it from a distance. In-game and up close it looks like this:

So you get an idea of the scale of the game. Here's a screenshot of me looking north from that hill:

Here you can see the first of a trail of torches I laid across the land to help me orient myself (it's really easy to get lost). You can see the whole trail on the map, it's that little row of bright dots going diagonally up and to the left from my fort.

The levels are finite but in theory they're infinite because they generate as you run. Your computer will slow down the bigger it gets, but the game is pretty simple so even with a map of this size I mine has no trouble whatsoever. I've seen some truly ridiculously-sized ones.

Finally, here's the night-time view from the top of my tower (those big gray blocks are clouds, by the way):

Play this music and you've got a pretty good indication of what it feels like to play:

You can buy the game here, it's pretty cheap and farily simple to install on mac or PC.

Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights

2010-11-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

A promo for Frankie Boyle's new show that I animated with Joe Bichard at Treat Studios. Video coming soon. Kind of Kirby's Epic Yarn vibe.

GOTTA DIG

2010-11-15T07:47:00.000-08:00

never played boulder dash in dos box on your fast-but-unreliable PC? you don't know SHIT about videogames.

I used to play this on my aunt's computer (we always had macs in my mum's house, which everone knows means no videogaming). to clarify - the little guy in the center is you, and the cyan things are boulders, around which you must dash. The flashing black and white square in the top left is an enemy! It chases and kills you but only if you let it out.

Also played Commander Keen for the first time in ages, but the graphics aren't as pretty as I remember so I won't post any pictures.

more garfield???

2010-11-13T03:56:00.000-08:00

A repressed young man, unable to contain his own psychic id, accidentally unleashes a torrent of his own unconscious mind across the world, which manifests as millions of warped copies of his own head. these flood the city and rapidly diversify and evolve, devouring and otherwise laying waste to everything in their path.

armed with nothing more than a baseaball bat and the limited psychic power of his own superego (which, through progression of the game, grows in magnitude), he ventures into the city to protect the world from his own deepest desires.

a platformer where you just run and jump and baseball bat things to death, no collecting just killing.

a prize for the guy who can redesign the main guy so he doesn't look so much like a scott pilgrim character, i think right now it's beyond me.

Cave Story aka Doukutsu Monogatari

2010-11-03T17:03:00.001-07:00

Cave Story is a weird little game you can download for your computer (and, as of last year, your Wii). It looks a little like Super Mario World at a first glance - little guy in a red cap, pretty pixelly world graphics - and the comparison isn't entirely superficial.

It has a little more than a straightforward platformer-save-the-princess sort of vibe, verging off into JRPG territory a bit in terms of the story (but don't let that put you off at all). The tale itself is a compelling one and it's told well, with interestingly-implemented dialogue choices and multiple endings.

The bizarre thing is, the whole game was supposedly artworked, coded and published by one guy - a japanese fella known cryptically (and kind of boringly) as Pixel. I don't want to touch on the whole games-as-art debate but this game is so lovingly rendered, so well paced and perfectly laid-out in general, it kind of goes beyond "art" or whatever - it isn't just pretty pixels. everything happens in the right way, the difficulty curve is well-graded, the story is told so you know exactly the right amount at the right time - the last videogame I played that hit this feeling so effortlessly was Ico, which is a game I try not to harp on about but feel deserves every haughty compliment thrown at it. Cave Story has all of Ico's stoic charm but with a much more vibrant world - the batshit craziness of some of the game's concepts just blows me away, moreso even than something like Earthbound.

The overwhelming feeling after playing Cave Story is one of admiration of its makers. It's an excellent show of craftsmanship, and will give any aspiring artist a thrill of jealousy at never being able to make something quite this good. But besides that, it's terribly fun and isn't too long, so go download and play it right now.

learning actionscript

2010-11-01T10:47:00.000-07:00

im a slow learner

my new website and why it kicks ass

2010-10-30T01:28:00.000-07:00

I re-did my website yesterday. There's not a lot of new work (I put up some of my favourite Dungeons and Drawings illustrations but not much else) but I cleaned up a lot of stuff and added a few features that I've been wanting to add.

Firstly, the homepage is now inhabited by a set of floating polygons which have some interesting effects when you mouse over them. I'm thinking of changing/adding to these over time so you can see when there's been an update (and maybe even check back to see if they've changed).

Secondly, I got really bored with having a beige background, but I didn't want to commit to any one other colour. So now there's lots of different coloured backgrounds! Each time you reload a page there's a bit of html code that picks a random background colour from a selection of about 10. If you don't like the colour of the page you're on, no sweat, just refresh.

Finally (and I doubt anybody noticed this) but I've changed the way the illustration page is laid out. with the site i set out trying to make an html site that imitates the best features of the popular "indexhibit" format - a frame on the left with a simple list of text links that makes images appear on the right. Before, I did this (pretty stupidly) by making each picture its own, templated html document, thinking that nobody would notice that a whole new page was being loaded in every time a link was clicked. The problem with this is that every time I wanted to update, I would have to update the links in every html page for every image. That would take a long time!

for anybody that knows how to code this is probably horribly messy (I just grab things off the internet and paste them into the code at what I think is the correct place - my knowledge doesn't go any further than that). I basically made one page with all the links on it (the images_con.html file in this case) and put an iframe in the table cell on the right. in dreamweaver you can give the iframe a name (here it's "imageiframe") and then if you reference that name in a link (put it in the "target" box) then clicking on that link will load the new document into the iframe. So when you click the "aboleth" link, the "aboleth.png" image is loaded into that iframe.

It's a really stupidly easy way of loading in new images without loading a whole new html page each time, and I'm really surprised this isn't talked about more widely on the internet. Maybe I just go to the wrong sites or something. I kept trying to do it with normal "frames" (like those websites that have a bar across the top or across the left hand side that acts as a separate window to the main body of the site) but they're super limited and fiddly. you could potentially do so much with iframes. if you've got an html site, learn how to use 'em!

PS i saw the Guardians of Ga'hoole the other day and I really enjoyed it. more kids movies should be this dark! It's like redwall meets lord of the rings.

a comic about left 4 dead

2010-10-28T17:51:00.000-07:00

i guess don't bother reading it if you're not familiar with the game. if i come up with some other less exclusive ideas for jokes then i might draw comics about them, too.

a secret chord

2010-10-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

i'm only posting these because I'm sick of that roman comic being the top post on my blog. these are some doodles from my sketchbook from the last few months, ranging from work-related minutiae (top) tiredness-addled attempts at drawing material for a zine (middle) and dungeons-and-dragons related tat (bottom).

not that i use this blog to actually note down what's going on in my life, but things are okay right now. i'm trying to get a part-time job as an assistant librarian nearby and have a couple of paid artsy jobs either on the go or about to start. I have some animations that are going to be on tv soon for MTV2's new season of gonzo (I'll post links soon) and am working with a couple of people on some personal projects (mostly comic-related stuff). My landlady is reasonably nice but can be rather blunt about things which I find sort of intimidating. I am having a lot of dreams with curiously significant themes (I like the idea that this means something but obviously it doesn't). I find the early evening darkness of the winter pretty intimidating.

i'll post something less half-assed soon.

THE EMPEROR IS DEAD

2010-10-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

work from a sort of commission that might be taking place. just messing around with pencils and photoshop trying to find a style that's comfortable to work in.

Paul Robertson Sprites

2010-10-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd post these after being pointed in their direction by Ben Tobitt - a series of amazing animated .gifs that Paul Robertson, the artistic brains behind the visuals of the recent Scott Pilgrim videogame, has made.

The animations he's contributed to, like Kings of Power 4 Billion %, are a little full-on but completely insane (in a way involving lots of entrails and copious use of strobing flashes) and anybody who was into videogames in the 80s/90s will feel a sympathetic pang watching them.

YOUNG PEOPLE, COMPUTERS, AND THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

2010-10-19T05:41:00.000-07:00

a prophecy in animation, gracing your teevee screens soon.

smeeaaarrrsss

2010-10-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

stole this from John K but I saw this and some of the smears are almost Dan Backslide-y in their ridiculousness. And I love ridiculous smears!

This isn't a smear but I really like the genuine look of terror on Foghorn's face.

If you're looking at this and thinking "what the fuck?!", check out the video here. It's a quick and funny way of animating fast movement, and it's really well thought out in terms of mass.

THERE GOES GOD

2010-10-12T06:36:00.000-07:00

fucking finally is all i can say
colours not final but i actually like them a lot

tube rant

2010-10-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

illustration for Catch 22, an online magazine run for free by graduates. it's for a rant article about how perfectly howwible riding the tube to work can be.

githyanki B/W

2010-10-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

It actually looks pretty cool upside down, try it out.

garfield

2010-09-28T17:12:00.000-07:00

flash is so much nicer to sketch in than photoshop for some reason. everything is a nice friendly simple vector.

finished quite a long stint at nickelodeon today, paid too. I went to the trocadero to celebrate and practiced a bit with Q. i can never get past the fourth fucking stage in that game, but it's fun to play and pleasantly animated.

edit: dungeons and drawings is hugely late this week, sorry. mostly as a result of that nickelodeon work and my not being happy with any of my sketches.

god guitar hero

2010-09-25T16:34:00.001-07:00

MOOD BOARD

CONCEPTUAL ART

all this conceptual stuff is by the excellent illustrator Matt Dicks

STORY BOARD

THIS JUST IN: MTV2 EXPLOITS YOUNG ANIMATORS

inks

2010-09-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

where am i going with this

progress

2010-09-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

SLOW GOING

I think most people I admire tend to publish their first recognised work of graphic literature at roughly the age of 24. if this is the case (roughly) then I think I have maybe just enough time to get a lot better, write something good and draw it before i get that old.i might even finish this comic at the rate I'm going.

aboleth work

2010-09-19T04:39:00.000-07:00

This weeks Dungeons & Drawings piece didn't turn out quite as well as the last two, I think. The sketches I did had a lot more character, which I think the computery stuff flattened. I know if I'd tried to finish one of them by hand I probably would have siezed up and made it look crap, though. I like the finished photoshop linework (the top image above) but I feel like I could have made more of an effort with the background - something to show the scale, some sort of Aboleth architecture or something.

Also, when I sketch I tend to make a few double page spreads with just two colours of marker and black - in this case, light green and pinkish orange - I think next week I might make an image with limited colour, the last few weeks have been chromatically kinda sqamped.

MUSO SOUP 3

2010-09-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

a shot I was rendering today. I think Jonathan modelled the geometry of the buildings, I put Damian's linework over them in a sort of scrappy way. I don't think they'll get used since it probably looks a little too 3D for Damian's tastes but I liked the colours I got.

I PUNCH PLANETS

2010-09-08T00:29:00.000-07:00

some stuff I've been faffing about with for a comic I want to write, about a superhero who protects the earth from evil abstract colossi.

finding a good work process is hard

2010-09-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

I feel like I'm getting ever so slightly closer to something I could reasonably call a work process. I "inked" the linework to this in the same way I did the Roc, where I physically use the bezier curve tool to trace round each and every line (effectively doubling or tripling the workload). It's a completely anal, unartistic way of working but the result is a clean but expressive line that thickens and tapers in all the places I want it to (as opposed to using something like illustrator brushes, which give you a little less control). I'd love to be able to draw like this with a brush (and I feel I'm getting a little better at controlling it by hand) but right now this rather soulless, computery way of working is what I enjoy.

At some point I'm actually going to try and draw a background for one of these creatures instead of just having them float lazily in the middle of the page, I promise!

MUSO SOUP WORK

2010-09-02T06:48:00.000-07:00

some stills from some of the modelling/texturing/animation/rendering/compositing work I'm currently doing. It's supposed to be finished mid-september (which is looking unlikely) but now that some bits are actually being taken through to completion it's pretty enjoyable. The only problem is that Damian (the director, my old animation tutor) has been working on it for something like two years now, and so many people have worked on it in so many different ways that it's really difficult to streamline the production.

Rendering/comping in 3d is really fun, though - there's a lot of freedom in getting things to look how you want.

sketchbook stuff

2010-08-19T04:57:00.000-07:00

I feel like I don't have much finished stuff to post at the moment (besides D&D stuff) so here's some of the stuff I've been mindlessly drawing lately.

I find I draw tons of this stuff when I'm at work on something else. I get really easily bored of something if I concentrate on it for any protracted period of time so I find scribbling like this helps a lot, as well as visualising a lot of ideas I have before they lose their conceptual "zing".

A lot of is it in imitation of stuff I see (and like) on other people's blogs, so if you see something that looks like someone else's work it's not exactly plagiarism, just me practicing stuff. Some of it is drawn from life, too - I feel like I still haven't bridged that elusive gap between life drawing and functional drawing yet but I feel like I'm starting to see how one can feed into the other (a year or so ago I didn't get how this could work at all, so I guess that's progress).

The last two pages of the guy in the ultraman-esque costume are from a comic book I'm currently working on.

new stuff

2010-08-09T09:11:00.000-07:00

a tidbit from a job I'm working on at the moment with the excellently excellent Matt Knotts. Supposedly paid, too! Hallelujah!

3ds max artefact

2010-08-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

they are pretty!

minecraft: this game was made for me

2010-08-03T01:20:00.000-07:00

so, minecraft is an indie game that just got big enough to receive a shout-out on the tf2 blog. if you've never seen it before it actually looks something like this:

Wow, you might say. That looks like a game that maybe came out a decade ago. Well, the point is it's developed independently, meaning that no big company like Capcom or Ubisoft or (shiver) Activision has gotten their hands on it yet. It's actually developed by one guy, a fella called Notch, who based it on some open-source code from another, simpler game called Infiniminer. As such, it's like another big indie hit, Dwarf Fortress (another favourite of mine), in that it accepts certain graphical limitations (if you think this game looks primitive you should see Dwarf Fortress, it's like playing the matrix) in lieu of being able to develop the gameplay to a highly detailed - and, importantly, fun - level.

The gist of the singleplayer game is literally this - you're a little guy with a green shirt running around a gigantic world made out of cubes, with tons of botanical, animal and geographical features. The game generates the world as you run, so it's technically infinite (see the massive map at the bottom), although obviously with bigger map sizes you're going to have some memory issues. Your little guy can do two things - dig and build. You can dig, or remove blocks, to get resources, and then you can spend those resources in inventive ways to make new blocks or more complex things like stairs, minecarts, boats, windows. digging takes a while, but in this way you can build pretty much whatever you want if you're patient.

The above map (which you can generate using an external program) shows the cave systems that lurk beneath the surface of the map, generated purely for you to explore. But beware - on the surface, you might find such harmless animals as pigs, cows and chicken wandering around for you farm or hunt - but underneath, in the darkness, there's the constant danger of a monster appearing. walking skeletons, gelatinous blobs and giant spiders are merely three of the dangers that await, and the dreaded creeper...

... which trots around before running headlong at you and exploding (all the while making this unnerving hissing sound). Doesn't sounds scary? Just try playing it. The game works on a day/night system too, and monsters such as these spawn in darkness, whether underground or at night. This makes the nights a terrifying ordeal of barricading yourself in your little self-styled fortress and battling off mobs of skeletons trying to destroy everything you've built.

It's the kind of thing you have to be pretty obsessive to indulge in - the fact that you need to do so much digging to even be able to build the simplest of structures makes it something you have to invest quite a lot of time in to get anything out of. But. Imagine it in multiplayer (a soon-to-be-added component of the game). I'm serious, think of what that would mean. Team bases being hastily constructed to protect the clan from the nightly armies of monsters. Helping out smaller fortresses to gain a better foothold in the area or ransacking and annexing their bases and making undeground tunnels to connect them all into one super-base. What about spurning the surface altogether and making a morlockian underground society, battle-hardened and wary of overworld miners unwisely digging down too far? What about building an underwater fort, inaccessible to all but the most determined adventurers? What about forsaking forts altogether and roving across the land, raiding forts too small or inexperienced to defend themselves against human opponents?

The game just entered alpha testing and already so much stuff has been fixed or improved. When you hear people talking about the multiplayer being able to potentially host hundreds of people in a single cohesive world, I really start to wonder if this game was just made for me. A lot of other people are wondering the same.

kolyarut pencil

2010-08-01T05:56:00.001-07:00

i'll be posting it a little bit later today. I didn't really work on it much in the week because I was working.

he's supposed to be coming through a planar gateway of some sort, so that doorway thing is supposed to be sort of hanging in the air - I'll probably need to put something behind it. I just liked the way the cracks look in it. also, inspiration much?

kolyarut

2010-07-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

sketch for next week's dungeons & drawings. kolyaruts are cool, you should check them out.

more don moroi

2010-07-26T06:45:00.000-07:00

this is what i was working on the last couple of days.

tomorrow I'm going into a studio in london to help composite some stuff together for a 3d short film. i was going to do some work on it at home in preparation but, unfortunately, the models don't work on my version of 3ds max. so, I thought i'd do some long-planned 3d character animation with this blocky old vampire.

the idea is that I'm going to matchmove this shot with him behind a table in a cafe or a bar or something, do a couple of other shots and then combine it with what i already animated before and make it into a little mock trailer for a documentary about this retired vampire character.

i'm sort of pleased with the fluidity of the animation, although he has these enormous arms which are difficult to animate without having his elbows fly around in circles (IK animation is sort of difficult!). in some of the pose transitions (and I know it's very pose-to-pose, I just wanted to make it kinda basic at first) I had to adjust the elbow rotation frame-by-frame, which is why it looks sort of stop-motion-y. But I like that! It adds to the whole "old man jitters" thing I tried to do.

DUNGEONS AND DRAWINGS

2010-07-25T07:23:00.000-07:00

GO SEE MY NEW BLOG THING
dungeonsanddrawings.blogspot.com

Seriously take bets on how long I'll keep updating it.

Basically this is a project Blanca and I are doing for a bit of fun this summer, or at least as long as possible. The gist is that we both love D&D (see my last post if you're wondering what this is) and we both love (most of) the iconic creatures it's spawned. Who can forget the ferocious owl-bear?! the marvellous mindflayer!??! the frankly stupid-looking one-armed dragon known as the ravid?!?!?

Anyway, we thought it would be fun to draw one each week, updating on Sundays. For the first week Blanca's drawn us a Razorboar, whilst I've seen fit to content myself with the gargantuan Roc. Go on and follow it, why dontcha! You may well learn something.

In other, unrelated news, I've been doing some more 3d character animation. Will post soon!

biiiig birds

2010-07-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

tidbits from a project I'm working on with Exit. trying to get a little more character into the shapes, make it not just a straight drawing of a bird in flight, but not too much like this. the bird's holding a whale, there, incidentally, it's supposed to be really huge.

For those who don't know, D&D stands for Dungeons and Dragons, a sort of really complicated boardgame designed by some guys with neckbeards in the 1970s. For the younger and more, uh, technologically minded of my readers (I guess) it's basically like World of Warcraft without being a videogame. You have your character (your elf, dwarf, centaur, whatever) and you go on an adventure as determined by the "Dungeon Master", one of you who gets the role of a sort of storyteller.

It's a lot of fun - particularly for the more obsessive among us there's a lot of customisation to be had in the design of characters (something I always like in videogames regardless of their genre). But for me (and countless others) the most thrills are to be had in this bad boy right here:

It's a Manual. of Monsters. you can read this shit for hours, I've always found its comprehensive cataloguing of every species of fauna (and flora, believe it or not) you're likely to have the misfortune of fighting to be incredibly engrossing for its sheer imaginative volume and colourful illustrations.

more on this project soon (when I feel like I have more work to scan in and upload - every sketchbook i own but one is currently in an incredibly untidy storage state at home), it's turning out to be really fun so I'll dedicate a whole post to its announcement. Stay tuned, true believers! Excelsior, etc etc.

I got a...

2010-07-13T02:48:00.000-07:00

apparently that's what three years of slovenliness moderated by a constant sense of self-criticism can get you.

without arms or charm of culture

2010-07-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

go forth into a joyless world of swords and rhetoric to bring it joy.

more colour club

2010-07-05T02:47:00.000-07:00

COLOUR CLUB is the name of my collaborative venture with several of my friends and colleagues from Kingston University, whose hallowed halls I have just forsaken. We already have a couple of jobs on the go!

WE NOW HAVE A BLOGSPOT AND A VIMEO CHANNEL

COLOUR CLUB BLOG

COLOUR CLUB VIMEO

THERE IS A SHOWREEL AND EVERYTHING

Colour Club is here! We are a collection of animators and illustrators.

we are currently looking for creative ventures. If you would like us to make something for you get in contact! Email us at -colourclub123@gmail.com

We hope to hear from you soon!!!

Colour Club Reel from Colour Club on Vimeo.

the G stands for Geraldine

2010-07-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

I... borrowed... a couple of images from the nickelodeon style guide library, including a bunch of Hey Arnold! turnarounds and backgrounds. I really like this show, my girlfriend and I have been watching a bunch of it lately. It's obviously for a young audience but it isn't half as saccharine as most other shows of its ilk (whilst still retaining some worthwile morals). Helga's sort of ridiculous, though - she's probably the first tsundere character I can remember seeing. It's taken to a silly extreme - she is horrible to Arnold at every chance she gets but psychotically obsesses over him pretty much every moment he's not around (I think she makes a bust of his head out of gum at one point). Somehow she still manages to be a wonderfully well-rounded character and I obviously had a crush on her.

"my pain is greater than yours" - "BLOOOPITY BLOOP BLOP I AM A FORMLESS OCTOPUS MAN"

2010-07-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

So, I watched the naruto episode 166 on a whim because I'd heard it was the one hinata "died" in and I just wanted to see how they treated it. It sort of made me sad, which was pretty good. So I just watched 167 to see if the fight with Pain and Naruto was going to progress in a cool way.

I'm not going to pretend I know anything about anime right now - I don't even know that much about animation - but I don't really expect anything when i watch naruto nowadays. the drawings of faces and bodies are usually pretty terrible and the fights don't always seem to have much zing to them.

And then I fucking saw this.

I know there are arguments for and against this sort of thing, and if I'm honest they're abusing the whole Gurren Lagann things-morphing-at-high-speed-for-not-much-of-a-reason thing to the extent that it started to get a little tiring, but jesus -

I thought it looked both cool and hilariously funny. It dipped in places but the variations on generic-naruto-anime face were really entertaining and refreshing.

nickelodeon

2010-06-30T08:23:00.000-07:00

so, I'm interning at the nickelodeon building in London for the next two weeks. I've met a lot of nice people and everyone's really cool. I haven't done much actual art yet (the last couple of days were mostly spent following around the head of the graphics department and going to a few live-action shoots) apart from the stuff shown above -just to give me something to do they asked me to do a cartoon of these british kids' show hosts for a logo. I find caricature really hard to do and I've no idea if they'll actually want to use it anyway! Oh well! We'll see how it goes.

EDIT: it's been a while since i deleted something on my blog because I'm so embarrassed about it - this is one of those times.

COLOUR CLUB - COMING SOON

2010-06-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

some logo ideas and a quick go at some motion graphics. this is part of an ongoing collaborative effort, more as it comes.

2010-06-10T03:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, the 201st post won't be a comic. Maybe the 202nd one. Lately I feel like I can't write about anything that's happened to me and thinking up something from scratch seems like a bit too much of an undertaking for where I'm at right now.

I held off from posting a bunch of stuff in the hope that I'd get down and right something, so here things are:

1: LONDON DEGREE SHOW

It's at the LBi, or Lost Boys International, which is a super sweet venue on Brick Lane. There will be drinks and art and general merriment, and if you're reading this it would be my honour to invite you to the private view on the 17th (next thursday, a week tonight!). The address is no. 146 on Brick Lane if you're nearby and you're lost then give me a ring on 07758 224292 and I'll try and show you in.

2. Since we only have one day or something ridiculous to hang our shit at the LBi, I went and made a mock-up of what my space will look like IN GLORIOUS 3D:

I actually learned how to do something new: see the little holes in the CGI pegboard? I made them by adding a boolean modifier to the board and subtracting a cylinder from it. I collapsed the result and then copied it a bunch of times (since my computer shudders to a halt if I try to add multiple booleans to the same object. It's kind of like a 3-dimensional mask, which is something I've wanted to do for a while.

3. I've been painting again:

A1 show piece

2010-05-29T05:49:00.000-07:00

we each get a portrait A1's worth of wall space for our degree show. this is probably going to be my contribution - more animation stills than any illustration but that seems to be the way things are going lately.

in other news, this is my 200th ever post on this blog. I started it at the end of my first year at uni to try and get better at drawing comics (which I've failed marvellously at), but I've picked up things in a couple of other areas.

I'm going to try and draw a commemorative comic for the 201st post, but don't expect anything more fancy than the usual couple-of-hours-in-flash jobs.

MY NEW WEBSITE IS UP

2010-05-27T09:00:00.001-07:00

it's kind of minimal now but I think it works a lot better. Includes a selection of illustration (which will probably be revised at some point) as well as my edited showreel (which I've smartened up since the last time you will have seen it). We get marked on it for uni, too.

MY DEGREE SHOW FILM: EX LIBRIS

2010-05-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

Some stills from my final film, Ex Libris. Finally handed in everything yesterday. Started this in what, December last year? About six months of effort. Good riddance.