Monday 30 December 2013

How fossils are formed

My final gif animation for How fossils are formed.
The original one (5mb in size), then a lower quality one that's below 1mb with reduced colours.




Thursday 19 December 2013

The Walking Dead tee

I printed a couple of t-shirts the other day with a drawing of Michonne from The Walking Dead.




Sunday 15 December 2013

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry 2.0






A new bookcover for this book, following my varied Saul Bass inspired mock ups on illustrator I decided to make one out of paper.

However people have frequently asked me what the red is, which makes me think I should start over.

Spoiler warning? Highlight below to read;
The cover is meant to be representative of the girl that Harold meets who works in the garage. She notably wears a red tabard, an apron-like garment. This character is the catalyst of the story in that she gives Harold the idea of his pilgrimage, hence the word 'Pilgrimage' being inside a speech bubble.

Friday 13 December 2013

Inverted

Same again but with inverted colours and edits on the arrow showing the force of gravity.

Hand drawn test


How does gravity work.
Was meant to delete/repeat that arrow.

Wednesday 11 December 2013

My website

I've finished making my website and it's hosted and everything - huzzah!
To see it, click on the image below.





Friday 6 December 2013

Gif-ing!


How fossils are formed
Hopefully this gif explains it but in case it's not clear...

When an animal dies, its skeleton settles on the ground/sea floor and is buried by sediment.

The sediment begins to thicken and gradually turns to stone.

Over time the groundwater dissolves the skeleton and a mould of the skeleton is formed.

Minerals crystallise inside this mould and a cast of the skeleton is formed.

Eventually this fossil is exposed on the Earth's surface either from natural erosions or from excavations.

Sunday 1 December 2013

Some Saul Bass

Not happy with my book cover for 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' so I've put down some ideas quickly, inspired by Saul Bass's style. These are more glorified thumbnails rather than final products. For the time being.

I began by drawing vectors from some of my development work, illustrations of the character. With these I played around with them on illustrator with various text, colours and compositions, adding new images to use as you can see below.









These last two are references to a character in the book who is the catalyst of Harold's pilgrimage, she gives him the idea that having faith, a belief in something can be more powerful force than more logical/scientific approaches. Not a religious belief, just a personal one. So I thought with the use of her red tabard and a speech bubble under the word 'pilgrimage' was a clever approach to illustrating this.

I also found this funny tumblr which scrutinizes many Bass inspired works.
It makes me feel bad for making these now.

Book covers

My last brief was on book covers, I had to choose a fiction and a non-fiction book from a selection of a few and create covers for them (and an inside illustration for either of them).

I chose 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' by Rachel Joyce and 'Faviken' by Magnus Nilsson.
Both sounded interesting in their own ways.


I'm not happy with this one, at first I felt I was spending too much time on Harold Fry, because I'd been reading the book and gathering more ideas for it, so I decided to concentrate on Favkien for a while. However once I got the idea to make it all out of paper, it began to take a while to put together. Eventually when I was happy with my cover for Faviken, I found I had little time to create a cover I'd be happy with for Harold Fry.
Worse still, I didn't make a final, presentable illustration for it either, so I'm going to revisit this part of the brief to improve on it.

I feel a lot happier with this cover. I had fun making it and I received good feedback on it, most problems were technical or easily changed. I've fixed a few things that I discovered on printing but I've yet to re-edit the original scans so that there's no quality loss (the background was pixelated).