Busters' Museum

These are some location shots which I did for Buster Bumblechops' museum in the Moshi Monsters movie (in UK cinemas now!). This is a scene where the evil Dr Strangeglove appears to wreck havoc. It was really interesting to explore different ways to light and shift the focus around the scene. The final backgrounds were vectored in Illustrator.

Merry Christmas!

Moshi Movie out in UK cinemas

Today the Moshi Monsters Movie is opening in UK cinemas. I worked on character design, backgrounds, props and general visual development. It was a small but dedicated team that pulled it all together in a mind-bogglingly short time.
Fellow Mind Candy artists who worked on the film are Lea, Trevor, Ross, Celine.

I'll put together a post with some of the development work that I did very soon. It was a first time for many things and I learnt a lot.

Card for Mazz & Badger

I made this card for my friends Mazz and Badger who got hitched the other week. It was a nice opportunity to try out some Dr Ph Martin inks. I love how vibrant the colours are!

Coming Soon...

This is the poster I did for the Moshi Monsters Movie that's coming out in December. I also worked on the production for the better part of a year. It was really awesome to work on an animation, and I'm really excited to see it coming into UK cinemas soon! I'll probably write another post with some production art once the film is out. :)

Here's the press release.

Schoolism LIVE London Workshop

This past weekend I attended the Schoolism LIVE London workshop with a couple of friends from work. This is the second time Bobby Chiu has brought the live version of his online classes to London. Last year I was lucky enough to catch workshops with caricature artist Jason Seiler, Bobby, the man himself, and the inimitable Alex Woo. They were some of the most informative and helpful workshops I'd attended to date so there was no question about jumping at the chance to come back for another round.

The instructors this year were creature designer Terryl Whitlatch and colour and light guru Nathan Fowkes. Terryl designed the creatures for the reboot of Star Wars and has worked for many feature films. Nathan Fowkes hardly needs any introduction. I've been a fan of his blog for a long time and when his Colour and Light course appeared on Schoolism a while back my excitement was quickly replaced by disappointment when the spots for his class vanished within minutes.

As always with Schoolism workshops, everything was tightly run and the contents of both workshops were both inspiring and rich on information.
Terryl ran through some basic animal anatomy, showing how to go from skeleton to gestural sketch, to muscular drawing and finally surface finish. She covered a range of different animal types, from fish to bird, to four-legged mammals, and went through some of the distinctive characteristics of each. She the intorduced us to the idea of combining different animal characteristics to form imaginary creatures that feel like they could exist.
I really enjoyed Terryl's course but I haven't done much animal drawing before so what I took away from her workshop was mostly a basic introduction to animal drawing. It might sound obvious but I realised that there are no shortcuts to drawing animals. You can't simply extend what you know about drawing humans to animals. Just as with drawing people you need to study and observe to get anywhere. Terryl's love and fascination with animals has meant that she's been a lifelong student of animal anatomy, evolution and behaviour, which shows in her drawings.

I was very excited about Nathan's course on the Sunday. My relationship with colour is a difficult one. There was a stretch of time when I didn't do any colour work at all, which made me even more scared of colour.
Nathan broke down the concepts of light and colour into properties that were simple to understand (albeit difficult to master), and my fear of colour has started to recede. Apart from the main bulk of the talk on properties of light and colour, Nathan told a series of anecdotes about his long career in the industry as well which were both entertaining and insightful.

These are a couple of notes that stuck most firmly to my mind.

• The entertainment today industry is saturated, but if you learn principles instead of follow trends you will always be able to find meaningful work.
• The One-two punch. The best pictures have a clear purpose. Keep the purpose front and centre in your mind.
• Do everything you can to create a sense of depth in the picture.
• Think of colour in terms of value and temperature. 
• Emotional associations with colour. Can think of it in terms of verbal descriptions like "feeling blue", "seeing red" etc... Can think of temperature in terms of associations with the colour, like, "sunny yellow" "mouldy yellow" or "sandy yellow".

Again, Schoolism delivers! Huge thanks to Bobby Chiu and Schoolism for bringing these amazing teachers to London!

Thanks to Pooneh Heydarian for the picture! 

Tudor man

Sunburn

It's been a hot summer but I'm not complaining! Got to be thankful for the bits of summer that we get in ol' blighty. 

Aviator

A character design that I did for work that won't be getting used.

I spy

Pour Chippy

This is a birthday card for my friend Chippy who recently got a little kitten called Connor. 

Vial

Playing around. Brushes courtesy of the wonderful Celine Choo! 

iPad sketches

I got an iPad mini a while ago and I've been enjoying sketching on it on my commute every day. Not having pressure sensitivity is a bit of a pain but it's not that big of a deal for these quick, rough doodles.

The drawing app I use is called Procreate. I think there's a lot of consensus in that it's the best drawing app out there at the moment. It's very intuitive and powerful, featuring a while lot of layer modes and textured brushes which feel good even without pressure sensitivity. You can create your own brushes, like in Photoshop and I might've read that it's possible to export brushes as well, but I haven't figured out how yet.

After trying a few options, the stylus I've settled on is the Sensu brush. I was quite skeptic about using a brush for stylus at first, it seemed a bit silly, but after trying a friend's brush I found that the feel of the brush on the screen kind of suited the way I like the draw.
I also tried the Pogo Connect, which has battery powered pressure sensitivity through bluetooth, but I find it a bit of a hassle to use. The button on the side of the pen switches the pen on, so if I keep it in my bag the pen gets accidentally switched on all the time which drains the battery. It also requires quite a lot of pressure to make a mark, which makes it difficult to draw with, but I do like it for painting.

Composition study

I've been doing some landscape studies in colour in an attempt to brush up my colour chops, but after doing a few I felt that what really made a picture work was the composition. There's too much to think about when you're trying to cover colour, value, composition and drawing all at once so I wanted to focus on composition.

At the moment I'm sitting one floor below the incredible Neil Campbell Ross whose compositions are just killer. I was looking at some of his work for inspiration for this one.

Switching lens

I've been doing some more drawing on my commute but it's been quite difficult since I moved office. The train is shakier and more crowded so it makes things a bit tricky.

Still, I did these two drawings of the same guy the other day. At first I was trying to identify the most prominent anatomical features and make sure that I emphasised them. I wasn't very happy with the drawing though so I gave it another go.
This second time I was going for the big picture. I looked at the face, looked down on the paper and drew the impression that it left in my mind, without worrying too much about individual  features.

I think the first drawing is a more accurate depiction of what I saw but the second one captures the life and gesture better. It was interesting to see how switching from one way of looking to the other produced a very different drawing.