James Gurney

James Gurney.

My childhood memories are decorated with his illustrations.

My parents love to read and shared this with us by filling our library with a wonderful range of books.

Learning to read was a struggle when I was younger so the books I bonded the most to were always to heavily illustrated ones.

Even though 'Dinotopia' and 'The voyage of the Basset' were probably some of the biggest and hardest books to read when I was little, the world was always there for me to explore with my own imagination in Gurney's illustrations.

As you can probably tell I am and was completely in love with his illustrations.

I've always thought it was the level of detail he used but now I think it was also how he made fiction blend with reality using colours too. There is no way humans can really know how to we would interact with dinosaurs/fey folk but his drawings make it seems like its our second nature.

By painting the creatures and environment using realistic lighting and natural tones, all the elements just blend together. 

It seems to gives the creatures a sense of weight and with that, life!

"It's like magic!"

Little character sketches

Showing off those moves

So I finally finished my dance duet project and I think I'm happy with where its at now.

I was still itching to try and draw someone or thing dancing with cleaner lines so I ended up starting a second dance animation.

I really enjoyed working on the almost experimental style of drawing in my dance project but I think I need to get into the flow of cleaner lines.

I really like the sketchy look but I want to work on drawing with more clarity in single strokes.

Figured it could help me develop the habit of drawing clean shapes and make inbetweening a lot easier, for me and anyone else.

The moves are finally coming together

Nearly there.

The all the key moves have been drawn out though it's not visible in this exported version.

Everything coming together a lot nicer and I'm happy with the way my interpretations of the movements have turned out.

I decided to go with this style of drawing as I really like how my sketches looked in my notebooks.

I also wanted to try and capture a short story in the dance as well.

So far the male dancer starts out like a pencil drawing then when coming in to contact with the girl in 'ink'

he transforms into a ink drawing as well, perhaps suggesting their bond and connection.

Still a lot to do and clean up but I'm really happy with the development.

Reminiscing

Just remembered my old drawing blog from when I was 13-15.

Looking back at my old digital drawings is a really good reminder for me to draw for fun more often.

Give my brain a bit of imaginative play time.

Dancing progess

After watching different contemporary dance videos on YouTube I felt a lot mo inspired in terms of what moves I could try out and push even further in my animations.

James Bay's 'Let it Go' dance video was a huge inspiration.

This is my latest update to my 10 second dance animation.

Some moves are pushes even further like the leg kicking motion and I tried to mix up the rhythms a bit more.

This week I finally met up with the dancers and together we came up with some new moves I could work with as well as reference footage.

I managed to get some life drawing in as well too.

I find drawing the dancers from life and trying to capture the movements by drawing creates some very interesting lines.

Lines that I could reference back to when trying to exaggerate the motion.

Digital characters

This has been my first year using Photoshop and I am loving it.

Still getting the hang of things but I love experimenting with different brushes.

Haven't done a digital drawing for fun for a while now

so here is a stubborn/angry looking lady in red.