Batman vs Luchadore

Loving those luchadore's.... I'm a fan of Nacho Libre so it felt fitting to slip him in here.

I'll need to fix up that leg coming forward on Lucha (knee a little flat).

I'm going to colour up Lucha and then start work on the background... I'll try this in Illustrator.

Any thoughts, tips are most welcome!!!

Bye for now :)

Batman fanart

One of my favourite classic super-hero's. I'm going to have him fighting someone..will post that in day or two.
Hope to also have a background environment!!!

Cartoon Animation stills

As promised in an earlier post here are some image stills from a recent job I had.
The hero dog above was a lot of fun and the challenge was to create a dynamic look within the constraints of the brief.

One of those constraints was that the animation was to be in 2-D (either front or side-on). So I had to make sure that the pose's were readable and easy for the animator to articulate.

Here's the rest of the animals for which was the interior shot. It was challenging also to find a way to create a visual interest between all the characters so that they could be read easily as the camera moved past them. In the final animation the mouse was moved from the trap as it wasn't seen as appropriate.

Exterior shot of clinic. Also side profile of characters.

I really enjoyed doing the exterior as it's something I haven't done alot of within illustrator.

Major reason for using illustrator was that once images were complete I could hand over the files and not have to worry about resolution...so yay for illustrator.

Lobster Johnson fanart: Feathering technique

Just started to colour-up this image. I've tried another technique which I like the look of. It's selecting the area's to shade and then feathering. This gives the image a much softer look. I initially had the outlines all in black (to harsh), so I coloured them respectively to the subject.

Definitely stoked with outlook so far.

I learn't this technique from Shane Lewis. Check out his tutorial. His blog is definitely worth a visit - he's got some funny-as pics!!!

Will post finished image later.

Bye for now and any thoughts on your colouring process would be very welcome.

Happy 70th Super Ma!!!

Caricature of my wife's mum. 
Big 70th birthday coming up so it seemed doing the super hero costume was called for.
I've been studying a digital artist called Jackademus. What I like about his style that I tried to incorporate here was the shading. He's an awesome artist, go check him out here.

Jack and the Beanstalk character concept

Here's my interpretation of Jack. Thinking that I might rip up the trousers a little to give him that much needed destitute look. Go destitute!!!

I'm working towards submitting 5-6 full colour pages to some publishers. So I thought I'd try Jack and the Beanstalk as a story - I mean how cool would it be to climb up into the clouds on a beanstalk.

Just some doodles at this stage, trying to get a feel of how he would move, some expressions, etc. I really love this stage of the concept as you start to see the character emerge.

Rat me out poser

Some Random remy-esque sketches after watching Ratatouille, one of my favourite Pixar films. Great thing with DVD is been able to slow down and track the movements of the characters for posing. You really get to see how characters move effectively.
Go on - be a poser!!!
One great resource I've found for posing characters has been Preston Blair. Just type in the name on google and you'll find heaps of great tips and techniques. He also bought out a book called Cartoon Animation which might be at your local library or alternatively there's lots of pages floating out there in web-land. One such place is here (ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive). It's a great resource for all sorts of stuff.

This was the result of me playing around with Remy cooking. The shirt kinda came out of watching spiderman 3 the other night...very random but there you go.
Tools used were 3b, hb pencils...little touch-up in photoshop.