December 2015 - February 2016

Here's some comics work I've done recently for a 2000AD submission. The script I worked from is called "Cycle of Violence". I'm not sure who it was written by but it can be found at the following link and is one of the sample scripts on the 2000AD website for art submissions.

http://www.2000adonline.com/submissions/

I did the whole thing digitally in Manga Studio as usual. The script was really great to work from - everything in it had a reason for being there and I tried to get all that included in the artwork.

Here's how I planned out the pages with layouts and thinking about dialogue and caption placement (there was quite a lot or so it seemed!). I was trying to do more interesting things with the panels and layouts again. 

Some practice drawings of the man himself. I found those shoulder pads difficult get looking right and appealing and am still not happy with the results in the finished pages. Drawing symmetrical helmets is also a real pain in the neck! I tend to skew things a lot one way or another so being able to flip the image on a button press when working digitally is a blessing.

Here are the final inked pages I sent off. Overall I'm pleased with the results, I think what I've been doing recently is starting to get to a level I am consistently happy with (not to mean I am ever going to stop trying to improve though!). 

I'm still fairly new to inking and it shows but I am noticing improvements every page I do. Some of the panels on page 4, I am particularly pleased with. I think I tend to be a bit too precious with the lines though so with the stuff I am working on now I am focusing on being a bit looser with the inking and trying not to draw everything. Hopefully I can post some of that work up soon.

I discovered LinkedIn SlideShare for showing off storyboards is quite handy.

Gwelsh The Egg Thief Storyboards from Gary Welsh

Gwelsh Proto June 2015 from Gary Welsh

And links to a couple more:

Roy Art Test

Gumball Art Test

I've been swotting up on my film language, screenwriting and story boarding knowledge recently and will be doing some more storyboard work shortly.

I wanted to learn a bit more about rigging and do some more animation since those are areas of the pipeline I have the least experience with so I did some HumanIK rigging and skinning and animation:

And to follow that up I made this wee guy.  I wanted to get to grips with building custom skeletons etc... I'd not done anything like that for a few years.

Here's the rough character design and model sheet I made.

And here's the 3D model. I could've spent more time on the textures but I was eager to get to the rigging. I'll maybe go back and tighten everything up when I get the chance.

I made some Blendshapes for the face and eyes using sculpt layers in Mudbox. I decided to just use the whole model rather than chop his head off to a separate mesh since it was mainly done for learning.

I built the feet and legs of the rig but in the end I had to get it done quickly and got some help from all round good guy, Gary Spiers finishing building the rig. Hat's off to you G.

I literally could not stop chuckling at his face while I was modelling him. Especially once I'd sculpted the blendshapes.

June-Aug 2015

I just finished up helping Gary out on a games project. This one I found much more enjoyable to do. I got to do some animation on it as well which was an interesting experience! I spent most of my time at university doing everything but animation and most that I had done had been 2D hand drawn but once I got into the swing of things I started to enjoy the process.

Here are some of the character designs for the game. I modeled, textured these guys, the fight arena and animated most the alien fight sequences with the other characters.

And some of the environment concepts with a render of the finished model.

 

In amongst all the freelance work I made this storyboard for a 3D animation. I'm not sure when it'll be animated but I really like the start of it and am particularly happy with how a couple of the shots turned out. I definitely want to do more storyboards like this future.

I've also put together a new showreel which can be viewed below and done a couple of storyboard art tests also linked below.

Showreel

Jam Media Test

Cartoon Network Test

I've still been plugging away with some comic work too. Here are some pages. I've been working in a bunch of different styles as you can see!

   

At the end of last year I worked on a 3D version of Top Trumps Turbo. Below is a bunch of concept work and screenshots of the models. The game was released on Steam earlier this summer. It was a good experience to follow on from Dare last summer and was nice to see a game through to completion and have it released.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/343180/