Limited Edition Original Inkings

So this is a bit of a departure from what I’ve been doing recently and a bit of a new direction – if you can call rocking it old school a new direction. I’ve been itching to have a crack at dip pen and ink work for a while now so I decided to fire up the old lightbox and ink a couple of pics from my sketchbooks. Then I decided to test whether its still fun to ink the same drawing over and over again, just like in traditional 2D animation clean up. So I did. And it is. It was also nice opportunity to watch a lot of episodes of ‘bottom’ while I was at it. The outcome is a couple of nice wedding present prints and a limited edition of 10 original inkings of a splendid ‘Curious Head Worm’. Here’s pics – looky:

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The next big thing on my mind is to go big! I want to get hold of the most massive canvasses I can get and basically do the same as the inkings but on a titanic scale. Big ass Cropley head worms and freaky life models 10 ft high! …but we’ll see how that goes.

‘Mouks’ – The Money Shot!

Everyone has a labour of love in their life – this was mine! 5 years in the making (!) and weighing in at a girthy 3 whole minutes. Created in my spare time to keep me sane from animating teddy bears waving day-in-day-out in my day job! This really is what years of working in the kids animation industry does to someone. Officially deemed ‘too strong for Aardman‘ – not sure what to make of that little claim to fame… enjoy (I did!)

It was fully animated from start to finish in Traditional 2D, then scanned and traced in Adobe Flash. It is what it is, but I can’t tell you how much this stupid little film means to me. The SFX and music was a joint effort from Darren Lambourne (who came up with the gruesome baby noises and visceral crunches) and Robin Stout who dragged it up from the gutter!

Trying to Catch Hepatitis C?

Told you I wasn’t a single issue guy! Lets talk about Animation! :D

I’ve spent most of my professional career as a professional 2D animator – both traditional 2D and digital 2D. I come from a background of pegbars, lightboxes, rostrum cameras, inking, cel paints, 16mm film, Steenbecks, studio lights and dope sheets. Over the years I’ve learned to love Adobe Flash and consider it ‘my backyard’ – its allowed me to create high quality quick turnaround content, like this:

Meet ‘Dennis’ – he’s trying to catch Hepatitis C! I designed, storyboarded and animated this spot for Rubberductions in 2007 using Adobe Flash. I really loved this job, it was the first project that I managed to get off the back of my independant film ‘Mouks’. Everyone from the agency right the way through to the Hep C sufferers who saw the film loved it! Big piles of win all round :D