Throwing hammer

Skipping

Skipping again

Mazed Characters

© Quentin Blake

As I posted earlier, our main inspiration for the characters for the project Mazed was the illustrator for Roald Dahls children books, Quentin Blake. I really like his style, the sketchy and loose pencil that suits perfectly for children, but adults as well, because it's quite realistic at the same time. 

I thought this would be perfect for Piskey Led since this is animation is going to be on a tourist app for Cornwall, the audience would be both children and adults. The only thing with this style that would be a problem is that it's too sketchy, and would look a bit messy in an animation. We needed cleaner lines to make it work with the timespan we had to animate. 

This is how William and John ended up as. I tried to keep them simple, with organic shapes. Beside Quentin Blake as inspiration we googled ‘Bristish farmer’ to find the stereotypical farmer look. We wanted them to be typical farmers, as well as typical British. As I'm 'foreign' here in England, I know how the stereotypical British person for us 'foreigner' look like, and one of the most typical things is red hair. That's why they both got red hair, as well as it has the movie a wider colour pallet. We chose to make them the common comical duo; one short overweight one and the other tall and skinny. 

Experimental Animation

This is my final video for the experimental animation project. I did this with iron filings on a piece of paper with magnets underneath the table to move it around.
It was really hard to move the filings around, since the magnets were so strong that they pulled big chunks instead of just some of the filings, as I intended it work. But that's the point of the experimental project, you're going to explore new techniques. 
This was totally outside my comfort zone. I'm not a very artsy person. Don't take me wrong, I love art, but I'm more a realistic art person. Abstract stuff has never been my thing, that's why this project, and especially what I ended up with at the end, liberating but at the same time frustrating because it didn't need to look 'perfect'. 

I did three other experimental animation short films before this one, but Youtube isn't collaborating at the moment and won't let me upload them. I'll try to fix this later on.
   

Background work

Second semester we started having animation backgrounds and layout lectures. We learned different techniques with both colours and black and white, what different effects it can have and simple rules to make the best backgrounds.

The first picture is an exterior layout of a castle, drawn with charcoal. Here the challange was to deside where the light source was, and use as few tones as possible. 
The second picture is an interior background with one light source, drawn with pastils. I'm pretty pleased with this one, and had a lot of fun with it. I like how I didn't need to draw the whole chair, just highlight where the light would hit the surface, but you can still see that it's a chair. 

These lectures give me a lot inspiration to do more backgrounds and explore more with colours and different combination.   

Illustration work

Couple of moths ago a high school friend of mine asked if I could do an illustration for her university magazine in Oslo, called 'Føniks' and it's a feminist magazine. The illustration was for this article about a Swedish well-known blogger (Isabella Löwengrip) who seem like an anti feminist. They wanted a comical caricature of the blogger being chased by an exaggerated extreme feminist holding a penis. 

Its been a while since I've done illustrations, I used to illustrate for the news paper in Drammen, so it was fun to do it again. I wasn't really good at using a wacome tablet before I started at university, but now I finally started to get the hang of it. Next step is exploring more different brushes and textures in Photoshop to give my illustration more depth and a personal touch.