Bay Area

More sketches around San Francisco and the East Bay

The Doctor is in!

Illustrators Wales published an interview with me waxing lyrical on the subject of drawing here.

I've been leading a second Gesture Drawing Class supplementary to Alex's. I'm not as experienced as Alex or Louis or Tom Gately but it's a beginners class and allows me to draw with folk from other departments and learn with them.


There's nothing like teaching to force one to distill and condense drawing principals & technique.
These are some of the notes I made in class-basic tips and tricks to strengthen drawings.

And some fun stuff from the sessions . . .

COM!CS

The artists of the Aardman Animation anthology comicbook Tales of the Spiffing were recently interviewed by Ben Mitchell of Skwiggly Magazine. 

You can read the group interview at this link but here is my unedited response to Ben's questions.

•To canvass different work backgrounds, what role do you presently have at Aardman/other company? 

I was a Story Artist on Aardman/Sony's 'Arthur Christmas' Feb. 09-Oct 09

•How did you come to hear about ‘Tales of the Spiffing’ and why was it of interest to you?

I worked with Ash Boddy & JP Vine who initiated the project -they're both strong story tellers and I wanted to support them in their first publishing venture.  Contributing 8 pages to an anthology book is a good way to see my own work published without having to produce a whole graphic novel!

•What sort of timeframe did you work within?

I played around with different concepts for a while then thumbnailed the final idea over the summer 2010- finishing the final art in a mad dash towards the end of the year after moving to California.

•Given the collection is thematically about Britain, what determined your particular choice of subject matter (such as any British institutions/legends/pop culture that appealed to you in particular)?

Being a Welshman I figured that could be a unique entry into the collection-while searching for ideas an interesting true-life story hit the media over the summer which attracted my attention.  Bert Forking's 'wheelie bin rescue mission' appealed to me as a small story on a large canvas; a regular joe literally getting out of his depth & ending up in the national media.

•What artistic influences did you draw upon when it came to your story/illustration style?  The comic book work of MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman really inspired me- I wanted to keep the artwork simple & evocative-like his  'Hey Look' strips or early MAD covers.  Yann Martel's LIFE OF PI has long resonated with me for its 'lost at sea' passages and an old man on a grand adventure is always entertaining such as Pixar's UP or David Lynch's THE STRAIGHT STORY.

•Were there any brick walls you hit during the process, and do you feel as though you were able to overcome them successfully? As always I struggled to find a satisfactory ending-  I resorted to a cheap false teeth gag to round off the story!

•Did you use the opportunity to help strengthen a pre-existing visual style you feel that you’re known for, or was it an excuse to do something completely new and out of your wheelhouse? Oh it was absolutely a chance to experiment -I've made comics in the past but never for public consumption so this was my first opportunity to be published!  I wanted to keep the style as rough & loose as possible and hoped working digitally would allow for that.  However it transpired that working digitally is still very time consuming as I kept re-working the artwork to find an appealing 'look'.

•Do you feel that working within Aardman is a valuable contributor to your creative process, in the case of this book as well as other endeavours? Aardman is a great place to work!  They supported my efforts to gather employees for regular life drawing sessions at a local Bristol art school.  The studio is full of inspiring creative folk & the love they have for the medium is reflected in the unique output of the studio.

•I’m especially interested in the angle of the book’s contributors all coming from an animation industry background. Did you find that this complemented and/or helped the process, or was it tricky to get acclimated to a different method of visual storytelling?

Nah, storyboarding & comic books are closely related-if anything I wanted to make my strip illustrative but combine some more cinematic compositions and play with the rhythm of the panels.

•Was there anything about the experience that made you feel you’ve benefited as an animator/designer/storyteller etc? It was a constructive exercise to distill an epic story into 8 pages and relate the tale without dialogue or colour-those were the parameters I set myself to work within.

•Do any of you have future plans for the characters/stories you created, such as a longer-form story or animated incarnation?  I'd love to expand mine into a short and exaggerate the sea voyage further-Bert could drift for weeks, months and encounter all sorts of marine beasts, strange islands and hallucinations!

Tales of the Spiffing is available from the website.  For orders within the U.S. I have a limited quantity of books here for sale. It costs $20 (excl. mailing). 

I will sign any copies and perhaps make a drawing inside . . . just email me at the address in my Blogger profile.

A productive weekend . . .

Last weekend I made some new friends but immediately lost them once I made their portraits . . .

The day after I did some real academic study at the DeYoung Museum drawing 'groovy tribal shit' . . .

I rounded off a stellar weekend sinking a couple of cold ones in an olde world inn where buxom wenches served thirsty knights fancy cocktails . . .

The End.

"SMILE!"

This is a painting I've been working up based on the birthday card I made for Ronald Searle's 91st. Inspired by the sea-lion colony down at Pier 39 in San Francisco.  I went down to Fisherman's Wharf a few months back to draw these smelly, noisy squatters.

March 3rd was Searle's 91st birthday and I put together a special sketchbook with all the other Pixar artists.  I wanted to make a San Francisco themed image and came up with this gag.

I thought it might make a good subject for a painting and started re-working the composition.

Rough Sketch

Fun stuff from Gesture Class

1 Quick 30 second warm ups with Karate guy!

2 Alex had me switch to left handed drawing to try and break out of relying on drawing crutches, habits and tricks.

3  A couple more left-handed sketches with digital corrections

4 Another class with 2 models gave us a chance to play around with a couple of familiar characters!

5 Never drawn these guys before so they're somewhat off model.

6 This model came dressed as a gangster so our work was almost done for us-

7

8

9 These were all inspired by the same male model-spot the movie reference bottom left?

10 Final bunch, again all made from the same male model. 1 minute poses.

The Monstre is coming . . . NEW CLIP!

A sequence I boarded from the film was just released online as a pop promo for the song 'La Seine' by Mathieu 'M' Chedid and Vanessa Paradis.



It was with great pleasure today that I greeted the release of the trailer for 'A Monster In Paris'- a film I storyboarded on for BiboFilms between 2006-2008.  It's a sheer delight to see scenes I drew 5 years ago realized so gloriously en trois dimensions!

I had the time of my life on this project working with a world class team in the south of France. I can't wait for the world to see the final film . . . I'll be blogging more about the film once it's released.


Trailer Un Monstre à Paris (A Monster in Paris) by animatieblog

Latest Gesture Class efforts

1 We start with 30 second-1 minute warm up poses.

2 Simply looking for the flow and rhythm of the pose . . .

3 Always pushing the pose while maintaining clarity

4

5

6

7 Too much emphasis on anatomy in these-

8 Starting to get some acting in here . . .

9 . . . and now some fun stuff!

10 All these were made from the same male model, using his pose as a springboard for character and story.  Two minute poses.

To see it done properly check out these drawings on Alex's blog.  Some even more fun stuff here