Various Doodlings

Aaaand now for some non-robot related drawings.

First off, some sort of... grinny tooth-y fish thing. I don't think it's actually capable of properly opening its mouth.

Zombie and Biscuit looking silly, because my characters just aren't my characters unless I regularly draw stupid versions of them.

A new misc was added to Team Fortress 2 recently known as the Pop-Eyes, which are now rivalling the googly eyes for my favourite cosmetic item for the Pyro. Here's the mercenary in question showing off his beautiful new eyes to the Scout.

And last but not least, here we have a very colourful dinosaur thing that probably can't stand up very well. I don't think many of my doodled creatures would be able to physically function in the real world.

Robots, Robots Everywhere

Despite saying it was time to get back into the swing of things about a month ago, I never actually did add any more posts. Methinks it's time I rectified that - this particular post will be focusing on a few doodles and drawings I've done of robots, mine or otherwise, over the past few months.

First up we have my guys in their semi-casual getup... only none of them really have much of an idea of what semi-casual means (or what fashion means; here's looking at you, big guy). Two of them are just wearing the same things they usually wear anyway. What a hopeless lot.

When Hard's not wearing ridiculously bright and gaudy outfits, he's usually too lazy to change out of his bodysuit when he deactivates his armour, so... he's wearing that. Those eyebrows of his are taking over his face, I swear.

Speaking of Hard and gaudy outfits, I made this silly little animation of him sitting down whilst forgetting that he weighs 3 tons. It's basically the animation equivalent of doodling, so it's nothing too complex, but I like how it turned out anyway. (Don't ask about the broccoli guy in the background - inside joke)

Ivan going for a little swim, which probably wouldn't be terribly advisable for a robot, but oh well. Maybe he's particularly watertight.

Silly size comparison thing, featuring my biggest character, my tiniest character and my skinniest character.

I realised there's still an unfortunate lack of art of Searchman, so I decided to rectify that the only way I know how: by drawing him looking stupid. (Really this was just a warm-up doodle.)

A scribble of Pumpman which was supposed to be my first warm-up doodle after having not used my tablet in a while, but it ended up more dynamic than things that I actually put effort into. My hands are fickle things it seems.

I can get away with made-up helmetless appearances for most robot masters, but Chargeman is one who doesn't really lend himself very well to that sort of thing (not least because his design is just plain silly). Still didn't stop me from coming up with a humanoid version based on my take on his personality. :^B He's a pretty thickly built guy who does a lot of heavy lifting and shipments as part of his job. He's also rather surly and looks down on slackers.

Silly warm-up doodle of some of the Megaman 3 guys. Can you believe these are supposed to be evil robots created by a mad scientist bent on world domination? 

More Searchman because Searchman is great. This was done on a Cintiq I was trying out, hence why the lines are a lot neater than usual. I accidentally made him a little too green though.

Initially just a doodle, but I like how it turned out. This is probably how Hard reacts when his brothers get annoyed at him after he playfully slaps them on the back and ends up knocking their head off by accident.

And we're finishing this post off with yet more Searchman. His colours are more accurate here, though I still have a habit of tweaking colour schemes from what they are officially.

Team Fortress Madness pt. 2

Between graduating, moving out and having to look for a job, I kind of fell out of updating this blog. Think it's time I got back into the swing of things!

As mentioned in my last post (has it really been 3 months, wow), I started taking TF2 loadout commissions, and managed to get a couple.

Here we have a very, very smug Demoknight. He had to be tweaked a fair amount of times during the earlier stages, but I'm happy with how he turned out.

While the main idea was to do purely loadout commissions, in one instance I was asked for a completely vanilla, sinister looking Spy. I think this turned out alright to say I don't have a lot of experience with drawing the Spy.

I'll be making a separate post for my more recent stuff, but for now, here are some doodlings from before I moved away from Stoke.

Here we have Percy doing a bit of stargazing. I absolutely love the aesthetics of silhouettes, so this was an excuse to experiment with them a little. 

Here's where things start to get a little confusing. This is my armourless/more humanoid interpretation of the robot master Pumpman, looking annoyed because he's a cranky old git who hates kids. His arms are very noodly and silly.

Yet more robot master "humanisations", this time Hardman, nonchalantly shooting his fist at poor Percy. (He probably deserved it.)

I'm not quite sure what this newt-y little thing is, but it's rather cute.

And last but not least, here's a silly doodle of my still-unnamed dragon/mermaid hybrid. He seems quite enthralled by his tail fin.

Team Fortress Madness

With my graduation date drawing ever closer, I've turned to commissions in order to make a bit more money whilst I look for a job, now that I don't have a loan to fall back on. Along with my regular commissions, I'm now taking TF2 loadout commissions, since people seem to love seeing their customisations drawn. 

The above drawing is my Scout, and I drew him out as an example of one of the types of pictures I'd be able to offer.

I also drew some icon examples, using my Pyro and my brother's Soldier. We're both now using them as our Steam icons. :P

He's A Large Ham, v.2

I decided to do something a little different to my usual warm-up doodlings, and decided to redo the shading on one of my older pieces instead, since it's been bugging me for a while now. I experimented with a new shading method while I was at it, which involved doing hard shading and then blending parts with the water tool in SAI, and I like this version a lot better than the old one.

Also doodled Ivan and Percy wearing shutter shades whilst being pink because... because? I'm not really sure. They were fun to draw, though.

Aaaand here we have a Burstman, also making use of the shading method mentioned earlier. Poor Burst isn't a terribly popular Robot Master and he's from a rather unpopular instalment in the series, but I think he's adorable.

Robots, Robots Everywhere

I've found coming up with more humanoid appearances for Robot Masters to be pretty fun, so here are a few more doodles of that.

I've posted this guy before, but here's Hornet again. I'd decided I wasn't too happy with how angular his face was, so I softened it a bit and tweaked his colours a little, to make him look warmer and friendlier. I also finally got the hang of drawing that darn hair of his.

Next up is a design I came up with for this guy, who's known as Hard. The original design's pretty thick and rounded, so I kept that aspect in his body type, but while also keeping him looking as though he could probably punch through a wall if he wanted to.

Also, as a bonus, here are some recent silly warm-up doodlings I've done.

Here we have a strange giraffe creature.

A monster that likes to hide its true face...

I'm not sure what this is, but it's kind of cute.

Some sort of brown-y pink crocodile thing...

...aaaaand a creature I used to doodle a lot in my early teens, that I named the "lesser toed Nog" for some reason.

Finished Products

Whoops, been a while since I last posted. In that time my deadline's come and gone, so in this post I'll be sharing my finished animations.

First up, we have my final third year film, Three's A Crowd. The majority of my progress on this was documented by blog posts, but as the deadline began to draw near, I ended up just focusing on working on it, figuring that it'd make the parts I didn't post about more of a surprise.

I had a lot of fun working on this project, and I'm kind of surprised I managed to get so much done, considering I didn't have any second years to help me and so had to make all three character rigs and backgrounds and things by myself. I learned a lot of things in the process of making it and my animation skills improved too, which I feel becomes apparent the further into it it gets, considering I mostly worked on the scenes in chronological order. I also stepped out of my comfort zone quite a bit, especially with the backgrounds, which I don't normally have much confidence in doing.

From concept through to finished piece, this took about 3 months to produce. The programs I used were a combination of Paint Tool SAI and Photoshop for backgrounds and rigs, Toon Boom Harmony 10 for the animation, and Adobe After Effects and iMovie HD for editing.

Next up is the finished music video that my friends and I created for "The Flower Temple". While I only animated a few scenes, I contributed a lot of ideas while in the storyboarding process, and created several set pieces that could be used to put together backgrounds. I also created and rigged my character for the credits, made the end title, and helped with final editing.

The scenes that I did animate are both of the night sky scenes (shown in the video preview), my character's movements in the credits sequence, and the movements of the flowers in the end title. 

The aspect of this project that I enjoyed the most was the style we'd chosen to use, where everything looked home-made and practically was, since we'd bought lots of felt and buttons and things and used them to make various pieces in Photoshop. It was also interesting animating the hands, what with them being photos and all.

This isn't necessarily an animation per se, but a presentation I put together for the final part of my course, and it details the process I went through to develop and make my final film. I had to make it on my laptop using Adobe Premiere Pro, and it didn't quite export properly so some parts aren't on-screen for as long as they should be, but otherwise the important stuff's there.

Aaaand last but not least, here's my updated showreel, comprised of my best works from my three years of studying at Staffordshire University.