Jan-Feb 2018

It has been so  long since I posted an update that this will be quite a long entry. 

Last time I posted I was just finishing Semester 1 of the comics masters course at Dundee University. 

I've updated my Website and Instagram with a bunch of images.

I can't post much of the lost legionnaire as it's being published soon by Comichaus. Here's a couple panels. It's a horror story about a Roman Legion getting trapped in a mysterious forest full of demons. This project was a great chance to write and draw a comic on my own. I enjoyed the freedom of controlling the pacing from the script and not just the page layouts. I also am quite fond of this style of rendering. I think it's very me.

After completing the lost legionnaire I started working on Unity, a superhero comic for the main project of the masters degree. The idea was to do some sort of riff on 90's style x-men comics. 

Anyway here are some of the pages.

It was optional to do some comic pages for most of the essays on the course. Here is the one I did for the Superhero module featuring "The Phantom". Got good marks for this :D

And this is another completed for an essay about Flash Gordon written by Dom Archer. 

Right after completing the course I did the 2000AD art competition at thought bubble and got second place. I was well chuffed. Here are the pages I produced for it.

Unfortunately I was pushed for time to get these done and it shows. Ideally I'd have liked the inking to have been as consistant and an improvement on what I did with 'The Lost Legionnaire'. What I ended up with is some sort of mish mash of styles between that and the unity project I had just finished. Still, second place is no bad. 

Since graduating I have worked on a short comic called Children of the Well for the Inkpot studio anthology and They Came From Planet Earth issue 2 and 3. 

Masters Degree

I've gone back to education yet again heh. I'm now on an MDes in Comics and Graphic Novels at Dundee Uni. The timing of it all worked out quite well with Dekko Comics finishing up in mid August. I'm looking forward to coming out of it next year with a strong portfolio of comic work.

Three weeks in and I'm enjoying it so far. There's a good bunch of people on the course and the research is mostly all reading comics and articles, and books about comics. What's not to like? *cough*essays*cough*

It's not all writing though, there's a creative element and the final dissertation is just a 22 page comic.

I've a new blog up for this semester for a 12 page comic project. It's a bit bare bones just now, but several drafts of the script is up if anyone fancies a read.

http://thelostlegionnaire.blogspot.co.uk/

It's looking like I'll also be doing They Came From Planet Earth issue 2 as well starting in October.

Finito!

5 years of intense study is over! Deciding to return to education was totally, absolutely the best thing I have ever done :) Thoroughly enjoyed my time at Motherwell College and DJCAD and happy to say I have no regrets.

Somehow we managed to get the film finished to the standard we were aiming for with no cuts! That was always a worry for me as I think it would have started to fall apart with to many cuts.

The plan now is to get the film into some festivals so unfortunately unless you come through to the DJCAD degree show you can't see it yet.

I've got that nice crash you get when you go from loads of work to no work at all so I'm taking a few days recovery time then it's time to find a job heh.

Here's my showreels! Got a bit more modelling to do for the texturing one but got time to do that now!

A week of matte painting

Fun change of pace from all the maya and file management stuff but was still pretty grueling to get through them all.

All of them have some renders for ground and various models for environments that were heavily painted over in photoshop

Some purely by me:

Some by Rebecca Horner that I finished up:

And one by Lauren McLaughlin that I heavily changed:

2 months to go :S

The last two or three weeks....streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssss. Finished off the workshop textures finally to kick things off and have since sorted out the screen displays and worked out how we will comp them. It's looking quite spiffy.

Next up I did some matte painting, we had to revisit the matte for scene 17 due to the background being too plain. So I comped in a render of some of the old town buildings and started painting in the details.

The next big task was sculpting and texturing the creator. It's mostly done. Here you can see my renders with rubbish lights and the skin looking quite nice then Scotts nice lighting and my skin textures looking all waxy and horrid.  Will post tweaked ones next week. Have to go change all the shader settings :|

EDIT*** Done a bit of tweaking. Much less pasty faced versions:

I also somehow found time in between to recut Papa the animatic and John Macho Operation: Mr Tiddles (Project Gary and I are working on).