Illustration Friday: 'Vanity'

Work has suddenly got busy, which is nice but it means less time for all my extra-curricular activities. My blogs, Lang-8, comic, animation and everything else gets neglected as all I want to do is get home, lie on the couch and drink tea. But since my fiance and his mate are Spelunky addicts, it's sort of forcing me to do things. And damn, now it's too late for tea.

Pocahontas

I tried drawing her the other day and everything just looked awful. I was animating all day and it got to about 5 and I thought no, that's enough, I need to do something else. So Pocahontas it was. I got the video as an Easter present years ago so it's sort of seasonal too.

Troll run

Well, I say run. It's more of a... series of jumps. I was trying to convey that he's quite heavy and not that dextrous. Troll smash!

Illustration Friday: Natural

This started off as just me trying to paint a background quickly, but then the theme for this week came up and I thought it was rather apt.

I haven't got the balance of light/dark entirely right, or the flow of the elements, but I rather like the colours.

Running

This one I'm a little sketchy on. I wanted her hair 'wafting' but the technically correct waft was way too flicky and made it look odd. I went for more a swing. Her legs are really clicky and I've decided the way I rigged them was not the best. So I'm going to try something else tomorrow and see if that comes out a little smoother.

Waving

So I made and rigged my little character from the other day with Illustrator and After Effects. Did a little animation with her to see if it was working the way I imagined, and decided to make a gif for your enjoyment! She's waving just for you.

Website Update

Good day to you, people of blogger land. I have been slowly making various transitions. One of them is that you can now find me on Tumblr, where it turns out it's much easier and faster to get an audience. That doesn't mean I won't be posting here at all, in fact I tend to write a bit more info on my blogger entries as there is the space to do so.

I've also just updated my main website, www.joannemclelland.co.uk, to be a bit more cross platform friendly. It's made using a website maker, which was a slight pride hit as over the years I've taught myself a bit of html and css for the purpose of making my website.
My main problem was always updating image galleries. The simple viewer I had been using was a pain to go all the way back through and re-export. And also, seeing as I'm never really planning on being a web designer, my time is probably better spent drawing and animating.

So there you have it. A blog entirely without pictures, although I'll try to put something up later.

Koala cuteness

Designed a couple of vector poses for a competition, but then decided he was uber cute and I was going to do some more drawings for fun.

Illustration Friday 'Zodiac'

Here's my first go at the theme, obvs went for my star sign. Mixed poppy colours with a sort of Greek pottery theme. Might have another go on a more general 'Zodiac' theme later in the week but I'm happy with this for now.

Character Designs

I went along to a talk last night where they were asking for pitches for character driven animations. I felt a bit lost at the time, as the guys were right there and I had not an idea in my brain. So, slightly hungover today, sat and squeezed my eyes shut until I began thinking of things. Doodled up these two, slapped a bit of colour on, to satisfy my green hair fetish.

It's business time

Decided to try do some characters. I had little conversations with each of these guys as I was drawing them. I told the guy on the bottom left he needed to buy a bigger collar size, he wasn't fooling anyone and it was probably uncomfortable. I tried to get away from the guy on the bottom right as fast as possible.

Pushed the colours because brighter is better.

Totoro

Because he's guaranteed to brighten your day.

Yuki-onna

Been trying to design the 'snow demon/witch' for the comic. I really love the Heian era court costume that involves a lot of layers, but it's sort of made her more classy than scary. But then, she's also supposed to be 'bewitching' so maybe not too scary? I dunno.

Illustration Friday: Survival

I remember this from somewhere on the internet, so decided to give it a pop! I was torn between Sigourney Weaver and Arnie as ultimate action hero survivalists, but I figured I don't draw men that often. Maybe I will go more philosophical on another theme, but for now... 'Get to da choppa!!'

3D Chair of Inevitable Confusion

I decided I should learn a 3D package properly so in my off week I have dived into Cinema4D. Today's mission was making something with HyperNURBS from the tutorial. It's a thing of... mediocrity. And quite a few wrong bits as the tutorial contradicts itself. But... I learned things! And that's what's important.

Shubba

A quick little shiba inu for this evening.