Scary Berries

Yikes. I haven't posted on here in ages. Lots of things have been happening, with EpicWin 'sploding on the net and AppStore, and I've been flat-out busy for months on making LittleBigPlanet2 (out in January on PS3). We've just heard it gotten a perfect 10 out of 10 score in it's first published review (in Official Playstation Magazine).

But on to the really important stuff, its nearly Christmas! So here's my Christmas image for this year Scary Berries. Hope everyone has a great holiday and lets all hang-out and draw more pictures in 2011!

iPad Granimator

It was a real honour to be asked by UsTwo to be part of their creative project for iPad: Graninator - back in the days before iPads existed outside of Apples lab of shiny things. And especially when I saw the other folks involved, like me old pal Jon Burgerman, monsterous hero Pete Fowler, and the super-tight work of James Joyce, Buro Destruct, Airside & Moving Brands.

So, Granimator is a free creative package, for designing wallpapers for your iPad and iPhone - it's super-simple to spray artwork all over the screen, and tweak and edit to your hearts content, and then share it with your friends or the world.

Once you've got Granimator you can buy downloadable art packs, which are about the price of a crayon. and start creating. And obviously I'd love it if anyone bought my one, so I can buy myself some new crayons. Or even, one day, an iPad..

So you can just go and get the REXBOX - HI-DRAMA! PACK but if you want to know more here's what you get from me:

Here's some more artwork, sprayed around ala Graminator:

Go buy. Thanks! Bye!

Old Project Roundup: Mysteriously Sporty Characters

Next project from down-the-back-of-my-sofa: an early-stage pitch I did last year, for some sporty characters. I can't go into much detail about this project, or the client, but here are some preliminary roughs which never got to see the light of day...

I was hoping to see these characters animated with a mixture of gloopy/fizzy CG and jerky traditional animation (for the facial expressions) and running, jumping and hurdling around live-action filmed environments, leaving colour and animation in their wake.

Except they didn't, because they fell over at the first hurdle and some other much shinier characters sprinted past them. Ah well.

Old Project Roundup: Becoming Merlin

Next in the roundup of projects I forgot to blog: an interactive storybook I illustrated for the BBC with the production handled by my Preloaded pals. And this one is Bafta nominated. Shiny!

I've put some of the final artwork below, along with a couple initial sketches. As this interactive book employed a liquid-layout (where the layout expands and adapts to your screen size) I had to design the illustrations so they could be viewed on small monitors, where you only see a small fragment of the scene, right up to massive screens where you see all the surrounding scene.

So make sure you watch the book fullscreen when you try it out, otherwise you'll only see a small fragment!

Being Merlin

And lovely job by Preloaded on the story engine, animation and voiceover.

Meatbook Faux

My friend Spaff left his Macbook Air with arms-reach of my doodling pen. As he's a fan of fine foods and gastrobation I thought I'd give it a coating of pork:

I hope he won't mind...

Surprise Lover

Dear The Internet, Merry Christmas!

Have a great holiday everyone. It's been a crazy year, but lots of fun and learning a-plenty. Hopefully next year I'll have some time to put it into practice!

I'm off to New York for a while, but will be doing an end-of-year round-up of some stuff when I'm reunited with my Wacom pen...

Odosketch

While my mac is having its motherboard replaced, after burning out just after the warranty ran out (Thanks Apple) and I'm having no luck installing Cs3 onto a temporary machine due to its crazy DRM which won't let me run the software I paid a fortune for (Thanks Adobe) I've been looking around at what online creative tools there are to see if anything can help my predicament. Aviary looks like a real technological marvel and I'll probably try that for a while.

But, the big news is Odosketch. I love it. In many ways there isn't much to it, but that's the point, it's the way it forces restrictions on you. There's no eraser, limited colours, and you can't change the size of the drawing tools. Just like real life. It's exactly like when you're sitting on the train and you have to doodle in the margin of a discarded newspaper with an old biro because that's all you have. And of course that's also when you can do your best doodling.

Here's a couple I did earlier:





Full size versions here and here

Letting The Beatles Be

I got asked recently to take part in a fun project - redesign or reinterpret the cover of any album from the top 100 albums of all time (as chosen by Pitchfork) for the folk at Becks Beer.

So I leapt on "Let it Be" by The Beatles (well, actually I leapt on Purple Rain, but Kate Moross had already picked that one, so I swapped pvc and superbikes for coudroy and facial hair). I've written up in more detail on Becks' Flickr page my thoughts behind choosing this cover, mainly for the challenge of creating a likeness of the band while also sticking with my bold style, so you can read more about it in detail there.

But here's the image:





And here's some work-in-progress, as you can see from the Ringo sketch I was originally thinking of using a more realistic style, closer to brilliant artwork they used themselves on Revolver (by Klaus Voormann) before switching back to a bolder simpler style so I could concentrate on getting likenesses with as little extraneous detail as possible.





And in Beatles related news, there's a new trailer out for the forthcoming Beatles Rock-Band game, which, although I have not interest in actually playing, looks amazing in the Sgt Pepper segment at about 1:00 in. I want to see more games that use colour, lighting and post-effects like that more. Down with polycounts! Up with art direction!

DuckMonster Destroys PixelToyko OMG!

I've been a bit slow to post this one (although its now very relevant, as if you purchase The Sun newspaper (U.K.) tomorrow you'll find out more) but I was involved in a crazy project recently called RubberDuckZilla for Coca-Colas tasty fruit cocktail "Oasis".




If you visit the site linked below (and have a webcam) you can play various games that I did the 16-bit retro visuals for, after being asked to do them very nicely by PokeLondon. And by harnessing the power of GEEKMAGIC (tm) your webcam puts you inside the game and turns you into a giant duck shooting lazers out of your eyes (a bit like this Project Natel that my old pals at Lionhead are making for Xbox360, but with more wonkiness and lazerin' and explodin' and for a whole load less less money and with less digichildren).

Anyway, you can play the games here:
www.rubberduckzilla.com

And you can watch the tv spot in this handily embedded video:



And, as I said at the top, if you buy The Sun newspaper tomorrow (11th June) and wave it around in front of your webcam you'll be able to unlock some extra special features. Blimey!

Doodlebook Dump One

As I was saying in the last post, I've been scanning in my sketchbook for this months Computer Arts magazine feature. And I'll put them (and a few more) up here on The Internets for all to see. So here's the first batch of impenitable doodling, these examples are more about story development, I'll post some others soon thant show character development.




These all feature work for my Grip Wrench series for MTV. As you can probably see, most of my thought process happens on paper, and really consists mainly of doodling ideas until I get enough of a collection to edit down into something fit for human consumption...

Here's some close-ups:

Stand Up

I'm off to FMX in Stuttgart next week, with Kareem & Francis from MediaMolecule, to talk about how we made the wonky world of LittleBigPlanet. It looks like there's some interesting programmes on, I might have to sneak in and geek out on the various talks on the production design of Hellboy2 and Watchmen.

Talking of Watchmen, here's a portrait of The Commedian, it's not really finished but I'll have to leave it as it is for now..

Photoshop Tennis

The Pims has been poured, the lawns have been trimmed, the strawberries are on ice. It's must be almost time for my Photoshop / Layer Tennis match with Cookie. You can follow the progress of the match here, commentary will be provided by Anne from I Like, and many thanks to Coudal and Adobe for running the whole thing.

For those that don't know the procedure, the 2 of us will be taking it in turns to create artwork in a series of volleys, building on what has just gone before. And with only 15 minutes for each turn its going to be a mad flurry of paper, crayons and Wacom pens. Here's an image I warmed-up with, it was done in 7 minutes so maybe there's still hope for me.

Self Portrait

Just doodled a portrait of myself (it was needed for an animation festival that I'm supposed to be talking at).

The old one I did in LittleBigPlanet that's used as a sticker, and crops up everywhere was a bit out of date on the haircut (or lack of) so I've done an updated version. HAIR POWER.

200 Edges

Edge has always been my favourite games magazine - I really like their unapologetic mission to examine and celebrate the best of videogame culture with writing that is leagues above most of the PR-driven "Churnalism" that's also out there. And its always been a beautiful thing to look at. I still remember buying Issue 1 and holding it with wonder as i starred at these amazing pages from the future (although, as it was all about how the 3DO was going to conquer the world, it doesn't always get everything right).

Anyway, so in order to make me feel old and grown-up they've gone and made a couple hundred issues since then. And to celebrate this milestone they've got 200 different covers this month, and if you're a subscriber you get one designed by me and my little Sackboy helper.



There's a bit of an ugly watermarked CVG logo slapped on there so hopefully I can provide one without that soon.

It's the third cover I've worked on for Edge, but probably the one I had the most fun making. And didn't hurt my eyes as much when making it as the one for issue 120 for Jeff Minters Unity project!

MAN OF MEAT. MAN OF ACTION.

I've finally put my website for Grip Wrench live. It's the animated series I made for MTV QOOB, featuring Hollywood hardman, Vietnam veteran and fearless patriot Grip Wrench. And basically gave me plenty of sleepless nights for a year and a half while I was trying to animate all 10 episodes on my own (whilst doing LittleBigPlanet at the same time). What a nutter.



Anyway, its probably best if you just go and have a look yourself, there's some iphone wallpapers too (which I think all promo websites have to have now by law..) desktop backgrounds and of course all 10 episodes are on there, although here's an embedded episode which is one of my favourites:

Cullumdar

Nearly xmas and it's a busy time of year for a designer/animator person - there seems to be a neverending line of people needing lumps of snow added onto the top of their logos, or animated flakes drifting around their websites or title sequences. Here's my latest yuletide project - I got asked to make a flash advent calendar for top jazzer Jamie Cullum. Here's an image from it.



And you can see the actual calendar (or Cullumdar as I jokingly called it) by running off in this direction. Although nobody will notice I spent ages making the doors open exactly as I wanted to, and hand-making animation on all of them, so they all open very slightly differently. I'm a nutter for things like that.

There's no chocolate behind the doors, but at least you can win tickets to see ACDC or get all arm-wavy with a Nintendo Wii and other less jiggy prizes.

Branson Pickle

I don't understand why so many of my doodles turn out looking like millionaire "playboy" Richard Branson. It's quite disturbing.

Especially with the absence of any clothes.

Taking Stress in the Jaw

Blimey I'm busy. Working my brightly coloured socks off. That PS3 game that I've been working on, LittleBigPlanet, is in its very final stages and looking like a polished and shiny diamond (assuming the diamond is made out of cardboard and milk bottle tops, and has toy wheels bolted onto it, and a rocket launcher). And I'm trying to balance that with some other little projects, and finishing Grip Wrench (Yes, I know, it was supposed to be finished, but needed some last minute changes to keep everyone happy, it was a bit too filthy for TV unfortunately).

In the meantime, here's an ad i designed that's in this months Edge magazine. It was a bit last minute and cobbled it together, but I'm pretty pleased with it. The little Sackboy character in our game is becoming so recognizable that I thought it would be fun to make a version of him out of some of the other assets I've designed for the game. And it you look carefully you'll see my face represents the characters groin, not sure what that symbolism means...

Oh, and if you're a Motion Designer, a Level Designer, or an Art Manager I'm sure Media Molecule would like to hear from you.

Being Industrious

I've just been finishing off a canvas for an exhibition I'm exhibiting in next week - the show is called Art In Industry, in Shunt (in the amazing catacombs beneath London Bridge station) and features the work of several friends of mine, built round the loose theme of showing things produced away from of their main commissioned work.

I'll also be screening some episodes of my Grip Wrench show in the cinema area, which will be the first place to get to see them in the UK. Not only that, the now completely finished tent by me and the other members of 70p (7-Tipi) will be on display too.

And here's the extra canvas I've been painting for it. And if you're free next week come along to the exhibition, its going to be a fun one. Details here.