Hey! what's up?

I've noticed a few people are still signing in to follow this blog- Just a reminder that I've moved all bloggy activity to my site, so check it out, and if you like it, subscribe over there. Thanks people!

Just in case you're over here...

Here's a piece from my current project, a comic based on the british warrior queen Boudica...you can see more stuff over here :)

Tel Aviv Sketchcrawl

Hey, this is the last sketchbook post over here! There will be one more message from the managment, but for now please subscribe to the jpvine.com blog....

BY CLICKING HERE. :)

We were pretty wary of some heavy rains this weekend. Well hey, I'm british, so rain is nuthin'. But my Israeli friends are delicate flowers, so we opted for a nice cafe on Rothschild Boulevard, Tel aviv's most groovy, Bauhausy, and pleasingly human-scaled boulevard. Sketched there. Drank belgian beer on an empty stomach so sketches got wobbly. Then grabbed a gourmet burger at Moses, down the road. Nice, and simple.

A Drawing of the road:



And some of our fellow cafe dwellers. One couple did not like being sketched one bit, and went off in a huff...





This Girl had an interesting bottom lip. Glad she didn't ask to see my sketchbook.

I wound up at the pool, and thought I'd draw these old boys chewing the cud in the hot tub:

Death From above, p2

Spinnig a few arty plates right now, but continuing on the comic. Here's page 2, and I'm slowly getting comfortable with the look of the piece. More to come!



And (if I may) I 'm going to remind you that this is the penultimate post over here, all the action will continue over there. Please update your bookmarks :)

Death from above

I’ve been looking for reasons to practice my layout and comics skills, and this weeks Illustration Friday topic, ‘Focused’ is as good as any. It was a toss up between this idea and a rabbit staring at himself in the mirror. This seemed more dynamic, in the end. I’m pretty comfortable setting up a sequence in film formats, but -er- doing comics is hard!

Head on over to http://jpvine.com/2010/02/02/death-from-above/
to see work in progress, and may I remind you to sign in over there if you follow this blog, which I'll stop posting to in two posts time. Thanks!

RraaaaR!

although this is more of a RaaaR! of fear than anything else. I draw pirates all day right now, but none of them are this hairy or ginger.

and a reminder: I've moved my blogging to jpvine.com, I'll continue to post here for only three more posts, but if you follow this blog, please sign in over there.

Have a great day. We're going to have another snowball fight at lunchtime, methinks.

Moving to jpvine.com

Hi folks,

First of all, thanks for even reading this. I'm glad you're here.

Secondly, I'm doing the (probably ill-advised) move of switching my Blog over to the newly bells-and-whistle-enhanced jpvine.com,

And I would love it if you could join me over there. It will be fun. We'll have a raffle on thursdays. Please, update your links, and sign in as a follower right here. That would make me grateful. And to show my gratitude for you going through the tedium of numerous, potentially dull mouse clicks, I will send you a little something small, and unique to you, when I see you pop up over there.

Does that sound wierd? Hm.

Thanks again,

JPX

Late night painting

I need a new painting for the bedroom wall....

Website up together

Ahh, Christmas is coming. I would feel christmassy if it was a big deal over here, but it's a regular work day, which in some ways is actually pretty refreshing. I can only handle so much schmaltz and consumerism. We'll make do with a walk on the beach and friends over for mulled wine in the evening :)

As usual, boarding my behind off for Aardman, and still having fun with it.

And: my website has been overhauled and filled with new work lately.

Please check it out, I'd be happy to hear any feedback.

Le monkey

I should go to bed because I know there's an insane amount of boards to draw tomorrow. Ah well. a warm-down monkey before bed....

Shaun book in print

Got my hands on a preproduction Shaun book. Mmm. New print smell...
See more panels here.

Me, apparently

Me doing 'The Storyboarding face'. Drawn by my annoyingly young and talented workmate Ashley Boddy.

Beat it baby

It's late at the studio.

All quiet, apart from Daft Punk blaring in my headphones. I can't tell you anything about the sets they are building next door, apart from the fact that they are gorgeous. Can't wait to see the animation coming through.

As for me, I'm preparing Beatboards for our personal feature project, getting ready for pitches. Wish me luck:)

15 minute wakeup bird

...before I start the dreary task of assembling another portfolio.

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?