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.