Moe and Les

Here's a few character designs for a job which unfortunately never made it. The brief was to design two cheeky characters which would encourage people to do a little 'Moe' exercise and eat a little 'Les'. It was a lot of fun coming up with the designs and thinking of the various mischievous things they could do. Although it would have been CG I wanted to try out a kind of illustrative feel with lots of texture. Ah well. Here's the initial little thumbnails that I always start with...

... and a few with them in various costumes. I thought they'd be the sort of chaps who'd like to dress up a lot...

And here's some characters and environments worked up in Photoshop...

Art Rage

I've been experimenting with the cheap and cheerful Art Rage software. It's a little like Painter and has some very nice, naturalistic painting and drawing tools. It's perhaps not quite as polished and comprehensive as Painter but in many ways it's much more intuitive. The layers are much easier to use and the palettes cleverly disappear when you draw near them. Here are a few quick doodles. The first are using default brushes and pencils and the last is using a brush I made myself - which is a bit more manageable as it doesn't lay down too much paint. I'm looking forward to trying ot out on a longer piece...

Olympic Mascot Designs

Here's another in the series 'jobs that I didn't get or never happened'. I've got quite a lot of stuff in that category - sometimes when you get a run of pitches going down that path you begin to wonder if you're doing something wrong. Then you have to remind yourself that it's not you - it's everyone else who's stupid.

Anyway, earlier in the year I got the chance to pitch some mascot designs for the olympics. I started by doing a few thumbnails and thinking about how these mascots are usually used. They get printed on merchandise and then end up as big foam suits to be worn at promotional events. This is where I think a lot of previous designs which have looked beautiful as 2D designs in print can go terribly wrong so I thought it would be good to design something with this use in mind.

I thought about various themes, landmarks, what makes us British, how do the rest of the world think of us, stereotypes... I decided that the rest of the world think we drink a lot of tea, and it's true, a lot of us do like a cuppa. Also though, I think we like our humour, sometimes silly humour and are very good at laughing at ourselves. This is what I liked about the tea cup idea - it played on a commonly held stereotype and was funny too. I envisioned sporting events for the different cups -'It's a Knockout' style, it would have been great! Pity the judging panel didn't think so. They probably drank tall frappucinos and skinny macchiolatos or something.

Of Monsters and Beavers

I was asked to do a few quick monster designs last week. Turned out what they actually wanted was beavers. Easy mistake.

I watched a little bit of 'Gangs of New York' yesterday. Mostly nonsense but I did like some of the moustaches. Here Daniel Day Lewis's...

It's a messy job...

Even robots need a lunch break...

This is getting to be a bit of a theme. I'm finding they don't scan very well though.

tiny giant robot

I got a postcard sized block of watercolour paper for christmas. I did this quick doodle of a rather cliched sublect to see how the waterbrushpens worked on it. Watercolours are much more fun on the proper paper - it's pretty rough to draw on though.

Ducks

...and geese. I've got a little story idea which involves ducks or geese so I drew a few to see what I could do with the shapes - how they could be simplified and so on. I'm ashamed to say these aren't from life though.

Cowboys

Pale Rider was on last night - what a great film - and what a terrific character the Preacher is. These aren't necessarily pictures of the cast - just doodles of things I found interesting - moustaches and hats mainly.

This Week

Here's a job that did happen. I did a series of vox pop animations leading up to the election. The interviews were with people in the street who weren't going to bother voting.

There wasn't a lot of time and they wanted about 2 minutes a week. There wasn't much money either - so I had to do it all myself. I'd get the sound and edit it down on on Monday morning, on Wednesday night it was on the TV and I'd have started the second minute for Fridays show! The only way I could do it was to keep the characters very simple - built out of a kit of parts that could be re-used again and again.

Creature Comforts

A little while back I did the only cg characters in Creature Comforts. A plankton and some cells which divided as they spoke...

Blobs

Here are some quick doodles for a very simple character...



And here's what it became...

Professors and assistants

I'm going to try and get this thing going again - it's beena busy year. Here are a few designs I did for a pitch...

wrestling

a few more lunchtime sketches from the docks and some made up wrestlers

ferrari robot

I used a photo I took recently as a palette and starting doodling - mainly in photoshop with a bit of 'messing-up' added in painter.

Aliens

Here's a few character designs for a job I'm working on - can't say what it is at the moment - top secret - very hush hush ;)