Tuesday, October 27, 2009

I'm in print- finally!


I worked like a fevered chimp over the summer on a bunch of projects, one of which was this where's Waldo-style Shaun the Sheep book. And it's on sale now! er- in Germany. But, there are no words, and if you like this kind of thing, it's here on Amazon.

The very simple premise was that Shaun and his buddies bust out of the farm and go on holiday, while Bitzer tries to restrain them. The readers are supposed to find just Shaun, but I had to entertain myself with a few easter eggs, like a UFO breakdown, and extensive bike race, a duck party. That kind of thing.

First I sent the client roughity-roughs like this:
Just to get their buy-in to the angle and subjects.
Once that was done I penciled the illustration at full size. This was important because in Illustrator I would be zooming in so close, I would lose sense of scale pretty fast.
Then into Illustrator; first time I used this programme, and I really enjoyed it. The fun part about using the brush is that it can fill your strokes instantly. Which meant I could ink AND colour at the same time. I had only 2 days for each image, so time saving was crucial. My kids loved how fast a full colour character would appear on screen.


So I made layers in illustrator. The program would often complain due to the amount of vectors. My computer cried.


And finally, comped it in photoshop, added shadows, maybe texture and a bit of lighting. And onto the next one. The question is, where is he?

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Edit: sketches

I can't seem to get blogger to play nice with my images lately, so I've reposted the sketches if you want a closer look. :)

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Sunday, October 18, 2009

Grecian 2000






My friend Kris calls from Greece. He's on a round the world trip with his wife, and has taken some time to hang out in greece and volunteer with the salvation army in Thessaloniki. I've been having a crazy summer and his invite to come on a wee adventure proves irresistible.



So we met up, and took a boys road trip. Of course, he's going round europe in a classic convertible. No other way to do it, right? So we headed for a town called Meteora, famous for it's absurdly mystical monasteries, all teetering on rock pinnacles. I have a thing for things built on the tops of mountains, and it's nigh impossible to do an unappealing sketch of these places :)




I'm a real spiritual guy, you know?

And here are the wheels:


Of course- A little beach time was in order too.


The director in me demanded a decent 'road' shot. This one almost involved rolling off the back when the car changed gear. Clever
Fluffy dice an absolute necessity.

Heading through sheep country. Picture by Kris



Thursday, October 15, 2009

Shark


A Collaborative Shark with my six year old. He's just keeping the blog warm while I prepare an awesome post for you.