Strange Kid

Hello there!

Where oh where has the time gone?!?!? It has been a stupid amount of time since my last post so I think it's time to get back on this train and start blogging again!

A lot has been going on this year, most of what I have been working on I can not show until the future when all is approved and what not but for now here is a sculpture commission that I have just finished up.

The awesome chap that is Rondal Scott, commissioned me to to sculpt his great character "Strange kid" Rondal runs a really awesome website/blog called www.strangekidsclub.com which I was already a reader, so I jumped at the chance to work with Rondal on this.

Rondal sent me over his great design and I went to work on creating it and I took a few process pictures along the way.

The finished sculpt prior to some clean up here and there

 

The sculpt was then thrown into some silicone to make a mould and cast in resin.

The cast came out great but needed a little filler here and there. 

After the cast was cleaned up and sanded down I started up the super fun part of painting him up.

This was mostly done with airbrush but also a few small details were done by brush. I undercoated him with white then masked off the hair and painted the skin.

After the skin was finished I masked of the face leaving him this small window to see through.

After the hair I masked off the head and arms to paint the T shirt. I didn't take any photos of this though, I'm afraid.

And here is the finished chap!

I had a lot of fun doing this, especially the painting.

Hopefully I will have some puppet building work to post up soon. If not I can always post plenty of doodle stuff!

Autumn already?

Good day to you!

How has it gotten to Autumn already?!?!?!? This year is going so ridiculously fast. Slow down will ya!!


A few bits and pieces to show in this update.

I did a fairly quick sculpt of a chap that I've been wanting to design for a while. I was going to draw him up but instead I decided to sculpt him. I think it probably took a tiny bit longer than drawing it  but not by that much and I think I will start doing more of these concept sculpts instead of drawing them.Although knowing me I'll probably end up doing both :)
I'm quite happy with how he turned out but I think next time I'd definitely push his expression a lot more.

 I'm just calling him "Cigar Guy" for the moment

Digital paint job

Turn around video

VIMEO link

SHAPE BEASTIES
I've been going over notes from the character design course I did last year. I'm revisiting some of the exercises and the first is shape and shape language. I did these wee beasties

Starting point

Finished beasties

I did these other monsters but forgot to take a screenshot of the shapes.

It's a very fun and rewarding exercise and highly advise people to have a go. Just draw some shapes and have some fun!!

PRINTS!!!!

I got quite a lovely response to these from everyone and I had a few requests for prints.
So I looked into it and set up a store over on Society 6 where you can now buy a few of these and many more.

Today (22nd September, midnight pacific time) is the last day that you can get free shipping
Using this link http://society6.com/stopmotionben/prints?promo=ca2e16

I think they do this promotion every now and then so I'll be sure to post on here it happens again :)

 

So that's it for the moment. I have to get back to work!! I hope everyone is well and being awesome!!!

Oh and here's a bonus doodle, a little test I did with some of the default brushes available in Photoshop cs6. They have some very nice textures to them.

Clyde

Hello Everybody!

I've been working on this over the past few weeks in between doing various bits and bobs of character design work and other mysterious duties. Unfortunately it didn't turn out anywhere what I wanted it to be.

Clyde

The idea was to turn this sketch into a fully fledged puppet.

I was quite taken with the character and really wanted to try out doing some hair punching again and silicone painting and I'd got myself all excited but due to severe lack of funds I had to resort to good old newplast plasticine and I have a lot of it and it's a million times cheaper.

So I just started to sculpt and get a feel for the shape as I usually do.

Originally it was just going to be a mock up for a final head but I was liking how it was going so I decided to give him some drastic surgery and add a bit of a styrofoam headcore with K&S for a neck to slot in and out.

 As the head was thick plasticine I had to carefully dig out a trench for the head core to sit in. Then make sure the plasticine was nicely compacted around the core so there was no chance of it coming loose when moving the neck. 

Also I added some cloth tape to the neck wire so that the plasticine would fix to it without any problems sliding off which seems to be some peoples biggest problem when making plasticine puppets with wire armatures. You needs something for the plasticine to "Cling" on too or it will flop about around the wire.

With all of the surgery out of the way I finished the head up and gave him some hair. I didn't go with the original hair from the design as I just wasn't feeling it in plasticine. I think it was more that I could see it as real or synthetic hair and wouldn't work for me otherwise. 

I also added the flesh tunnels in his ears. They were made with two pieces of aluminium K&S round tubing that slotted into each other then the ends filed off to make them one whole piece. 

The eyebrows have a small amount of wax mixed in with the plasticine to keep it hard to help with being handled excessively.

As he was originally going to be a full puppet I had planned to make a full armature and what not but I got a few jobs in which I could see taking all of my time up so I decided for the moment this chap would be a pose-able bust. 

Time to give this chap a body and flesh out the neck!

The body was just more styrofoam with a piece of K&S glued inside for the neck to slot in. The body was then hot glued to a wooden base .

 

 

After I had done this he was unfortunately neglected for a week due to work. Over this time I had thought that I need to start fabricating my own clothes for puppets and have to rely on Mother dearest to do it for me. 

I scoured the internet for a pattern simple enough for me to follow and just went nuts on it.

This took me quiet a while and lots of trial & error. I think I redid the hood at least 4-5 times. I dont mind though as I have found sewing to be rather enjoyable. I used to do it a little bit as a young whippersnapper but He-man and turtles action figures won that battle.

Halfway through this process I was contacted about making some puppets for someones short film and decided that I couldn't afford to spend anymore time on this chap. I didn't really want to have something half finished either before I take on a big job. I've spent the whole of this weekend getting bits of sewing finished off and cleaning up the plasticine again as he had gotten quite mucky over the outfitting stage. I really wanted to change his face a bit and maybe add some more detail but I thought it was best not to start messing when he is pretty much done. 

So what started out as a full stop motion puppet has now unfortunately ended up as a small maquette/bust. Maybe in the near future I will revisit this character as I reaaaaally want to make that hair in the original drawing!!! I also really want to have another go with his clothes. Next time I suppose.There is a small chance that he might end up for sale but I'm unsure how I would go about doing so. Etsy or some other online store maybe? Hmmmm we'll have to see. 

Until next time!

Mohawk Melvin

Just a quick update.

I did this character sculpture last week as a potential give away for my followers on twitter.
I just need to find the time to paint it. Until then, I thought I would do a quick digital paint over to see how I want it to look.

Meet Melvin and his Mohawk

 

And here is the unpainted version as I know a few people like to flick between the two

 

The Inspector - Maquette

He's finally finished!

There are a few things here and there that I'm not too happy with but it does its job as a maquette and lets me see the whole character in 3D. I'm not too keen on the colour of the plasticine hence the reason for all the black and white photos.
I will add the digital paint over soon but I think I am actually going to physically paint this chap at some point so the digital paint will really help to make sure I get the colours right before hand.

16" Newplast plasticine

Edit (28-07-12)
Digital paint over

The Butler and the Detective

Hello there!! At the moment I have given myself a task to keep me active. I am currently working on my own project where I can concentrate on character design and also take my time with developing the characters. It's a theoretical short film about a Butler who is a criminal master mind and a detective who has spent the last 10 years hunting the butler down. I don't really have much of a story but I have enough to explore the characters. Maybe one day it will be a real short film but at the moment this is not financially or logistically possible for the foreseeable future but at least it is a cool little project to keep me creative.

 So here is a bit of development so far

The Butler

After doing a few more similar designs I decided this was not the look I wanted for this guy.  I did a couple more head drawings and was feeling a bit more happier with the shapes

After doing these I still was not feeling the design so I did another set of heads but this time kept in mind that I want him to look very creepy, smug and snake like... you know... like a criminal mastermind :)

I was happy where these where going so I picked one and then moved on to visualize the whole chap and came up with this

The Detective

I already had an idea of how I wanted this chap to look so it didn't take me too long to find the design I was happy with

This was the first drawing I did and found it wasn't what i wanted.

After a bit more of a play around i came up with my detective

I then added a bit of colour and set a scene

With all of this designing I was getting the itch to sculpt one of these guys. So I picked the detective :)

I did a quick head sculpt to see how the design translates to 3D

Happy with this I decided it is about time that I try making a full body maquette as I have not done this before. Doing character busts has become a bit of a comfort zone habit so now its time to change that.

Here is the armature. I used some hard packing foam to bulk out the stomach and then wrapped it in a kind of rough masking tape to the plasticine something to stick too.

After I blocked out the main shape I found I wasnt really feeling how it looked so I took to photoshop and did a bit of layering with the drawing to see where I was going wrong. I also did a bit of jiggery pokery with the actual drawing to change the pose to be more suited for sculpting

Thankfully this helped me out quite a bit and got back on track

So that's where I have gotten up to with documenting this maquette. I have gotten further with it but I'm going to save the rest of the progress photos for when it finished.

In other news, the series that I did some work experience on at Aardman has been on the TV over the past few weeks which means I have had the pleasure to see the sculptures I did all finished and moving in the episode 'Swimming' from 'Shaun the Sheep Championsheeps'

They dont look like much to excited about but at least I know that they originated from my hands. The original sculptures will have been doctored to how the animator needed to do the shots, so they added arms and glycerine for water (I think)

I managed to take a really crude photo of the TV paused but at least you can see the characters. I have got a photo of the actual sculptures from when I finished them but I don't think I'm allowed to post them so these will have to do :)

I hope all is well with everyone! Until next time!