December 20, 2015

Secret Santa Thingy Thing

So at work we did this secret Santa thing where we each pulled names from co-workers out of a hat.  For that person, we would create a drawing of something they liked.  I ended up drawing Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us.  I've never played the game, but I've heard nothing but good things about it.  Here's the drawing:

December 17, 2015

Colour Hyde

Forgot to upload this one.  This was an earlier version of the Hyde character that I was supposed to clean up.  Figured it would be fun to figure out its actual colours.  There’s a few minor changes in the design since this one, but overall it’s pretty similar.  Why is this text blue?

December 15, 2015

Hyde Does a Twirl

So now Hyde turns! It was a rather tricky one to rotate while keeping it simple, but this was my attempt.  Stephen made a few suggestions that I did before uploading these, so here is Hyde, Finnish folklore style.

December 11, 2015

Ember Process 1

I've been meaning to make these (upcoming) posts for a while now.  I have finally started compiling things together for uploading.  Here's the first of multiple posts in which I put together a whole bunch of (pre-) production work from my fourth year film project at Sheridan.

Let's start with the concept art and pitch package.  This is well over a year old now.  It was basically the thing I put together to pitch the idea to my mentor group.  It has some very early versions of Dart and Juffer's designs.  Originally Dart was a bit older and more serious than what he ended up being.

Here's a preliminary colour concept of the main environment.  Many people said it looked a little bit too ominous, so the final colours became a bit more saturated and leaned a bit more towards a warmer yellow/green hue.

Here's the finalized colour script of the whole film.  There's something really fun about throwing solid colours down with a hard round brush on one layer.  It makes you work with less detail and gets you to focus more on the overall colour scheme.

Previous Ember posts can be found here:

December 04, 2015

Stuff From the Online

I have plenty of stuff to upload, so here's sort of a big post.  These are all online course works.  For the first week we were asked to a design of an old wealthy entrepreneur whose name currently escapes me.  Anyway, here's the finished guy.

And here's some process work:

The main assignment has us design two characters based on the characters of Jekyll and Hyde in our own interpretation.  I was thinking of basing my characters in Alaska, but ended up doing some research on Finnish folklore, resulting in the characters set in 1880 Finland.  Jekyll is an eager cartographer, trekking through the forests to explore and draw his maps.  Hyde is a leprechaun-like gnome.  It looks innocent, but it is rather mischievous.  It strives to get people lost by luring them deeper and deeper into the forest while playing riddle games with them.  I did some research on Finnish names and came up with a Finnish name for Jekyll (Jyri Laaksonen), while the Hyde character already had a title from the folklore that I read (the Menninkäinen).  I don't know how to pronounce any of that!

For Jyri, I looked a lot at Lapland clothing and some other things he'd be wearing on his treks through the forest, such as snowshoes.  Anyway, I worked on doing different thumbnails first, while more refined sketches were due the next week.

There wasn't a lot of info on the Menninkäinen character, so I did lots of research on wildlife in Northern Finland.  They have a lot gray owls there, it seems, so that's what I ended up basing the Menninkäinen's facial design on.  I also wanted it covered with a snowy blanket with some natural materials on it.

Here are exercises of facial features and hands.  Most of these were drawn from photographs, whereas some I copied from some of my favourite artists.

That's all for now.  I'll see if I can scan in some sketchbook stuff soon.