Old Stuff

Dusting out the attic.... No, not really. Just some personal stuff to show a couple of examples of my own handiwork I s'pose. This chicken was for a western I was trying to develop. I wanted to play with the idea of a chicken as the hero. It took a while to arrive at this design and I like it, I was just not that confident in my own ability as a writer. One day. This critter was a miscellaneous design for something and was never used. Well, he was actually, but the whole sequence in which he appeared was cut. He was fun to design and animate, and I think shows my fondness for the Warners type characters.
This dog was created to be a new logo for the "Working Dog" company just before they were about to release "The Dish". They ended up going for a more realistic blue heeler, which again I animated and they decided against using. They wanted a real dog to do a pile of stuff you probably couldn't get it to do in 15 seconds.

More Wild Things

Here's the rest of the Wild Things. Is it just me or does this guy above bear a bit of a resemblance to William Shakspeare? The Rooster was quite hard to do, cos you only see him in profile in the book.
As I worked through these, you start to pick up inconsistencies in the illustrations. I found myself having to pick the most appealing parts of what I required and then work it into the overall model and try and make it consistent.
I love the feet on the bull- they'd have to be the defining touch.

Drawing Princesses

You would think as an Animator (or an artist of any type for that matter) that being able to draw compentantly would be a great buzz for your kids- that you could draw anything they ask of you. Even though I've been drawing rapid fire Thomas the tank engines and Dorothy the dinosaurs on my daughters "MagnaDoodle" for a while now and keeping her quite content with those, I learnt the hard way tonight, that such is not necessarily the case. My (almost) three year old daughter is mad over prinesses at the moment, especially the Disney ones. Mummy bravely attempted one this afternoon (which she wants buried forever) and right before bedtime, Madi asked if I could draw her a princess. Sitting next to her on her bed with pad and pencil in hand I asked "who would you like me to draw?", "Cinderelly" she replied. "Ha" Mummy laughed- if only Madi was about 18 months older, she would have been in her element as I was animated Cinderella herself on our last Picture "Cinderella 3" at Disney Sydney before it shut down. I quickly drew down a few lines (not the one pictured below) and well..... Madi went all quiet, wouldn't look at the picture and snuggled into Mummy very upset and "shy". I don't think she was expecting it to actually look like Cinderella, and was taken aback. It was a bit funny and sad at the same time.
Mummy was proud of her effort- "at least I didn't make her cry"

A couple of Wild Things

Here's a crack at doing a turnaround Model sheet for a couple of the "Wild Things" characters. I left off the cross hatching. They were a little tough to do 'cos when you really start to analyse the drawings in the book there's a bit of variation between the pictures and things change depending on the pose. This process forces you to set rules and uniformity. They were a lot of fun to do. On a side point it was interesting reading in the "Art of Sendak" book that this classic was created in roughly six months.

Word gets out!!

Wow! I got a mention on Aaron Simpson's great site "Cold Hard Flash" about my work on "Dogstar". I was wondering why views to my Flash reel had jumped up so much in a day. It obviously doesn't take long for the word to get around.
You can check out more on "Dogstar" here and here.

Apocolyptic Hero

More work, super hero stuff - not really my cup of tea. I think most of us had the cliche super hero drawings beaten out of us when we were teenagers. Here I had to create an apocolyptic hero who initially was a security guard hunting down zombies. I'm not really that enamoured with the pose -he's recoiling from shooting at a lunging zombie.The brief then changed to a soldier type dude complete with body armour and mammoth gun. The painterly effect wasn't well received. It was a photo-realistic pic they were after. Again, another crack at photoshop. I need to get the blends working better. After producing line drawings for so long, it's a little weird using colour.

Flash animation "Dogstar"

Here's a collection of scenes I animated in Flash for the upcoming series "Dogstar".
The scene of Gemma (the green cat like character) doing the haka is my favourite.