Wow!

Pretty amazing - Rhiannon at her gorgeous blog Pierced Beauty - has done a post about me for her Friday Featured Artist thread. 

Her blog is very very cool - you should all check it out - she is an excellent photographer, artist and creative, and shares a lot on her blog. As well as that she is a very generous person and refers to heaps of other amazing bloggers too - so her blog is a trove of creative inspiration.

And thanks to Rhiannon for featuring me! :) And make sure you go visit her!

Mysterious...

My friend and I have a theory about road cones. 

Auckland has a LOT of road cones, and we have often speculated on where they have all come from. Oftentimes it also seems that there are a billion road cones all set up around an area that doesn't even have any work being done on it. 

And also more often than not, the workmen standing around these areas of cones are doing just that - standing there. Scratching their heads. Eating their lunch. Etc. 

So this is our theory...

Hardworking Beavers

So here's poster no.2 - the Hardworking Beavers. :)

Animuls

Been working on some posters for my amazing lovely friend who is brave enough to be a primary school teacher - and a good one at that! The school she teaches at is a lovely little Christian school that is being established down in Queenstown, in the south island of NZ. 

They have character traits that are part of what they want to teach the kids about, and with the help of the kids came up with some animals that they related to the character traits. So she asked me if I would come up with some posters that would incorporate the word of the character trait with the animal. 

So here's my first (hopefully) complete poster - creative being the character trait - and a finch to go with it. : ) 

Will pop up the others as we go!

Wizardy

Woo hoo!

I have been having a lot of fun doodling in Photoshop - it was really weird at first (and if I'm being honest, still is a little) - but I think that I'm getting the hang of it. Still not amazingly brilliant at color stuff but here's hoping that practice makes perfect right?

So tonight we have a wizardy/sorcery-ish type character. My flatmate was reading out some of Lord of the Rings which inspired me to do this. What an epic book! I need to read it again soon. 

Canary-ish

I don't know what you guys think - but when I first saw this guy (after I had drawn him haha) I kinda thought that he looked a bit angry. 

Then I thought, no - more like suspicious.

Actually, he looks like he is scheming something.

Discontent?

And now I have no idea. 

What do you think?

Just another sketchy page of doodilliness

Hurrah for sketching!

I took time tonight to get out my Moleskine and actually sketch in it! 

It has been too long, and I have used it for other random stuff that is not pretty and very boring and practical. 

Why on earth would I use such a delightful tool for sketching as a book for boring practical things you may ask? 

That is a very good question. 

To be honest I think it was because I was scared. There is this unspoken pressure to perform when you have lovely blank smooth pages in front of you. And instead of just going for it, which I understand is the idea of sketching - I bowed to the pressure. 

But no more! 

In your face boringness and practicality!

So here's hoping that I can keep this up. Coz then I will have a sketchbook actually full of drawings. Which, ridiculously, will be a first for me. 

Oh look, there was actually one drawing that I found from last year...

Layouts

Since I haven't had the time to do some of my own stuff, I thought I'd share with you a little bit of what we have been doing at school this week. Next week we have our layout exam, so we had a practice run this week. 

The way we've been taught, you get given the storyboards then have to separate everything out from that, so the background, characters, camera instructions and field guide all have to be on separate layers - much like it would be once you were animating. So I scanned mine in and composited them roughly in Photoshop so you get a better idea of how they will look once all the layers are combined. 

10 points to anyone who can guess what movie it is that the storyboards were taken from. I'll give you some clues. It's a black and white movie from the 60's - the acronym for it is 'NOTLD'.

It's a lot of work, but it's fun - and we only had 12 scenes to layout in 4 days, whereas our tutor told us that you could have as many as 80 in a week! : P Maybe one day I'll be that fast, but not yet! 

Wow I am behind! It has been a while since I have been on here and able to update - and I also have been at a bit of a loss to know what to put up, I've been so busy with work stuff that I haven't had much time to do anything for fun. Hopefully that will change and I'll get back into it!

In the meantime, another random oldie. As you can see I had already started coloring this with pencils, although I am hoping that I'll get a chance soon to color this in Photoshop instead, but I won't hold my breath! Hope everyone else is going well - especially as it comes up to a busy and often tough time of the year. 

Dance

It's been a busy week, but we have some results! I think I mentioned that we were working on a paired up project - an animation of a couple singing and dancing. Well, we are pretty much done on the rough animation and I have a clip I can share. :)

My very talented team-mate Jean worked on the male character, and gave him heaps of personality and charm. I animated the female character, and had a heap of fun animating a pretty girl. I was really happy with how the first half of our clip came out, Jean did the initial animation and I just had to fit my character in with hers; and because of the excellent work she did it was pretty easy and fun for me!

Hope you enjoy it. : )