Colouring the Arm

Despite having finished the complete robot print a while back and having displayed it in the Collide exhibition, I still wasn't quite happy with the finished picture. Something wasn't quite right. It took me a long time to come to terms with it.

I think I was expecting the picture to be a big joining of lots of different shapes, colours, and styles, like a pile of dirty laundry. But it wasn't quite looking like that. It took me a while to realise it, but instead of being a mash-up of different parts, it's instead become interesting for a totally different way. Apart from one limb, he's an incredibly cohesive bot. It took me so long to realise what needed to be done to make it work. It just needed the detail fineliner arm to fit in more.

I'm no stranger to colouring my robot artwork. Initially all of my drawings were coloured, mostly in pencil crayon. But starting with A Certain Romance, this stopped being the norm, and I  stuck with black and white art and focused on the detail. I've since had a few attempts at colouring my art, using the the gradiented technique I used on the first batch of New Captain Cool art. I had a little success with that but I never felt like it fitted my style. When I did the batch of Citybots that accompanied Bigger Chris, I had to find a technique that would do them justice. I decided to dial things back a bit. I set up a really limited colour palette of shades of brown with some greys and reds. There were about seven colours in all. I then used these as block colours, observing lighting and shading but also adding details and embelishing in the other colours. This worked well.

I had no doubts about using that technique for this arm. The usual robot colour scheme had partially inspired the colours of this bot, and I already had the vector arm to give me a colour guide. This made things fairly simple. I gave the robot a quick coverage of the basic colours of the other arm, adjusting for the new shading layout. Afterwards I used the more minor colours to add detail to the arm, simply by adding colour to individual sections across the robot. I then repeated this with the other detail colours. I took note of the area colours as well with this. The brown area mostly uses the beige detail colours whilst the dark green sections make far more use of the blues. It helps to keep the sections distinct. To finish I used the magic wand tool to clean up the edges, then re-added it to the C4D model. I also had the chance to make a few stylistic tweaks, making the arm slightly bigger as well as the head so it fitted onto the pipes on the torso. I then rendered it out at 800 dpi to account for the broken camera of the C4D file. For the finished robot I had to flip the image (as C4D flips it back) and I also increased the brightness as it looks too dark when the colours are combined with the high-density detailing. I prefer the dark one for the limb on it's own though. I feel it's a little more characterful.

Now the arm's been coloured the picture works so much better. It's got a symetrical colour layout and the only B&W parts are the waist and thighs. I'm proud of this one.

Changes (Lecture Greatest Hits & Discussion)

Another thing I enjoy about Allison's lectures is the way they detail the art world as it changes. She does a really excellent job of painting the transitions between movements and how one movements shifts into another. It's also fascinating hearing how much the movements can borrow from each other whilst seemingly want nothing to do with their predecessors. It's sometimes quite amusing.

It's also been a nice way of ushering in the change in my work. My style has shifted all over the place, and there was a time I'd be worried about that. About losing my current style altogether. But as time's gone on I've stopped thinking of this as a negative. I mean sure my style changes. My method of drawing people is completely different from this time last year. Even my robot drawing style has shifted into completely new territory and I'm so happy about all of these. It's taught me that change is necessary and should be appreciated.

It's also made me think about what I would like to change about other things, including the course. And as (I'm really hoping) this will be read by tutors this feels like a good place to say some of these things.

The biggest gripe I've not mentioned here so far is my concerns with the grade weighting of the course. Not to sound patronising or rude, but it looks at the moment like they picked three focuses and gave them all equal gradings without too much thought about the work that goes in. I'll elaborate a little. For our studio we're expected to work for around eight hours on a tuesday. Tracy has also expressed that she wants us working about twice that again at home over the week. The equates to somewhere in the region of twenty hours on studio work in a week. 

By contrast, we spend a scheduled four hours a week on production, with the expectation to fill a couple more with expanded studies. Even by doubling the production time, this gives us a number of eight hours. Something's feeling a little bit off here. This figures also reflected in the attention tutors place on our studio projects. There's nary a mention of production from any of our tutors all year. It's reflected as a really small part of our year. So why is it weighted the same as studio work? The part of the course we spend hundreds of hours on just to scrape a pass. It's such a strange way of working and feels somewhat unrefined and poorly thought out.

I still feel like theory deserves its place in the grading system at about the same value it is now. there's a lot of work that's thrown into that section and theory always tends to have a slightly amplified weighting due to its nature in most courses and disciplines.

So that's a lot of big talk. So what would I propose here? If the workload stays the same and I feel it should. The balance here feels quite appropriate. Admittedly I would love more production workshops but I can't see that happening in the current schedule. So I would propose a new weighting:

50% - Studio Work
20% - Production
30% - Theory

I feel this is a far more appropriate weighting of the units and is far more respectful of the workload required for the units. The studio work now carries the emphasis it should for such a huge part of our year whilst production is dropped to a far smaller part. Production is a massively useful part of this course and most of the time is the most rewarding session of the week. But I don't feel it needs to have a high weighting as it's all for our benefit. It's about learning new skills rather than creating polished outcomes. As I've mentioned in the last Discussion, it puts emphasis on the wrong things which seems to be a key flaw of this course.

Out of all of the points I have made about the course and the way it is run, this is the one I truly stand by the most as I feel that if this were addressed most of the other issues would fix themselves. As a result the context would be delivered resulting in less strain on the contextual portfolio allowing it to be delivered in the current way without as much pressure. It would even hopefully fix the weak parts of production, as those sessions would be more geared towards the method than the outcome, which is one of the key problems it faces.

To conclude, I'm aware this is a huge shift, but I feel it would greatly benefit the course and make things a lot clearer for students, and help make the aims of the production aspect of the course far clearer.

Context (Lecture Greatest Hits & Discussion)

One of my favourite parts of Allison's lectures is the way she introduces each artist and explains their backgrounds and aims in the industry. It's a really nice way of adding a whole lot of value to an artist's work. It's such an important thing when you're studying individuals, as it allows the viewer a glimpse into the context and reasoning behind pieces that might otherwise be ignored.

It's really made me think about the 'why' in all of my pieces. Where all the ideas come from, why I did things the way I did, what's to blame. It's a whole lot of really useful stuff to think about because it adds a great deal more to the projects. It's that neat connection between research and the final piece that's often overlooked.

Recently this has proved to be a huge dividing point between me and the values of this course. Recently it has begun to feel like context has been dragged apart from the work it's connected to. Whilst the contextual portfolio is still thankfully a thing, even that has begun to be dismantled from its original purpose. The first time I really noticed this was the visual appendix. Each design I made for that project was heavily based around research into other superheroes and real world outfits and cultures. I wanted each costume to be well reasoned and to have a function in the list rather than just a collection of useless lines and meaningless icons.  The word give context to the art and add so much more value to it. Needless to say I was dissapointed when I discovered the visual appendix was meant to be completely contextless. All of that reasoning, all of that background, all that inspiration. All washed away. Whilst I understand the vague reasoning here, and that the pictures are supposed to come first, the harsh word limit has only hurt peoples projects. Students now have to rely on tutors understanding their work right off the bat. As Allison has instilled on us from the start of the year, that's not how things work. That's not how art is effective.

As I understand things so far, the contextual portfolio still performs in its original function as a blog the tutors will look through, and I'm happy about that. But if that is no longer the case then something is deeply wrong at the core of this course. The presentation idea is a decent way of showcasing the core of what's going on but unless the blog is also looked at the entire notion of the contextual portfolio falls flat on its face. At this point the contextual portfolio has to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the studio work as well as its own regular function. If it's not read then it feels like a really important part of the creative process is being abandoned

To wrap this up, I feel like context is becoming increasingly

Lecture Greatest Hits: Crash

Another lecture I gained a lot from was Spencer's lecture on Crash, and about all the different covers and methods of advertising it. It was one of those strange lectures that didn't really interest me at the time but I keep coming back to the ideas from it. Every now and then I pick up on something and think 'wow that's been advertised terribly'. It's a thought I've had before but that lecture made me pick up on it a lot more often.

It was a really useful lecture in terms of opening my eyes to things. I'm a lot more critical of things like film trailers and posters doing a bad job of expressing the content of films, and sometimes advertising to the wrong kind of audiences. But it's also made me more greatful of the better advertising campaigns out there. Films like Deadpool have done an incredible job of communicating with their target audience in some really unconventional ways. On the negative side, I already scrutinise things too much and this has just added adverts and trailers onto that list. Oh well.

CV

I could've sworn I've talked about this before. No? Never mind here we go. It's time to talk about the mini-project that turned into almost as big a deal as the YCN brief.

The CV was a tough task for me. I'm not the most graphically-minded guy so putting together a set of graphics that make me not look like a cigarette in someone's perfect birthday cake was going to take a lot of effort.

My first attempt was the very obvious 'go into InDesign and try and make something' approach. It didn't get too far before I realised I actually needed an idea to make it look effective rather than just blind optimism. What I had made until then was a fairly nice-looking setup in retrospect. The orange looks really nice and the type is a long way from awful. I can imagine the round formatting being awkward later on though. I might use it for if I make a fore regular CV at some point.

So I thought for all of five seconds and decided I wanted to have it look like a machine to try and capture that robot spirit I'm known for. So I jumped back into InDesign and tried to put it together. I did quite a bit of it before deciding that this wasn't working out, and that it was going to be far too much work.

I also entertained the thought of drawing one by hand but I didn't like the idea of having such a constrained CV that I wouldn't be able to tweak much.

So in a move crazier than Spencer's lecture schedule, I decided to jump headfirst in and build a CV in Cinema 4D. Yes I'm a madman. Of course. From my perspective at the start, I wanted a CV I could easily edit that would really capture the robot spirit of my hand artwork. And I wanted to have fun making it. C4D was also a good idea in that it taught me a bit more about the software.

Somewhere along that line I forgot that Cinema 4D takes a really long time. But ignoring that, building this thing was a blast. Plus I learned a massive amount. I wouldn't have been able to make the torso nearly as good if it weren't for this.

I put together the first take based on my plans for the InDesign version. It's mostly based around a set of monitors with a ring I initially envisioned as a car speedo tracking my skill levels in each piece of software. I also added some sidebars about my history and education and such. It's a pretty simplistic build bit I like the glow effects I've used and there are some really cool ideas in there. I stuck with this design for a while too. I mean I never sent it to anyone but I still totally kept it. It was only when I was about to message people that I took another look at it that I decided it needed one more take.

For the third case I came in with a far clearer plan in mind which would economise on space far better and put the important stuff at the forefront. I also took the chance to tone down on some of the less useful information. Sadly this meant losing the really madcap camera angles but I think it's a worthy sacrifice. I was able to keep a lot of the elements I liked from the previous design. The glowy screens are back and look even better now. I've kept the awesome spotlight backdrop. But the big change was essentially basing the entire design around the speedometer idea, and placing the rest of the text inside that console. I'm so glad I did this. Other changes include separating the skill graphs into clear segments so they're easier to differentiate as well as making the skill levels more defined. The metal texture was also updated to the one from the robot torso, and I added the lighting pods from that thing as well, because sharing is caring.

The final big change that was half the reason for the update, was the incorporation of some of my actual artwork into it, which was the single biggest weakness of the last one. It did a really bad job of showcasing what I can do as an artist and I wasn't really ok with that. So now it shows my artwork in the panel where it shows which medium I'm talking about.

So to conclude, the CV process was mind-bogglingly mad but it's wound me up with a really unique looking CV and kicked my C4D skills up a notch. I'm pretty happy with this.

Lecture Greatest Hits: CV Talk

One of Pete's fairly early was about placements and CVs and how to be noticed. Without a doubt it's probably the most real-world-useful lecture we've had, even compared to Pete's other lectures. Blimey he's had some good ones.

So Pete was talking about CVs and how to be noticed when employers receive a huge pile of the things every year. A few interesting pieces of advice were given. The first was to keep it succinct and focus on what the employer wants to see. The second: make it stand out from the crowd. That part's pretty hard in the world of very design-heavy CVs. The sheer range of beautiful ones I've seen from this course alone is jaw-dropping. And the third main point was about how they're delivered. Ideally give them in person, then post, then email, was his advice.

As Huddersfield Uni is placement-crazy, I had put together a CV halfway through this year to go placement-hunting with. I'll make a full post about this in a minute. But yeah, genuine thanks to Pete for pointing a lot of this stuff out. Super useful stuff.

Lecture Greatest Hits: Gender in Animation

So to kick-off this mini sseries about the lecture programme, I think it's best to start with the most important in terms of effect on this year's work. And that's Spencer's Term 2 talk about the gender divide an animation. For starters, it was probably my favourite lecture of the year. It was balanced, respectful, and really put the point across well. He should be proud of that one.

And secondly I like it because it gave me the inclination to do my essay on gender in comics. At the point the lecture arrived, I was really struggling in terms of essay ideas, as my first one crashed and burned and I needed a replacement. I'd been thinking for a while and nothing was coming. Like, I knew I wanted to something about comics but I just couldn't think of anything worth writing. Then this lecture came bouncing right out of the blue like most of Spencer's lectures do and suddenly I had a really good essay topic.

The lecture gave me a couple of topic ideas too if I recall correctly. I can't remember exactly though. It's been quite a while since that lecture.

The Lecture Programme

Before I delve into this year's lectures in a bit more detail, I figured I'd have a little chat about them as a whole.

Compared to last year, the lectures were at another level. In itself that's really not much of a statement, as I was a long way from impressed with last year's batch. This year however was another story. All three lecture sections did their jobs well. They all had their genuinely interesting moments. Some more often admittedly, but all of them were good.

Allison's lectures dealt with the fairly general topic of art practice, and continued from last year's section. As the best of last year, these have continued to be interesting, detailing some really interesting elements of the art world. Despite not broadening my outlook on art as much as was possibly intended, the lectures have opened my eyes to several new artists. In particular her lectures on photography were surprisingly fascinating, even though I'm not the biggest fan of the medium. It's just so interesting to hear how these people work and their motives and context around it. And that really capitalises the parts of her lectures I appreciate the most: how she portrays the artists as real people. The way she introduces each artist before the work is fantastic and adds a lot of flavour to their work. It really helps to sell work that's sometimes not all that impressive at first look.

Next up is Pete. His lectures were a whole lot of something new. And really appreciated. Pete tackled the business side of things and these are probably the most useful lectures we've had here. They detail how to actually survive in the art world which is something SERIOUSLY useful, epecially with the way the industry is at the moment. I have learned so many really important things from these lectures. He's told us more about placements than anybody else, including the best ways to get them. he's responsible for my insane CV ideas too. Well, for giving me them at least. His lectures have been hugely effective at giving me a bit of a confidence boost about the industry. It's still a terrifying thought to go out into the art world but at least I know more about what to expect now.

And finally comes Spencer. The big curveball of the lecture programme, Spencer zigzags from topic to topic over the weeks and it might get annoying if most of them weren't fairly interesting. And quite a lot of fun too. Especially towards the end of the year, the lectures started going in some really odd directions. A lot of them ended up being really good though. Like, I think most of his best lectures came from around then. There was the awesome one on the gender imbalance in animation. And the one about all the covers of Crash. There have been some good 'uns.

Sooo...onto some of the best bits...beecause I really do need something to put into the PDF slides.

Captain Cool!

A good while before I decided to be more work on Captain Cool in the Visual Appendix project (or before I even knew that such a thing existed), I drew Captain Cool in his original outfit. I wanted to have another go at drawing people as I'd fallen a little out of practice and was still trying to find a drawing style that worked. It also marked the first time in a long while that I'd tried to do a decent job of drawing the old character design. Usually I would draw him as a silly cartoon version instead as that's all the character was to me until recently. And whilst it's not the best person I've drawn by a long shot, it's really interesting from a style perspective as it shows a bridge between my old drawing style and my new one that debuted is the Visual Appendix. Plus it's Captain cool and I love that guy.

Research And Inspiration - Gestalt

Gestalt was a strange unit research-wise. Being a unit with no commercial nature at all, there wasn't a market to research in the slightest. And being as unique as it is, there's nothing quite like it, as a whole at least.

The idea itself came from a combination of a discussion with Tracy, and with some of my previous work. Tracy was the first person to agree that there wasn't enough basis to make a whole unit based around a single picture done in my robot style. So I instantly thought back to my back-catalog and remembered that I've done a few pictures in chunks. So I decided to combine the nature of two of my previous pieces here. The first was a picture I did for school, where I repeated the same pattern but used a different technique for each. The second was a picture I did for a robot contest where I had to make three pictures that formed one. Each one worked on its own but became something greater when combined. That was something I liked.

Design-wise I wanted to make a departure from the more over-designed big bots I was used to so I looked back to some of my more traditional robots. My soulbot style was out the question as it was too skinny, and wouldn't give me anything to work with. None of my other existing ideas worked either so I had to come up with something new. The final design used elements found in quite a few old pictures as well as an injection of something new. It was going to have to be humanoid and accessable but charming at the same time. Bucky was a good place to start here. I also used The Highlander as a key reference as it was the best indicator of where my style's currently at.

For the cinema 4D chest I didn't immediately find inspiration anywhere. I just dived straight in there and started building. But as I worked and came up with ideas, the animated film Robots began to spring to mind very often, It became especially important as I began to toy around with physics engines to do some slight animation work with him. The madcap contraptions of Wallace and Gromit were also helpful when creating the feel for it.

For the Robotic Fineliner arm my main inspiration was of course, myself. This was the big glory-hog project and this is the most show-offy part in it. Of course I'm my own inspiration here. The key inspirations were the (at the time) half-drawn dragon and my citybots, as I felt like it needed to be very detailed. Bigger Chris proved to be a useful guide as a fairly similar approach was used here, essentially using my robot technique as overcomplicated colouring for half the project. This arm allowed me to continue that pictures ideas, especially the more advanced way I've been trying to use detail recently. Whilst the detail is mostly used to create form for the robots, it's also very useful as a way to throw attention around a picture. Here I tried to condense it to create points of interest and accentuate the key shapes, whilst glossing over others. I'm loving this effect and I got to use it to finish off the dragon too.

The vector arm was a nightmare. Inspired by the confidence from my second project, I thought it would be easy. I was so very wrong. As well as Home Sweet Home, I had to look to other places for inspiration, as the arm was looking too blank to call finished. The first idea I found was in one of my favourite character designs of all time: Glados from Portal. The way she's so inhuman in design yet still shows a degree of femininity is genius. But what i was interested in here was the way each section was broken up with lots of cabling. It's nothing new in my pictures but I really loved the way it was used here. I also borrowed a few tips from The Iron Giant for the hands, particularly Kayla Miller's fantastic poster design, trying to make them inviting rather than terrifying, as I feared the fineliner hands were.

I don't imagine I'd have started trying out my fineliner rendering had it not been for the work of Kei Zama. She's a Japanese artist known for her incredible ink rendering. She does a lot of Transformers art but isn't officially tied to them or anything. She just loves robots. I was also inspired by traditional pointillism techniques (which I actually used on the glass) and these helped to form my basic knowledge of how to shade with the medium.

I've skipped over the pencil thighs as pencil's such a done-to-death technique it's basically impossible to be inspired whilst using it. The next part to be made was the collage. Despite being loosely inspired by my own previous work in that medium, I also wanted to bring something new in. Despite having a lot of ideas plotted out, my main inspiration came from my material. I had to work with what I had. Thankfully this included a whole host of Which magazines as well as a few photography and music ones. This gave me pretty much everything I had. To get started I also made a couple of mood boards as I hadn't done any for this unit yet. I kinda regret this. Whilst they were a nice confidence boost, they used up a few too many of the best pictures from the magazines. Probably should have done these after.

The final part of the robot was the comic leg. The array of inspirations here is so incredible. It's essentially inspired by every comic I've ever read. predominantly it's superhero comics though, as those are big-budget enough to have both a penciller and an inker. It's also really impressive how much difference there is between finishes here. The main inspiration I'll use here comes from Olivier Coipel. He's one of the best Marvel-employed artists around and whilst his work has it's roots in traditional comic, art, the meticulous quality here is incredible.

I've already mentioned the influence of Transformers Devastator in the final setup of this robot but I feel like there are a few more ideas in here. The idea for the desert came from the incredible PS3 game Journey, and all the mysterious shreds of culture lying around in the sand. There's something really interesting about sand, and it also felt like it fitted the colours incredibly well. I'm just annoyed I spent a week making a 3D workshop first!

Research and Inspiration - Home Sweet Home

The project required a great deal of research before I could even get it off the ground. Being a competition brief for a large company, you have to get your facts right. So before any animation started, I dived once again into the metaphorical swimming pool of research.

My first stop was looking into HSBC as a business. I couldn't advertise them until I knew what they were all about. Thankfully the packs included in the project told me a good amount about the company before I even began to trawl their website. Thankfully, unlike some companies in the brief, HSBC hadn't misled anyone with their booklet and backed up all the claims they had made. I also looked for elements in the brand and ethos I could explore for my campaign. Their excellent customer satisfaction ratings and personal approach were the main thing I jumped on and tried to figure out how to weaponise it as an advertising campaign.

I also looked into other advertising campaigns both from HSBC and other banks. And sadly HSBC is a bit behind the curve advertising-wise. The main frontrunner I found was Lloyds TSB and their previous fantastic 3D animated approach that they used until recently. It hits most of the right notes of heart and charm and really gives of the impression of trustworthy-ness and working on a personal scale. It's just a fantastic campaign and works very well.



For the art of this unit Multiplex gave me the confidence to push my vector art to a high standard. It's a webcomic made entirely in vectors and manages to have some really nice looking art despite being done in such a clean, nearly emotionless style. If anything that was my aim for this project: bringing emotion to the emotionless. I'm so pleased I stuck with it as I managed to make a really charming animation using the medium.

I also did a whole lot of research into dogs for the project. I've never been great at drawing them so I wanted some good references. I also had no idea what breed of dog I wanted. So in Jonny tradition I put together a collage of dog ideas. These things really help when I'm struggling with ideas as it allows me to take my mind off the work for an hour or so and puts together a great board of references. I tend to do one or two of these for each project and it really helps.

In the end I went for a golden retriever, mostly inspired by the behavior of Jasper, my cousin's dog, who is excellent at demolishing anything not above table-height. Jasper is such a cutie too.

I put together a second mood board for the biscuits. I was having trouble deciding which biscuits to use so I figured this would help. And it defintely did. Just a few minutes after I made this I had created a set of biscuit sketches and moved into illustrator.

The perspective with the hands and the camera is a direct result of me watching too many Youtube reviews. Most of them use a hands-only-on-camera setup and that translated nicely to a video like this. It allowed me to keep focus on what was happening on the table whilst still keeping some human influence. I'm really happy with this decision. The key inspiration here is Stuart Ashen, who does a huge amount with the format.

For the game I had to do another round of research into smartphone games and tie-ins. The research into tie-in games was quickly abandoned because most I found were really poor, so I looked for far better games to use as inspiration, as I figured that the poor quality was likely a result of a lack of care rather than the medium. As predicted, most of the more successful games are puzzle games as they have the most longevity to them and benefit most from the smartphone as a platform.

Working with biscuits, I figured something akin to Tetris would work well. But rather than simply making a clone of the arcade classic, I began to inject some new ideas into its veins. I pulled the building society theme into it by using a full house pattern, and began to build features around this. Using Bones I also made the dog relevant and created the scoring system based around Crumbs, a spare word I had from when I made my biscuit typography.

Research and Inspiration - Daily Mail Dystopia

Daily Mail Dystopia was one of the most research-intensive productions Ive ever had to do. Every asset of that project had to be accurate or it would lower the value of the whole thing. I did a huge amount of research into Daily Mail headlines. Thankfully the Internet is a huge help for compiling the absolute worst of the worst headlines, so that helped speed things along a lot. It brought forward some truly brilliant stories I just had to use. You would not believe how many things the Daily Mail has decreed that cause cancer. It's pretty hilarious. At one point I was even going to have the central pair of characters die from cancer. It's how the structure came about, with them ending at a restaurant. Because Romantic Dinners Give You Cancer apparently. I ended up ditching the idea because it no longer fitted with the purpose of the animation.

The main aspects I looked for in headlines were the big two of Sexism and Racism, the two standing stones of the plot of the animation. Each is the main plotline of one half of the animation, so I needed to look into both parts thoroughly. I took special attention to the way women were portrayed in terms of celebrity, especially the likes of Kate Middleton, who has been plagued by cameras since she arrived on the scene. Every move of hers is scrutinised by the media. It's got to be a hard way to live.

In terms of racism, The Daily Mail is loaded. For years they have cried to deport immigrants and are spawning wave after wave of hate. So this is where I decided I wanted to do something important.

With the main plotlines formed I began to look for other stories to fill the background. Sillier ones. This was a fun research task. I found stories about giant crabs, steroid-ripped schoolchildren, injuries from falling poop. There were so many fun stories that fueled many of the background characters from the animation.

For the main characters I did a bit more research. I wanted them to look like actual young adults so I had to style them in that way. Gone are the usual standards in Jonny Draws People haircuts, as I had to research a bunch of new ones to make my characters look modern. I gained a few ideas from Google image searches and Pinterest but most of my best results came from Batgirl. As a comic that's set in Gotham hipster area Burnside, it contains a whole number of appearances and styles to try out on my characters. Both of the characters I ended up designing were heavily inspired from looks in Batgirl.

It also helped me flock the comic with more generic background characters too, as I couldn't have everyone in the animation be portrayed as bonkers Daily Mail caricatures. It helped me create a diverse and interesting range of people to sit around and be unimportant.

In the realm of less direct research I did quite a bit of research into styles. The basic idea that the animation could work came from the Transformers Robots In Disguise show, which uses 3D characters in 2D environments. I figured I could flip that arrangement around a bit.

The webcomic Dead Winter was accidently a massive inspiration (as I didn't realise how much it had inspired me until far later) The art style isn't too far removed from the animation style used in DMD and I ended up using the same Black, White, and Red colour scheme. Tonally it's not too far off either.

Another key reference for this project was Birds, my Unit 3 piece for last year. It provided a key starting point for the art and animation style. I wanted DMD to be a kind of stylistic sequel to it, being a similarly motivated and created story. The art style was initially borrowed from that before it was simplified for the animation itself. The two original character designs would fit right into Birds though. It led to the same eyes being used for this one, and if you've seen a few of my drawing styles you's realise how much of my styles spring from the eyes. They're nearly always the first thing I draw and tend to define the style of a picture.

Silent Hill 2 was a huge stylistic influence despite having never played it firsthand. The way it used fog to create atmosphere is really smart, especially given that it was originally done due to technical constraints to lower render distances. I had a similar need here, as I couldn't build anything very impressive in C4D so wanted to limit the amount you could see at any given time. I really like this effect,

Comic Roundup

As has become tradition with this page, it's time to talk about the webcomics, and regular comics, that I have been reading this year. I'll be going through in no particular order as I slowly rememebr what I've been up to. Enjoy!

Stand Still Stay Silent

SSSS is a pretty extraordinary webcomic written and illustrated by the great Minna Sundberg, who comes from Finland. It tells the story of a group of adventurers sent out to explore a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Most of the civilised world has been killed by this horrifying plague that turns people into 'trolls', horrible gribbly monsters with some awesome designs. Whilst there are some moments of genuine horror, the majority of the comic is spent getting to know the incredibly likable cast. We're slowly introduced to them over the course of a few hundred pages which really helps with keeping everyone distinct.
It also has some seriously beautiful artwork. Minna uses a really interesting painterly technique and a limited palette which gives the comic a very distinctive look to it, and greatly adds to the already excellent worldbuilding. I'm really interested to see where it goes because it's been superb so far.

Wilde Life

One of the most recent comics to enter this list, Wilde Life is a supernatural horror/adventure webcomic set in rural Oklahoma, and has a heavy emphasis on the mythology of the area. Like most the comics I love, it has some really good characters. Clifford in particular is really fun to read about. The story's still picking up but there are some really interesting things going on so I'm excited about the future. Art-wise it's got a fairly hand-draw and slightly sketch look to it along with some really bright, happy colours. It fits pretty nicely and allows the scarier moments to hit home hard.

Broodhollow

If a contrast between horrifying and idyllic is what you're looking for then Broodhollow is the place to go. It's another supernatural horror story but this time there's no adventure. Just nightmares. Nah, here's a lot to love here. Broodhollow tells the story of Wadsworth, a man with severe insomnia, who moves to Broodhollow to talk with a doctor about his issues. What follows is some really nice character exploration with heavy doses of traumatising horror thrown in. The horror works so well because the majority of the comic is drawn in a cutesy, stylised manner, but the horrors have far more detailed, lifelike appearences with lens flares being used incredibly effectively. It's a super effective setup and works wonders for the comic.

Girl Genius

In far more happy territory is Girl Genius, the webcomic epic from Phil and Kaja Foglio. The comic's been running for over ten years now and shows no signs of stopping. I've been rereading it from page 1 and I still haven't caught up yet. It's incredibly long but so well crafted at the same time. Dialogue is constantly to a high standard and there's some incredibly well-planned plotting at play. To have a plotline stretch for ten years but never feel dull is such a triumph of writing and they should be rather proud of it. The comic has a very steampunk aesthetic which really makes the world fascinating. Over the years it's been running the pair have put together a world that feels both lived-in but exciting, and above all else, believable. It's a fantastic read. If you've got a long time.

Seconds

Seconds, by Scott Pilgrim writer Bryan Lee O Malley was so much better than I thought it would be. Until fairly recently, the only work by Bryan I'd read was Scott Pilgrim. Which I loved to a ridiculous degree. But when he released another book I wasn't all that fussy about reading it for some reason. I guess I'd figured him to be a one-trick pony. But blimey I was wrong. Seconds is brilliant. It's mostly a 'be careful what you wish for' story but it's told with such visual flair and some excellent character work that result in it being an absolute delight to read. It even manages to be suspenseful, and makes you root for a character even though it's plain to see she's going off the rails. Absolute comic gold.

Avengers Academy

Around the time of doing my visual appendix, I read the Avengers Vs X-Men event from 2012 to help with costume ideas and stuff. The story is told as part of several different series as well as a main one. One of the minor ones that saw focus was Avengers Academy. So after finishing AvX, I decided to jump back to the start of Avengers Academy and read the whole thing, as I quite enjoyed what I saw during the crossover. And although I've only reached issue 13, I've really enjoyed it so far. It's been a great mix of serious plots and fun moments, but all told through the perspectives of students. It's not about saving the world in the slightest, but rather about helping out the people around. It's a nice read.

Sins Of The Wreckers

As it's me talking, of course there's going to be a Transformers series in here somewhere. And this time it's Sins Of The Wreckers, an in-depth character study in disguise as an action thriller. The floow up to Last Stand, this comic deals with all the horrifying and traumatic repercussions of that series whilst adding in a brilliant new villain and a whole host of extra nightmares. The character work in this comic is simply phenomenal, especially when most of the characters are robots, and only existed in the first place in order to sell toys.

Liars' Dice

Another fluke find, I discovered this comic when the creators followed me on twitter (for some odd reason). I figured I might as well check it out. And I'm really glad I did. It's still a relatively young comic but it's showing a lot of promise. The art's got a really realistic edge to it and helps keep the story grounded, and the character dynamics between the central pair are fantastic to behold. It's snappy, fun, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where it ends up going.

Sleepless Domain

This is one of the big ones. Not because it's massively long or has a huge following, but because there aren't many comics that I get this excited about every time it updates. Y'see it started out as a charming but slightly inconsequential romp about five magical girls. And then it happened. One of the best-executed and satisfying plot-twists I've ever read. Mary Cagle is a genius I tell you. Everything that's happened since has been brilliant.

Music

It's time to break from the norm a bit. For whatever reason I've spoken a lot about art, film, and writing, but never really talked about music. Admittedly it's had less of an effect on my work than most things immediately, but it's almost certainly had an effect at shaping how things have gone this year work-wise, and definitely informed my choices of soundtracks. And given how I constantly listen to music when I work, it's bound to have fed into the work I've done this year.

At the very start of the year I was just coming down from the stuff I'd been listening to over summer. Mostly a rather brilliant band called The Naked and Famous. I'd picked up their fist album at the end of the holidays and was thoroughly in love with it around that time. It's an astonishingly good album, and has that perfect mix of poppy fun-times and LOUDNESS I like in my music.



Over summer I was also beginning to listen to my favourite band, Metric, a bit more. They're a Canadian synthpop band with an amazing collection of albums and one of the best singers out there. They have this really great mix of great pop tunes with just enough of an edge to make it work. And those vocals are amazing. I knew they had an album out towards the end of the year and their singles were starting to slip through from the album. Shortly afterwards the album itself arrived in the post and I listened to nothing else for a few weeks. Not too long after that I saw them live in Glasgow with two of my old school friends. Without a doubt the best night of my life. Boy do they kill it live.



A bit after that I bought a lot of CDs. Mum came up for a trip, and we both went CD shopping then, and I also grabbed another album or two in later visits. The main albums of note were Be Your Own Pet's first album, a joyously loud medley of loudness. I listened to their second album a lot over summer so it was fun to get another one. I also found Art Brut's second album, which completely won me over after their questionable debut. It began a fascination with them that lasted until the summer term. And thirdly came Grouplove who formed the charming nicey-nice part of the new album triangle.



Those three kept me going until my birthday and beyond. Using some of my birthday money i went on another album shopping spree. The main albums of note were Froot by Marina and the Diamonds and Kindred by Passion Pit. I'd got into Marina and PP last year, so I was eager to finish off the Marina collection and get a bit more PP. The better of the two, Froot is a genuinely fantastic album. It's not just my strange tastes talking. It's so good. probably her best record, and after that debut that's really saying a lot. Kindred was also pretty ruddy good. It's very synthy, and has some fantastic bouncy fun tracks and it's very good.



Afterwards I picked up The Naked and Famous's second album. it's not as good as the first by a long shot, but after a while it grew on me. It's just a bit slow and doesn't really go to any very interesting places. Apart from the lead single though. One of the best songs I've heard in ages. Well, since Metric did The Shade over summer. It's such a good song.



I didn't get anything new after that until Christmas. My uncle worked his magic and got me a few more as a christmas present. Whilst I'd requested all of them, the only properly good one came from Franz Ferdinand. It was their fourth album and was filled with ten different reminders about why Franz Ferdinand are brilliant. And every single song is as catchy as heck. I had fun with that one.



As those albums weren't as good a music fix as I wanted, i dug through my CD collection and found that I hadn't put Of Monsters And Men's first album on the computer. So I did that and really liked it. It also tied really nicely into Stand Still Stay Silent, which I'll probably talk about later. I think we need another Webcomic Roundup soon. It's a really good album full of vaguely folksy nice tunes. Which provided a nice foil to Dananananaykroyd



Dananananaykroyd kicked me back to the Be Your Own Pet school of music. It's loud, fast, and surprisingly catchy indie-punk and it's a whole lot of fun to listen to.



The rest of the year was far less rooted in terms of music. As I bought less, I began looking back a bit more, and pulled some neglected albums off the shelf and gave them some more. Klaxons' third album finally got some appreciation. I also dug back into The Flaming Lips' recent albums but found nothing close to love. They're a bit too far from what I like right now.



And in the last few weeks I've been listening to the RWBY Volume 3 Soundtrack as well as rediscovering just how good Calvin Harris's 18 Months album is. I've also got back into The Naked And Famous again, especially their first album, after finding a concert video from that era on Youtube.



There are definitely traces of what I'm into in the music of the animations. The Naked and Famous fed into the darker introspective music of Daily Mail Dystopia, whilst Of Monsters And Men really fed into the YCN brief. The Production soundtrack spring from me getting back into Klaxons, and the Motion Go music was...well...pretty blank. Maybe there's a bit of recent Flaming Lips in there? Maybe?

Either way, I figured it would be interesting to discuss part of the year that I hadn't discussed before.

Gender in Comics - A More Informal Take

For my essay this year, I tackled the topic of gender in comics, which is something that is constantly being brought to my attention thanks to having a background in comics. I covered a lot of good points in that essay but I wanted to have a less formal, and more opinionated discussion without the confines of an essay format here. 

So firstly, I obviously believe that the comics industry (well, the superhero part at least) has a weird double standard going against females. But of course I think that. I wouldn't have written the essay otherwise. But I'm just going to talk around the issues a bit. This probably won't be that coherent but there should be some interesting stuff. 

Firstly I just want to say how impressed I am about superhero comics at the moment. Whilst I tore them apart a lot in the essay, things are really improving at the moment. Thanks to having a new female Thor, and the increasing prominence of Captain Marvel, Marvel comics has a really awesomely diverse avengers team. It's also really great that we have a female Wolverine, as the character that took his place was so much more interesting than the real deal. Great stuff Marvel!

DC's also doing OK but most of that's coming from a small handful of titles. Gotham Academy and Batgirl are doing the rounds as usual but Black Canary and Supergirl have also been getting attention recently. And thankfully DC's big Rebirth even isn't changing much in terms of the important female cast. So well done DC for not screwing that up I guess. 

Sadly things are still going ahead with the Killing Joke movie, but voice actor Mark Hamill has suggested that it's more of an adaption than a direct copy, so there's room for positivity, but I have a lot of doubt about it. The Killing Joke is still a shining beacon that attracts the worst parts of the comic community and I'll be happy once it's dead and buried but it's looking like a while until that happens. More positively though Alan Moore, the writer, has actually expressed distaste some of the book's events, and says that his editor should have reigned him in a bit. So that's good. 

It's also been really interesting watch Kate Leth's twitter feed over the past few days. She recently did a post talking about how bizarre female costumes are. She discussed how strange it is that artists accentuate female breasts individually, and says how the outfits would have to have 'boob socks' to achieve this effect. It's not just sexualising, it's just a bit ridiculous. Like, harking back to my previous points in my visual appendix (which you've probably not read), my main criticism of female comic outfits are that most the people who wear them would never choose to dress in that regard. Ms Marvel is a prime example of this.

It's also strange to note how uninspired female costumes have been until recently. The original Ms Marvel costume is probably the least interesting costume I've ever seen. Whilst it's visually striking with the lightning bolt on black, it says nothing about the character, her powers, or her really interesting alien origins. It's just a bit sexualising and really uninspired. I was so happy to see the new costume in effect.

It's surprising how many people still stand by the belief that male and female superheroes recieve identical treatment, and defend the 'boob sock'. I can't believe nerd culture sometimes. And also amusing was how many people accused Kate Leth of knowing nothing about comic books. KATE LETH, one of the most successful female comic book writers of the 21st century. This fake geek culture really has got to end at some point soon. It's doing the world any good at all. 

One thing I have gleamed from my trips to comic cons is just how localised the issue is. Pretty much every other genre has no such problems, and webcomics have taken things to such a level that there won't be a lack of diversity in the medium for twenty years even if they stopped now. It's a wonderful world out there. It's just that superhero comics have existed in this strange vacuum  for far too long. Thankfully, things do seem to be changing. 

James Roberts

I've mentioned Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye a few times here and there on this blog and it's not going to end any time soon. Especially given that I actually met the writer a few months back. That was a great day.

I knew he was doing a signing in Manchester but I wasn't originally planning on going. None of my friends who like the comic were available, and it meant getting a train to Manchester to do it. That decision was nearly finalised in the morning after I woke up from a terrible nights sleep. During the day we had the 'Save Huddersfield A&E' protest, and it was only after getting lunch that I decided I had to do it. I had to go and meet James Roberts.

And yeah, it was a great decision. He's one of the nicest people in comics I've ever met (and I've met John Alison so that's saying something!), and has such a love for what he writes. It's incredible to see. It was also really nice to meet more fans of the comic. After I eventually got to the end of the queue I got a couple of issues signed as well as my toy of Whirl.

From a writing perspective, Roberts is really unique, especially as a TF writer. He writes his characters with a far more human approach than many of the other writers, and has such a strong grasp of continuity it's somewhat baffling. The man's a genius. He also has an incredible attention to detail and his original scripts are nearing on 50 pages long (I'd know, he sells annotated copies of them). Trawling through the scripts is a surreal experience, filled with microscopic elements all pulling the story together. It's a marvel to behold.

Coming towards final year, I imagine his work is going to become fairly relevant as I move towards my massive final year project. He's one of my few regular inspirations that hasn't come into play yet, so I'm expecting it to happen soon. It's going to be fun.