ILLUSTRATION FUTURES : easyJet loading screen

  While I have already uploaded the finished piece for this, I have decided to upload the many sketches and ideas produced. Most of them are drawings of planes (more specifically drawings of the same planes over and over again.) The initial referencing was of the planes used by easyJet (boeing 737-700s)and also the game Flight Control HD My initial animation idea was to have a map or a globe showing the locations that easyJet flew to but this proved problematic in visualising as parts would be 2D whilst others 3D. Also, I had to take into consideration my 'skill' with animation. Limited to motion tweening in Adobe Flash. So I set about simplifying it. My first animation attempt to was have the plane build up from nothing, using randomly placed lines which then form a picture of the whole plane (then perhaps take off.)

This looked a bit shoddy to say the least. It didn't not lend itself well to the sleeks lines of a jet aircraft, albeit a rather chunky cartoon one, so I started again and looked for new inspiration. I started looking at blueprints for the planes so as to get an accurate picture of how they looked then, continuing with the idea of constructing a plane from nothing then having it take of I thought about airfix kits. In an ideal world where I had money I would have bought one (and probably crashed it!) So taking the blueprint pictures I decided to vector them (with greater symmetry) into individual parts (like an airfix kit) My initial plan here was to do this from an isometric perspective, but again visualising the construction in 3D gave me a headache so I opted for an overhead view. EasyJet has a very bold, and easily recognisable, colour scheme : white and orange (i forget what the hex value is off the top of my head, but its written on one of the sketchbook pages above, along with the font) So playing with this I decided to make blueprints of a 737 from the original blueprints but hey would be orange with white lines. The whole thing would come together with in pieces, effectively building itself. To finish off the plane flies passed the easyJet logo and produces an air current (eddy?)

Illustration Futures : easyJet Flash loading screen

As part of my current project I have been asked to come up with an animated loading screen for 1 of 3 companies : Adidas, Coca Cola and easyJet. I decided to go with easyJet due to my love of transport.
After much faffing about drawing pictures of Boeing 737s I started playing around with the idea of having the plane appearing in bits, which then led me to styling it like an airfix kit.
Ideally I would have actually made an the animation using an actual Airfix kit, but due to cost constraints I worked directly from some Boeing 737 blueprints.
Tried to keep it as simple as possible utilising the easyJet corporate colours (orange and white) going for a blueprint sort of look to it

boy pie - feeding time by *the-dumb-waiter

via the-dumb-waiter.deviantart.com

I've decided to make a webcomic of sorts. A place to vent dark thoughts or something.
This is the first strip.

I am calling the 'comic' BOY PIE (an homage to Roald Dahl's The Twits)
Check it out...its a bit sparse at the moment though
http://boypie.tumblr.com/

Happy Families 1: Apple Family

via the-dumb-waiter.deviantart.com

First part of a project for a Happy Families games. The brief was "set by the NHS for ages 5-10" and we had to do 4 families (apple, potato and 2 of our choice.)

With the Apple family I went with the idiom "an apple a day keeps the doctor away". I kept it simple trying for a mixture of Stanley Chow (http://www.stanleychow.co.uk/) and Shag (http://www.shag.com/gallery.html) , but with softer shading more appropriate for the age group using this font (http://www.fontspace.com/font-a-licious/lounge-bait)

I\'ve tried to keep it simple from the start so that I could take elements from each charate and copy them over (and copy them over to the other fruit/veg characters in the series)

Illustrator then post editing in Photoshop

the sketchbook work will be up soon

Chicken

via the-dumb-waiter.deviantart.com

For this weeks Illustration Friday (http://www.illustrationfriday.com) word "Chicken"
I thought I'd play with the classic "why did the chicken cross the road?" joke (I use both the term "classic" and "joke" very loosely.) It started off with a chicken crossing the road and holding up traffic, which then lead on to a chicken playing chicken (if it needs explaining http://bit.ly/EPexX)
Hardest parts were probably the perspective on the road and making the chicken's feet point in the right direction

Illustrator

winter

via the-dumb-waiter.deviantart.com

Havent done anything in a while so I thought I'd get back on the case. Thought I'd start with this weeks Illustration Friday [link] word "winter"

Thought I'd play around with the grid tool in Illustrator for the most part

Just Illustrator (no editting in Photoshop as I normally do)

merry christmas 2010 by ~the-dumb-waiter

via the-dumb-waiter.deviantart.com

As a rule I'm not a particularly festive person at the best of times and I'm even less so this time of year, but I thought I'd make some sort of effort this year. Intended for family so no punning...which is my excuse for being lazy really (I culdnt think of anything other than Sherry Mincemas (or Christmince)

I think it was all the cloves I put in my coffee...

Illustrator and photoshop

Miniworks Exhiition at the Courtyard Theatre, Hereford. October 2010

I recently took part in an exhibition at the Courtyard Theatre in Hereford. The theme was pretty broad, but the main point was that the image must be no larger than a £20 note. There was also a prize of a framed £20 note!

I decided to draw some robots on an old Isaac Asimov book and titled it "Didn't Asimov predict something like this?" It was a little tongue in cheek poke at sci-fi and visions of bleak and distopian future. Tthe robot is friendly, waving and saying "Hi" but everyone knows that eventually all (sentient) robots eventually turn on their masters with the ultimate goal of enslaving the human race.

Was quite a fun little project and, even though nothing really came of it, it was nice to see my work displayed in a setting other than the internet.

Materials: Asimov paperback (very yellow), alcohol marker and fineliner.

LEGO.com Architecture : Products - Landmark - 21007 - Rockefeller Center

via architecture.lego.com

"LEGO® Architecture inspires future architects, engineers and designers as well as architecture fans around the world using the LEGO brick as a medium for reproducing esteemed structures"
Is it sad that I really want this? Classic urban architecture rebuilt in LEGO! Who could resist. Though at $39.99 (http://shop.lego.com/product/?p=21007&LangId=2057&ShipTo=US) for something that is only 138mm I'm not sure...I am tempted though. Very, very tempted.

I'm sure if I got bored with I could get one of these...

via amazon.com

Tales of the Unexpected final design for cover and Toby Morison lecture

I must admit I was a little stuck with this cover. It seemed to be going very well at first, but I think I got caught in some sort of loop recreating the same ideas. The initial image was definitely missing something. There was no sense of drama or foreboding as there was with the cover for Lamb to the Slaughter:

(download)

Click here to download:

tales-of-the-unexpected-final-design-for-cover-and-toby-morison-lecture-JDgubqCIdkIymHrwtJqA.zip (51 KB)

There was just continuity and, while they worked together as a pair of images, The Landlady cover suffered. This stumped me. Do I leave them as is with one strong image and one image that was rather lifeless for the sake of continuity or redo the one and lose the continuity. I needed a fresh pair of eyes. Queue illustrator Toby Morison (http://www.coningsbygallery.com/images.asp?id=220 for some of his scenes of India.)
Last Thursday (25/11/2010) we were given a lecture from illustrator Toby Morison, which was most interesting. He explained his working processes, the pros of working for an agency, what he did after graduating and what he does when he's not doing commercial work i.e. personal work. All accompanied with a presentation of his work. He also talked of his childrens book and the problems he faced with editors/publishers, namely not being allowed to have one of the characters as an "old soak." (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Louis-Takes-Toby-Morison/dp/1416904352)

I made copious notes:

After the lecture we were given individual tutorials with him to run through this Illustrations Applications project. This gave me a chance to explain my problems with the cover design. He said pretty much what I was thinking : that it was flat and didnt convey the foreboding it should. He suggested something very simple. Just take out the landlady and have her props specifically the cup of tea. Also play around with more obvious symbolism for poisoning as not many people would get the Emerald Green reference to arsenic poisoning, but everyone knows the skull and crossbones as the symbol for poison (or at least they should!). This also achieved the other goal of continuity and much more successfully than the previous design, as both images would have an inanimate object (the gravy boat for Lamb to the Slaughter and the teacup for The Landlady) as the main focus. Here are the new sketches with some of the existing sketches annotated during the tutorial:

I have taken a slightly different approach as regards the media used. I decided as I haven't done any in a very long time to try some painting with acrylic. Was nice to get dirty and do something much more tactile than just use Illustrator and Photoshop. I heavily editted the final painting in Photoshop by cutting out the black background, resizing and adding a uniform green overlay so that the colour palette was simpler. I then added the green border from the original design so that there wasnt to much empty black space and the text (in the same style as before with Gill Sans MT as the typeface of choice)