'Pan' Photo Real Creature Design

Over the last couple of years I have developed a process using Photoshop to create 'Photo Real' work based on initial 2D sketches and artwork. I used this approach while working on a pre-school animation project called 'Treasure Tree' that I created with Cat Little. Since that project is still in development I cannot show any of the artwork here which is very frustrating considering the amount of work completed since 2012. 

However, I recently found an artist named Aaron Blaise who has samples of artwork and tutorials that showed a similar process to mine. Using his process as inspiration I went about creating a test piece, Pan, seen above. The process involves roughly 16 steps from sketch through to painting, texturing and faux lighting.

I've created a progression video so that you can see the process step by step. I've not followed it exactly, going back and reworking certain sections or adjusting mistakes but the below list is the basic pipeline I used as a guide.

Photo Real Process

1. Sketch
2. Refined Sketch
3. Local Colour
4. Shadow
5. Main Light
6. Deep Shadows
7. Reflected Light
8. Secondary Light
9. Highlights
10. Texture
11. Eye
12. Background Layer
13. Blurring (Depth of Field)
14. Atmosphere
15. Burned Light
16. Overlay Texture

I'll continue to work and test this process with future pieces. My main criticism with the 'Pan' piece is the lack of contrast and strong modelling on the face early on that left the face feeling to flat by the end of the artwork.

From The Archives: Bird Food Concept Art

While having a root around an old hard drive, I came across some concept art I did when working for Brown Bag Films. Myself and Richard Keane had been bouncing ideas around for a short and Richard came up with the concept and story for a short film about a man who has to defend his lunch from a gang of pigeons. Richard went on write and direct the short film for Brown Bag films but these are some of my early sketches based on our conversations to get the ball rolling on developing the short.

You can see a teaser trailer for the short film here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeLv21oJULY

Sketch Club Poster Design

A couple of weeks back, I started to run a Tuesday night drawing session for students and staff. To help promote it, I decided to create a poster and logo for print and a Facebook presence. I toyed around with lots of ideas but settled on a simple illustration of costumed characters armed with drawing equipment. Most of the drawing sessions consist of a model in costume so this idea seemed like a simple fit. I gathered a bunch of reference for characters and the background and set to work.

After roughing out a bunch of characters in my sketch book, I had a basic line up and set about comping together the poster layout in Photoshop. I scanned in my rough characters, made some adjustments and changed some characters completely before printing them out at a larger scale and cleaning up the rough designs for each character. This is where I refined the designs and poster layout beyond the very rough stage. I also mocked up the background artwork on a separate page and scanned it into Photoshop. 

With the characters cleaned up and the layout scanned in, I set about comping the poster and experimenting with type and logo designs. The initial mock-up above has a Led Zeppelin inspired type face which I ended up abandoning for something simpler and suitable for the box frame limitations of the Face Book page layout.

With the layout working, traditionally inking the characters and background artwork was next. I used the Faber-Castell PITT artist pens which include some brush pens which I had wanted to try out for a while. The inking style was influenced by Skottie Young and Bill Watterson. 

For me, the traditional inking process is still faster than digital inking partially because of the scale I'm working at and the fact that you can't screw it up and that pressure leads to more focus and less meandering over lines and placement.

The logo design needed to change from the initial mock-up, so I set about coming up with an alternative. I settled on a mixture of hand written script and digital type faces.
I'd seen plenty of similar examples and had not set about to reinvent the wheel for a simple poster. I sat down for about an hour and wrote out the word 'Sketch' as many types in as many variations I could think of, then narrowed down the selection and settled on 10 that I was happy with. These where brought into Photoshop and comped together with digital type faces.

The inked artwork and new logo design were finally brought into Photoshop and painted digitally using some simple brushes to create a flat opaque design with graphic shadows and highlights. The last step was to colour the Logo design in a colour that sat kindly with the illustration.

From the Archives: Zombi

Zombi was a piece created a number of years ago when I was enrolled at Animation Mentor. When I was not working on my animation assignments, I tried to work to improve my illustration work. This illustration was produced off the back of the Goreball design work, which also included zombies but had a more contemporary/apocalyptic theme and aesthetic. He's even wearing Adidas runners!

The first step in the process was to complete a traditional pencil sketch. This was a large drawing on A3 cartridge paper that I scanned in and reworked in a couple of passes to get the pose working. Once I had a very rough working drawing, I brought the image into Photoshop and did a clean up pass while maintaining the scratchiness of the original sketch.  

I then created a Greyscale value pass or painting on a multiply layer working out the lighting and atmosphere before even touching any colour. I struggled a lot with understanding colour for many years and have found the process of separating value from colour (Hue and Saturation) a helpful process.

I kept working the values, pushing the contrast to push the character out from the background. The style is contemporary comicbook blending line art and painting but never moving into pure illustrative painting. The line art was re-introduced at this stage and highlights and details painted in. Without adding any Hue (colour) I knew that the values would work with any colour wash.

With the colour wash, I wanted something vivid and dynamic. Red is not a colour I commonly use in my work. I tend to favour blues, neutral values like browns or oranges and occasionally purples or greens. The colour wash was applied on a blend mode layer on top of the value pass in Photoshop, either set as a Multiply or Overlay layer.

The next step in the process was an eye opener for me. I typically would paint the main character palette on a layer under the main wash so that any colour I applied would blend with the main scene colour ( in this case, red). The problem with this is that the colour is washed out or over powered by the main scene colour but it does give a good starting point anything as an underlay or under painting.

I could then colour pick values from the under painting and paint these on a new layer over the existing colour knowing that the palette will work. I would also use pictures and textures on multiply or overlay layers over the opaque painting and mask them out to fit the different shapes like skin or cloth. 

'Mick' Animation and Colour Tests

Here's the first completed animation test for the character 'Mick'. The design, style and animation has to be simple and quick to do while still showing a lot of character and personality. This was complete using a Cintiq Companion and Toon Boom Animate Pro.

Next I have the fully cleaned up animation with full colour and drop shadow. The final design style of the show will probably be more rough and ready with 'scratchier' line art but this does give an idea of a higher quality finish.

TV Animation Development Work Part 02

Above shows the complete process from character design to finished production still for Angler Fish.

Before a design can be approved, multiple versions need to be created and sent to the shows producers for feedback and approval. 

My workflow is to produce three designs for each character and have the producer/director choose their favourite. 

Any fixes or requested changes are then made to this design and sent again for final approval.

Once the design is fully approved, it goes to clean up. For a vector based show like this, i’ll do my clean up in Adobe Flash, drawing directly into the application using a Wacom Tablet.

Fox Run

I animated this run cycle based on a set of water colour sketches of a fox character I did a few years ago. I animated the cycle in Adobe Flash CC on my Wacom Companion which is a really great piece of tech. My plan for this cycle is to try and paint it up in Photoshop to see if I can achieve the same water colour style as the original sketches below.

Space Pirate

I've been brushing up on my Photoshop skills and in particular, colouring art work. This Space Pirate design (not sure its really a Space Pirate?) was created in Sketchbook Pro and then brought into Photoshop. I used a method found on Cubebrush.com as an approach for colouring which allows easy changes to be made to the colour design. I also completed some alternate colouring too (See Below). I'll post up a full workflow for this design asap.

TV Animation Development Work Part01

As I mentioned in a previous post, I occasionally get to do some development work for TV animation projects that are at the pitch stage. This tends to involve coming up with characters, locations and styles for a project that might be at the script phase or earlier. One of the first things that needs to be produced when pitching a show is the pitch bible. This consists of the synopsis and treatment of the show, outlines the info about target audience and format, contains production, direction and art direction notes and introduces the characters. Some bibles will also have story outlines and possibly some sample scripts. The visuals must then sell the project, showing the final look (or as near as possible) of the characters, some locations and overall art style. More often than not a finished still or series of stills must be comped together showing the final look of he show.

So, how do I begin this process? Well, the first thing I do is go through whatever materials are available. Sometimes this will be a rough version of the bible outlining what the series is about or if the TV project is based on an existing IP (intellectual property), I may have access to the original books etc. At this stage its good to have some discussions with the producer/creator and get a feel for what they are looking for. Once all this info has been digested and  i'm familiar with the project, I find its good to produce a list of deliverables for the project and clearly define with the producer what they need from me?

The sample project I'm going to show was based around fish, so my deliverables for this project were 2 coloured Fish characters, a visual design for an interstitial aspect of the show and 2 final production stills of the final look for the episodes.

Reference

Once all this work is out of the way, I can begin with the visuals. My first step is to source as much reference material as possible. Not only am I designing characters but I 'm responsible for defining the art direction for the entire project. I need to source reference that inspires my vision for the project and this process is just as important, if not more so, than sitting down and beginning to draw with no direction or clear intent.

The process of choosing reference materials and building mood boards immediately helps to define the project. These early decisions are narrowing my focus, giving me inspiration for design, colour and feel while allowing me to see the show as a collage of imagery without even putting a pen to paper or screen.

Sample Mood board for an the unnamed Fish show

Sometimes its necessary to show these mood boards to the producer for feedback but more often than not, these will only be seen by me and I will constantly reference them for the duration of the project. These days, I find applications like Evernote a great time saver and resource for accumulating image reference. You can easily source images online and its a simple drag and drop to collect your reference. Pinterest is also a great resource for collecting libraries of images to reference.

I would create a whole series of these mood boards on different aspects of the show such as mood boards just on particular fish consisting of live action photography or mood boards on film posters with aquatic themes to see what graphic design elements were used.

In the next post i'll talk about beginning the character design phase and the wonderful world of design approvals and fixes!

From The Archives: I'm A Creepy Crawly

I'm going to start posting some older character design work that I've completed over the last few years. A lot of the design work I do is tied up in development and NDA's and I don't have a huge amount of time to pursue personal projects with teaching and development work. Its a good complaint to have though as I've seen some of my work through to final animation for TV. 
Creepy Crawly is one such example, it's a series I designed and directed for Monster Entertainment based in Ireland and has been shown in a bunch of countries on Discovery Asia, ABC Australia, DR Denmark, TVO Canada, RTE Ireland, YLE Finland and the last I heard its on Tiny Pop in the UK. 
The following, in my opinion, are some of the stronger designs completed. I had about 52 insect characters to design for the series and insects are not exactly the cutest or easiest creatures to design but I tried my best to make them appealing and still a little bit creepy.

Barbarian Kid

More pulpy nonsense with this Barbarian Kid character sketch. I'm trying to find a fast workflow for inking and colouring while maintaining the energy of a rough sketch. Sketchbook Pro is my software of choice at the moment, but will be trying some other approaches in the near future...

Professor Abronsius

A concept sketch of the character Professor Abronsius played by Jack MacGowran in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers. Like all the best films I discovered in my teens, I first saw The Fearless Vampire Killers on late night TV, either on Channel 4 or BBC 2. It joins a list of secret gems found on late Friday or Saturday night viewing like Blue Velvet or even Akira back in the early 90's. Anyway, I was always taken by the rich set design, cinematography and cartoonish nature of Vampire Killers and have been meaning to do some character designs based on the film for a long time.