Plenty happening behind the scenes

Since the previous update to the blog, I’ve completed work on a few new projects that I am now able to share. I created another Iron Man design for a client that approached me through Campbell Animation. They requested that the featured child, Albie, be the central focus of this new piece, so I removed Spider-Man completely from the design. The main challenge of the work done on this design was getting the child's skin tone correct – although he has light skin, it wasn't quite working alongside the other colours. As a consequence of this, I had to make his skin darker than I would have preferred. The finished piece can be seen featured below.

 In addition to the above, I completed another section of the Scottish design I have discussed previously, which is roughly six main parts, of which I have currently finished three. This will be finished in May and hopefully soon after I will be able to show it off. I am particularly excited about showing off this project.

To give some insight into my process - I will occasionally do a character design between big projects, or digitise a sketch. Below is a character design for a fox-type character that I first sketched up a few years ago and have now finally digitised. When I am looking for some design work to do for fun to break my week up, I tend to look through my back catalogue of sketches and choose one to breathe life into. 

 

Initial sketch of the character. The arms and legs don't quite look right.  

 

With this particular character, I imagined him as the type you'd see in a platforming video game, along the lines of Spyro or Crash. As you can see from my original sketch, it isn't perfect and required some tweaking to give the character a more natural pose in its digital form. The arms behind the head pose is my reference to Son Goku from early Dragonball – his carefree attitude is one that I believe this character would share.

I have also done more work recently with Kenny from MoorLife, working on the MoorBeauty brand again, building on work from a previous design. At first we decided on a grey colour, as it had been in the first design, but after discussing with some of his colleagues we needed it to be female oriented (the target market) and so we made alterations to include pink colour, eyelashes and petals on the vines. Overall, I think this was the correct decision from their team. In discussion with Kenny, he is going to be sending across samples from the MoorLife clothing line, therefore I will discuss that at a later point and do a review of these when they arrive.

 

   The original concept we decided on wasn't quite right.

The client was much happier with these designs to really convey the market he was looking to capture.

 

In the previous post I mentioned that I was working on a special project with my son. This project has developed further since the last post and I now have characters designed, storyboarded and the animatic put together. The next stage will be to digitise the them and get the character sheets done. Soon after this I will be ready to start the animation process.

Additionally, I have decided to do another drawing challenge as I had done several years ago. I will be designing characters based on profiles generated randomly online. I plan to do around 31 of these (a months worth) though won't necessarily be doing it every day. So expect many sketches to surface on the blog too over the next few posts.

Next I intend to continue work on the aforementioned Scottish design and I have a Pokemon related idea that is currently in the process of printing and will discuss further in the next post. I also have plans for a project that will hopefully raise some funds in my local area.

More updates to come soon on this.