Other Bits and Bobs

Here are a few other illustrations that I have produced recently alongside work for FMP. I've been playing around with lots of new textures and a new lack of outline style.

Rosie Rainbow Pig- Final stages

It's almost finished! All I need to do now is place each page into Indesign and add in the text. Then will be able to print up several copies ready to be hand bound!

I intend to have a professionally printed and bound copy in time for the final show. 

Overall I am very happy with the book. With more time I would go back and revisit some of the pages I finished earlier and redraw the characters. I'd also try to make the actual story stronger but unfortunately I needed to focus my time on the illustrations rather than the quality of the story itself. 

Below are some small thumbnails of the whole book. ..

 

I still feel like I have a lot to learn about Photoshop and Illustrator. I'm looking forward to finishing FMP and being able to focus on my own personal projects and learning more about animation.

Monster Animation

I've had a bit of a slow start with my animation but things are definitely moving on now! I had initially wanted to do an animation with the main character of the children's book. I became more and more stressed with the amount of work I was having to do along side this and decided to opt for something a little simpler.

I decided to focus my animation on my monsters. This makes more sense because they are relatively easy to animate and are also something I plan to continue with after graduation.

Although I'm finding After Effects confusing I really think it's something I want to learn properly in the future. My style of illustration is really easy to convert into animations because of the simple shapes and character anatomy. I've really enjoyed picking which monsters to use and imagining how they would move around and behave...

Below are two of my finished animations. I intend to animate a further two monsters and then put all four into one animation with sound effects and music!

Reference Pigs

For my FMP I'm going to be illustrating a children's picture book about a blue pig :D
I've finally written the first draft of the story but won't be showing it on here until it's closer to being finished...


The main character of the story is a piglet so I've been looking at lots and lots and LOTS of examples of pigs. Photographs, videos and illustrations... Here are some of my findings including some more images from the MMU special collections library!

From looking at these images and from looking at the way real pigs behave I was able to start working on a design for my main character...


In the past my most successful character illustrations are the ones that focus on simple basic shapes. I wanted to keep up with this style for this book... Here are a few pig character sketches...

Craig Oldham Poster

I am so pleased with how this has turned out! A big thank you to Ian for putting up with me sending him draft after draft after draft haha!


Having the colour restriction really helped with this I think. A website I found massively helpful was http://www.colourlovers.com/ 
Really good for getting ideas for colour pallets to use :)


Doing this poster had made me realise that I need to practice more with creating my own text. I think it could have been a lot more creative. 
I also need to make some more textures! Need to take advantage of the A3 scanner in college! 

Feeling Festive

 A few Christmas illustrations I've been working on the past few months :)

Finished Children's Book

 Below are all my finished pages for the personal project. I'm so happy with how its turned out. Have tried out lots of new ideas and learnt lots of new things. There are few things that I would change with more time but I think that the book is very effective overall.

The night time images were much more fun to produce. I really enjoyed getting to experiment with lighting and the starry skies. 
My next step is to learn how to use Indesign to print a few copies of the book. I would also like to have a hardback copy of the book printed using blurb.com. 


My plan for future projects is to make lots of new painted textures and also to find more experimental textures such as scanning fabric or even foods! This will give me much more to work with and hopefully make my work more visually effective.