Heroes in a half shell

Been drawing a lot more recently. Figured I would do some fan art to get some practice and gives me something to work on while watching tv in the evenings. First up these mean green dudes, didn't look at much reference. Just kinda drawn from memory and in my own style. Would be interesting to animate them if I find time. Not promising anything tho.

Ambulance

 

 

More cartoony vehicles. This is for another freelance pitch, expanding the 'ol portfolio if nothing else.

Cartoony Cars

Getting some practice drawing cartoony cars for a possible project in the pipeline. Would be a lot of fun I think.

Colour studies

Trying out some different ideas for colouring my film and how to treat the space backdrop. Think the last one is close to the final look.

Yeti's

I sketched these characters in my notepad at work a while ago. Decided to ink them up and colour 'em. Think these two would make an interesting duo, might have to play with some story ideas for them. Good exercise in character design anyway.

Animation- WIP

DM Test Scene from Doug on Vimeo.

 

 

Sh 23 Blocking from Doug on Vimeo.

I took 2 of the most challenging/most fun shots to tackle first to set the style of the motion and get a feel for drawing the character. I was also thinking if the project turned out not to work or if I couldn't find time for it at least these would look good on my showreel as standalone pieces.

Gif fun

 

 

Been wanting to try out some looping gif's for a while. This was a bit of fun and also serves as a pitch for a freelance job. Hopefully I will find time to do some more of these.

Production Folder Structure

The whole production for my short film is on this card that's smaller than my thumbnail! If that idea doesn't make me back up files I don't know what will. I just spent a couple of hours building the folder structure of the project and copying the pre-production stuff into the new system.

Gives you a new appreciation of the tech guys at work doing this pipeline type of stuff :)

I found a handy program called Text2Folders which helps you setup folders/subfolders very quickly and since I don't know how to do a batch process this was a godsend.

So everthing's set up and ready to animate. Eek!

Astro Animatic

Dark Matter Animatic from Doug on Vimeo.

So this is the old version of my film. I've tweaked the story since then but I don't think I will post up the final version as I want some surprises in the final film.

Freelance Animation

Been looking for some remote freelance work on sites like elance. There seems to be great demand for these whiteboard type illustrated explainer videos so I had a go at doing one with a Karl Pilkington story as a kind of proof of concept. Quite fun to do.

Ant Problem - Karl Pilkington from Doug on Vimeo.

And here's my 2d Animation Reel...

2D Freelance Animation Reel from Doug on Vimeo.

Astro

 

Astro is one of many working titles for the short film I'm working on. It is a sci-fi comedy, the animatic is currently running at 2 minutes which should be do-able. I've spent months working on the story and reboarding it to improve it. I'm trying to tie down the animatic so I can start animating with set shot lengths. Once I'm animating I think it will start coming together quite quickly. I will be posting more progress on this in the coming weeks. Below is the sketcbook page for the image above. just to show how messy and crazy my page is when working these things out.

 

 







Graffiti

 

 

Whenever I travel I seem to gravitate towards any kind of street art. Here's a few of the best pieces from various places I've been to. I'm doodling a lot with graffiti influenced stuff but I guess comics/animation has influenced graffiti a lot over the years too so that makes sense. I always tend to get back into Vaughn Bode after looking at graf so expect to see some of that influence in my next post. I'm working on a title piece for my next short film.

Samsung Series7 Slate

This tablet is an undiscovered hero for artists, none of the companies making these seem to be marketing them correctly but if you scour the Internet forums like I have you will find that you can load Wacom drivers onto them and have full pressure sensitivity (512 levels I think) in all your favourite drawing programs and some smart folk have even developed a touch-screen hot key shortcut menu which has revolutionised my process.

The tablet is about £700 on Amazon and they were first class as usual with delivery etc. I won't bore you with the details you can find elsewhere but I WILL show you exactly where to go for the pressure sensitivity drivers and hot key software. It took me days sifting through forum posts etc to figure this out. Unfortunately it is not set up "artist friendly" out of the box.

First off go to http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=28&s=3&m=Eee+Slate+B121&os=&hashedid=Sr9xAv0Y2ZyvhqXw

Win7 64b select touchpad then u want the Wacom ISD_DualTouch_V7.0.2-21

After that follow instructions on the following link for the touch panel thing and the custom pressure levels.

http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/samsung/47422-how-set-up-your-samsung-series-7-slate-serious-photoshop-work.html

I hope this helps people to have less of a headache with this than I did. I cannot recommend this tablet enough for professional artists. If you are considering a Wacom Cintiq, then this will almost certainly be a fine alternative.

Fire & Lace

I designed this logo for my partners women's fashion ebay store. She gave me a few examples of styles she liked and I sketched it out digitally. Check out their store here: Fire & Lace

More inks

Tried inking the other pose of this character. Realised I missed the detail on his shoes on the last one. And I think I was adding a bit too much of my own style and deviating from the pencils. Not sure though.

John K Inking Test



 

Inked this in Toonboom on my samsung series 7 slate tablet

I've been meaning to get active on john k's drawing school blog posts for a while now but only recently feel I've progressed enough to have a go at some of them. He's currently getting people to ink pencil rough's and giving tips/advice to get people up to speed so they would be ready to work at a production level. I'm just hoping it'll give my inking for my shortfilm a bit of a boost.

Dr Sketchy

Been a long time since I went to an art class. Dr. Sketchy's is promoted as an anti-art class and it was a lot more fun than a straight life drawing session. Music and alcohol creating a relaxed atmosphere to sketch in. Here's a few of the better pages from my book.



 

Dark Matter

Been sketching a spaceman character in my notebook. Really enjoying playing about with a sci-fi theme and thinking up ideas for a possible short film. Threw in some robots for good measure too.

Holiday's

Got some life drawing done on holiday around the pool/beach. Thought I'd share it here. Been a while since I drew from life like this. Hopefully going to a Dr. Sketchy's anti art class in a week or two so will get some more practice in :)

Picayune

 

 

My new comic strip, Picayune is now updating every Tues/Thurs at www.dougwilson.co.uk It revolves around a 20 something guy who is a struggling artist/musician taking odd jobs to get by. Click on images to enlarge and please visit the website if you like these strips.