Thursday, January 24, 2013

Under Milkwood (animated short)


(Click through to view in HD)

Under Milkwood is a (radio) play by Dylan Thomas and I was given a brief to animate a section of it. This is the finished version!

Come closer now.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see in the blinded bedrooms, the combs and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing, dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

Here are the stills:

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Aesop's Fables: The Cat Maiden




This is a retelling of Aesop's fable The Cat Maiden whereby a cat is changed into a woman who behaves like a human at first, but returns to her basic instinct upon seeing a mouse.

I reworked these and I'm glad I did because they look much better than the previous version, especially the first one.

Project 2: Editorial

This project was to take a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall article from The Saturday Guardian and illustrate it via drypoint or etching. I chose drypoint since it was a familiar technique and I could manipulate it much faster than with etchings. At first I did not like the sound of an editorial project as this was not my strongest point - but I do have a love for cooking and food, so this wasn't too troublesome. Plus I had to make these dishes so that I had something to draw from! This article is for 'Simple Sausage Recipes':

 

Project 1: Reportage for the Blue Plaque Society

This project was a simple one, but not without challenges. The first part was to go out, find buildings with a Blue Plaque on them, and then draw those buildings. The next was to make them into A2 posters that would advertise what they were. It was difficult trying to make such a simple image appealing, without drowning it in fancy, unnecessary design 'charms'. In the end I think I achieved decent results, limiting myself to pure tone and gradients: