I am having lots of fun on my personal project!! I want to make sure I am doing all the prep work to make sure it's the best book I can make! I've learned a lot this year from Visual Development/Concept Artists about the importance of planning. My goodness, before this year, I had no idea what "Vis Dev" even meant!
As
Seth Godin would put it in his book
Linchpin- this is "thrashing." It's important to thrash (or do all the exploring, bad work, and planning) at the beginning of the project or you will be doing bad thrashing at the end of your project (with bad results). Thrashing at the beginning will make everything much better in the long run. How will you know if you have the best solutions unless you explore many of them?
Above is what I finally came up with for my characters. I decided to make
Sculpey maquettes of the characters to use for reference- lighting and angles etc. The proportions are not exact, but it gives me a good reference anyway. I will probably paint them soon. I am also going to post a video soon of how I made them. I also started doing some color studies of the main character- Brunhilda. This is so much fun, I am loving this!
Lovely colors and great character design by Stevie Lewis, visual development artist at Dreamworks. Nice work for sale in her Etsy shop, too.
(via Stevie Ray)
Its official! I will be in Burbank again this year for the CTNEXPO conference.
I have been asked to be part of a panel.
Animation Designers Who Illustrate and Vice VersaAre you an illustrator and have been wondering if you should take your skill set into the world of animation design. Or maybe you are an animator or animation artist and have been wondering if you should take your skill set into the world of Children’s Book Illustration or art. What are the similarities and differences that these top artists who work both in animation and book illustration go through to create and stories visually.
Pretty cool. The panel will be moderated by the incredibly talented Carol Kieffer Police. Sitting on the panel are; Brain Ajar, Chris Appelhans, and myself. These folks are amazing so click on their names to check out their work or read about the discussion by clicking on this link;
http://www.CTNANIMATIONEXPO.com/animation-designers-who-illustrate-and-vice-versa/
Three weeks ago I was lucky enough to find myself at the CTN Expo taking in the forum discussions, catching up with friends, and toting my wares around to the studios. I was not able to show the recent film work because the movies have not yet been made or released but I had enough new stuff that it was time to freshen up my book. Thus began the task of designing a new portfolio. There are plenty of places on the web with great advice about putting together your book, most notably Escape from Illustration Island, and most are well worth the time it takes to read them even for someone that has been showing work for more than twenty years. Much of the advice is standard so I will not go into the details but will share a few observations that I had in this most recent go-round.
First off it was far more difficult than I remembered so your first stop should be to check your calendar. The day that you read about a conference like CTN or
Siggraph that you may want to attend, you need to build time into your production schedule. Treat it like a job because your next one may depend upon it. Build in time for going through your images, designing the thing, editing, feedback, more editing, and finally printing and shipping. I used
Blurb and was very happy once again with the results though I would recommend spending the extra money for the paper upgrade.
OK, so you have picked some recent images of work that you like. These are pieces that you enjoyed making and show the type work that you would like to get more of. I put together a contact sheet like this:
The portfolio that preceded this version, and there have been many, looked wonderful but as a friend of mine pointed out it was a bit of an embarrassment of riches. It was well received but clocked in at a hefty 34 pages. Even people that loved my work were stuffed by page 20.
I was a prime candidate for a radical intervention on Portfolios Biggest Losers. If you have a copy, I am sure that it looks very nice on your coffee table but my goal this time around was to make something a bit more user friendly. How? Simple. Edit until it hurts. I am good at critiquing, in fact I used to get paid to crit and edit while teaching at
RISD but when it comes to your own book, we all need a fresh eye. So I sent it off to my friend
Buck Lewis. I received something like this back.
Excellent post as always. I really need to try Sculpey sometime.
Thanks Russ! And yes, you should! I'd love to see what you come up with!