Thursday 30 June 2011

The road to D&AD.

So, it's almost here!

As most of you already know, D&AD starts tomorow, so today is the day that everyone will be setting up!

'Tis all very exciting and if you are planning to take the voyage, I hope you enjoy what you see there!

For anyone who missed my previous posts, these are the people I will be displaying with:


And here's a link to go check out our page and their work too:

Tuesday 28 June 2011

Stephen the Bear.

For those of you planning on going to London for D&AD you can pick up a Stephen the Bear business card... but before you do, here's a little history.

Stephen started out as a concept I did for a Goldilocks animation that my group and I made in the second year for electives. Electives is basically to study and complete a project out of your area of study, and I chose animation two years running as it has always intrigued me.

After a bit of rummaging I have found that animation for your viewing enjoyment!

So, without hesitation, I give you:

Well Beloved Tales: Goldilocks, The Three Little Pigs and The Three Bears and the Wolf.



This was a collaboration between myself, Megan Bentley, Oli Osborne and Sean McCarthy.

Megan is an Illustrator like myself, and Oli and Sean are Graphic Designers.

The whole thing was painted by various members of the team (my pieces were the bears and the wolf) and is animated under a camera using cut-outs and stop frame animation.

Since then Stephen was woven into a small series I was playing around with called Scruffs, I developed his character and created a few story concepts, but then I started creating Gevaudan for University and Scruffs was left in the dark for a while.

So, as a homage to Stephen the Bear; he and his many happy clones will be greeting you at D&AD!

From the flood tunnels of Vegas to a cubicle in London...

My class at University is putting together a stand for the D&AD New Blood show in London tomorow and my final major piece of work will be on the table there.

For those of you unfamiliar with this Blog, that piece is "Donald", the story of a man who lives in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas, and it looks a bit like this...


For anyone interested in seeing this work first hand you can see the show at:

The Old Truman Brewery
91 Brick Lane
Shoreditch
London

This will be on show from Friday the 1st to Monday the 4th of July from 10:00am to 5:00pm.

Alternatively click this rather nifty link to see our pre-D&AD website where you can check out who else will be there and what might be on show!


As well as Donald which will be on a table, I will also have my portfolio available, so you can see all those pictures I posted the other day printed nice and big behind a moderately shiny piece of plastic!

Plus, my entire class will have their portfolios on show too, as well as some work on the walls and the table, so there will be plenty to see!

As an added bonus, there will also be a box full of glossy Stephen the Bear business cards for you to plunder!

Enjoy!

Friday 24 June 2011

My current Portfolio:

I have recently been setting up my portfolio for an upcoming show in London, so I figured that this was as good of a time as any to upload a few of the images!

This is The Amazing Journey, the whole thing is essentially just a trip to town, I did this as a holiday documentation project for Uni.


This next image was for an animation that I did in Year Two at UCA. It was a mishmash of Goldilocks and The Three Bears and The Three Little pigs. The basic concept was that each of the protagonists knocked at the wrong door... the animation used to be online, but isn't anymore and it was a collaborative affort between a fellow illustrator and two graphic designers.
     

                       
This fellow here is The Magical Bison of Doom. I have been doing small unrelated illustrated series' with him over the past year or so and for my girlfriend's valentines gift I made her a plushy version from scratch. He took about a week or two to make, from plans to getting materials to actually making him and I'm actually quite pleased with how he turned out!


Donald, as you have already seen, is the story of a man who lives in the tunnels of Las Vegas, for more info or single images just scroll down a bit, or click the Donald tab on the right!


Gevaudan, the village plagued by a beast made entirely from paper! For more info, scroll down or click Gevaudan!


Belief was part of a series of about seven books I did while looking into the lives of a group of Spiritualists just down the road from where I live, it was a documentation project that I tried to show in multiple ways for the ways each person described their faith and experiences. The full range varies from ink, pen, pencil, cut-out, stencil etc. and they were all stored in a wallet labelled "Belief".


Kyte. Kyte was the story of a man with green blood, an actual deformity in humans if you have a certain imballance. What started as a simple idea blew into a fairly ridiculous story, but I am still pleased with some of the imagery and layouts.


"Ordinary" was my first ever full blown comic. I completed it at College and it took just over 8 weeks to plan, draft, paint and edit. The book is 74 pages long and was all painted, printed and bound by me. There is only one in existance and some of the original files were sadly lost due to computer problems. Oh, also, the gist of the story was basically that I and my friends at College got superpowers from the dark room at my College...


Penguin did a book cover project last year and the book they chose was Perfume by Patrick Suskind. I really enjoyed the book, and straight away started testing out ways to tell the story visually by using elements in the book. In the end I went for this; a portait of the main character, Grenouille, in the substance that he created from the hair and scent soaked fat from the women he kills in the book. If you have read it, Grenuille has an amazing sense of smell, but has no scent of his own.


Unnoticed was another College project where I got a series of family photos and photos I had taken, and then focussed on the people in the backgrounds of these photos. The idea was to change the focus, what/ whoever these photos were orginally of was removed and insetad we're left with a portrait of unnoticed people. The images were all separate and were left in an envelope for people to find to keep up the unnoticed idea. They are all pencil on paper.


And last but not least, the Villa. My family and I went on holiday to Spain several years ago and while I was there I decided to paint a few pictures, the first was the view from the balcony and the second was of the actual villa we stayed in. This is the view of the villa from a ledge on the other side of the mountain and it took about 3 to 5 days to complete. After it was finished the owner of the villa purchased it from me which was quite nice. We have been there a few times since.


So, that's my portfolio so far, I hope you enjoyed it!