Aardman 'Show & Tell'

Last month I got an email from a very lovely lady at Aardman asking if I wanted to be part of an exhibition they put on every year that showcased the work of their employees and friends of Aardman. I am very chuffed to be thought as a friend of Aardman and could not turn down the chance.

 So I spent the next few weeks preparing my work. Cleaning up sculpts and making bases for puppets to stand on, getting doodles printed and new business cards made. It was quite alarming at how long it actually took me to get everything ready. Needless to say I got all ready and took it down to Aardman's Gas ferry Rd HQ in Bristol. Only a few days later I had to go back down to attend the exhibitors grand opening.

 I am so glad I decided to go to this as I met sooo many amazing people and got see all of the fantastic work on display. I was extremely honoured to find that my work was on the same table as Rich Webber. Though I did feel bad that my work kind of took over most of the space!! I have to say as someone who is super self critical of their work, it was hard to watch people walk past mine looking at it, pointing, not knowing what they are saying. But by the end of the evening I got used to it.

Even though participating in this exhibition has ended up costing me a fair amount on travel, prints, business cards etc it was all extremely worth just to see Wallace and Gromit creator, Nick Park, having a good long look at my work while smiling away. Absolutely priceless! I also got to have a really encouraging talk with Peter Lord who had a lot of lovely things to say about my work. So with those two gems and getting to hang out with my good friend Emily, it was a pretty amazing evening.

Laika Creative Challenge... again

In between doing a few freelance doodle jobs I decided to attempt Laika's Monthly creative challenge with another stop motion puppet. The trouble was I only had a week to do it.  I do like a challenge especially a tight deadline :)

The challenge was to create a character that is missing from Paranorman and why they weren't in the in movie.
I created the character Ralph.

"This is Ralph. He works at 'Lost Barks Animal Rescue.
He has been missing since he accidentally ran over a dog (Bub) a couple of weeks ago. It is feared that he has been run out of the city by the Blithe Hollow stray canines"

If you haven't seen Paranorman then this video will introduce you to Bub

 Voting

If you would like to vote for me and you have a Facebook account please go to this link and 'Like" the picture. I would be most grateful. Also be sure to check out the entries as they are fantastic!

MY ENTRY

Voting ends Friday 28th September

 

Making Ralph

Me being the geek that I am, I tried my best to make it look like it could fit right in with other background characters from the movie.

I did a quick doodle of what I had in my head just so I had something to loosely work with.

Once again in my manic work load I didn't get the chance to take photos of every step I took. Mainly the armature build. I just made a very basic wire armature with a rigging point in the chest and the hips. Then I bulked out the body with cushion foam. I always find cutting this foam to be quite relaxing.  This is where the shape of the puppet started to change from the drawing. Not too much though.

Due to my current living situation I knew that I'm not going to get to animate this guy any time soon so I opted to give him a hard sculpted head and hands.  I also wanted to give him a prop which would be a dog catching pole.

Next up was painting the sculpted parts. I did this with a mix of airbrush and brush painting.

But before I started I did a quick digital paint of how I might want the head to look.

After doing this I watched one of the Paranorman trailers a few times and compared it to one of the characters that I have a fondness for. I decided I would just try to get it as close as I could to this guy.

Stages of painting

The finished head

The clothes really gave me so much trouble so I had to get help with those. I did try really hard but it was taking far too long and I was running out of time. Thanks Mum!!! :)

With the clothes done very swiftly, he was done! 

Here is a few more photos of the finished fella

Until next time!! 

P.s  Go and watch Paranorman!!

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

 

Blast from the past

Last week I was on holiday with my family revisiting some of the places we used to go as children. My brother has done a fantastic blog post on this HERE which also has some very old pictures with yours truly in them.
I had to find out these old photos for him and scan them in. While doing this I came across some cool photos of a very young chap :)

Making Daleks out of junk since 1990

A big plastic bowl, a bathmat, card board, plastic pots, a basket, chair, bamboo sticks, a funnel and copius amounts of sticky tape = Dalek.
I think I must be around 7 years old in these photos. This is pretty typical of what you would find me doing when I was a kid. Making stuff has always been a big part of my life. Being influenced by TV and Movies I would always make things so I could authentically act out my favourite roles in what ever it was that I would have been obsessing about at the time.

I think I must have started making this and realised I didn't have the materials to make an actual costume so I settled for the next best thing.

This next photo has always puzzled me silly. 

How the hell is my head bent up in that bowl????? It looks like I'm bending it right back?!?!?
Either way I must of been happy as Larry running around in my Dalek Helmet!

Anyway, I was a bit of a weird kid and it seems things never change ;)

Zombieeeeeeee

The awesome people at Laika house do a creative challenge every month and to celebrate the US release of Paranorman they announced ZOMBAGEDDON!

You have two weeks to create your piece of art to hand in and  the winner is picked by the amount of facebook "Likes"

I didn't win this time but it was a great excuse to make a stop motion zombie puppet

All of the main limbs are sculpted with Super Sculpey Firm, over armature wire. As this was a super quick challenge I had to make a very basic armature. No soldered sections just very strong plumbers putty to hold the limbs together. Then using the same plumbers putty I secured 2 rig points, one on his hip and one on his chest.

And due to this speedy process I didn't get the chance to take proper photos.

I also did the the head at the same time as the body. The whole puppet actually started with the head and the rest of the design flowed from that.

Very basic in design in terms of the armature. I used bandage foam to cover the jaw wires and created a kind of flaky skin texture.

Most of the parts that had bare wire showing were covered up with bandage foam and blended in to the sculpey. So like elbow, wrist, knee and finger joints.

Next up was the paint job. This was one thing I was really looking forward to do as I have never actually fully painted a puppet my self. I've always gotten my dad to do main parts or touch up the bits that went wrong but this time I was quite determined to do it all on my own. Most of it is done with an airbrush then finer details are brush painted.

I did a super quick digital paint over on the head to see the kind of colour scheme I wanted. Im not going to lie, it is very inspired by Paranorman's zombies.

I first had to undercoat it with white then block out the main colours

It took me a little bit of time to get used too the airbrush again as I havent used one in quite a while. Luckily it's like riding a bike :D
After the colour blocking was done I added shading and then finished off with the finer details.
As time was running out (again) I didn't get to take photos except for this one which also shows the armature before padding out.

After the paint job was finished I had to pad out the body and neck ready to be clothed. The clothes were probably the hardest part and were actually done the day before it had to be handed in.
The clothes were a mix of sewing, destroying old clothes and "No Sew Glue"

So that 2 weeks flew by super quick and as soon as I submitted it to the competition I was off on  holiday for a week with the family. 

Here are a few portfolio shots of the puppet.

Also when I got home this morning I was greeted by a super awesome gift from the super awesome Paranorman twitter crew

So very grateful for this, THANK YOU!

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

It's that time of knight!

I did this the other day when I had to have a few hours break from sculpting. I dont really have a "studio" area so I have to sculpt where ever I can which results in hurty achy back pains.

Anyways... to say I'm excited about the 'The Dark Knight Rises' is an understatement.

I AM BATMAN!!!!!

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!