Monday, September 28, 2009

Another web commercial project with Voicewalk in LA



To see all my illustration portfolio samples, visit my web site. 

Last year I worked with the web animation production studio in Los Angeles named Voicewalk, on a web commercial for client InSight Direct's launch of their new product: VaZing. (see previous post on this project) 

These past few weeks I teamed up with Voicewalk again on another animatic web commercial, this time for client PureSafety. Working with Voicewalk's team of creative director Saul Ives, writer Monica Bowers and animation director Martin Guitar. We moved through the storyboard stages quickly, in part due to now all having worked together before it allowed me to execute a bit more efficiently by having a better understanding how Voicewalk will manipulate my images in the animation process. 

With my "regular" work for print illustration: magazines, advertising, children's books... I usually work with inks, paints etc... and (most of the time) then scan it all into Adobe Photoshop wherein I add digital effects in layers to come up with the final image result. But with these web commercial projects, it requires that I create all the final images as digital vector images, so I create them entirely in Adobe Illustrator. 

My process is this: I take the final storyboard sketch of a scene (in an Adobe Photoshop jpeg format) and open it in Adobe Illustrator, making it a bottom layer named "sketch." Then I stack new layers on top of the locked sketch layer and begin drawing the final image directly on my Wacom 12 x 12 digital drawing tablet. Usually the layers are set up knowing ahead what elements within the image scene that are to be animated, and therefore need to be on a separate layer. The final image is closely based on the sketch layer underneath... and is executed very simply, using various brush tools, shape fills, shape merges, and the only effect I use are gradations between two or three colors. 

Posted above are a few examples of some of the very rough thumbnail storyboards, revised storyboards, and their corresponding final vector images. You can view the final animated web commercial by clicking here.


Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Ring Flash Cards... Mudpuppy project completed!


To see all my illustration portfolio samples, visit my web site. 

My recent project with the on-line gift store for young kids, Mudpuppy.com was completed recently and all went smoothly working with art director Cynthia Matthews. It consisted of 26 images for flash cards divided between colors and shapes (called "ring" flash cards because they are all held together by a ring). The child must identify the specific color or specific shape depicted in the image. Posted here are four of the final cards: TRIANGLE (mountain), PINK (pig), BLUE (elephant), OCTAGON (spider web) 

The images were all done with black gouache and brush, scanned into Photoshop, then all the color was applied digitally with various brush and erase tools. It's refreshing to do simple images like this, though they take far more time than what it may look! (See the post below showing some of the sketches from this same project.)

Q: What color is this recession?