Crumbs: More Concept Art and Good News!

I was intending to create more concept artwork after handing in my dissertation and late development but once again I was hit with a wave of laziness and didn't do it. Very annoying of me.

But I have done one piece that people following the Facebook page will be aware of, as it is the timeline header. I wanted to develop Lilac more and had intended on drawing a lot of character interaction concepts mainly involving her reactions and relationships to and with the characters. Sadly this wasn't meant to be, at least not for the time being. But I did manage to capture a large part of her personality- the nurturing, caring side that Tweak brings out in her.

I had to use a photo as reference for the pigeons and also to experiment with the different background, not merely using the shape tool this time. I also wanted to show Tweak more puffed up and happy as he is quite skinny and nervous a lot of the time. It was a nice change of scene and I think the colours all work together nicely to create a nice serene image. If anyone has any critique or advice, please share!

In other news, the comic has begun.

As in the pages have begun being made. Like, months later than I planned. But in honesty I'm kind of glad it took this long as the idea I had five months ago sucks in comparison to the one I have now. I've had time to properly develop things, I suppose. So I guess it's worked out for the best. Even if I had to suffer through icky poopy essays, ew.

I have two pages done so far and have emailed them to my friend Rachel for some critique. I don't know how many I'll have done in time for Friday (the last ever hand in day, btw) but as long as it's enough to show the comic kicking off, it'll be good enough for me, and hopefully for the college as well.

As for the comic's official release date, I'm planning for sometime after the 20th of July. This is to give me enough time to build up a decent buffer of pages to upload to the tumblr site, time to share some stories at the exhibitions and also time to spend a week in Spain with my family without having to worry about the comic. Once that holiday in Spain is over, it'll be job applications everywhere, animation based work and Crumbs pages constantly!

So yeah, that's the basic plan. But I hope to have the exact date soon once I know exactly when we'll be back from Spain. If you want to see some of the pages and concepts before they appear on the site, you'll have to come to the exhibitions Crumbs will be featured at, alongside some other work that I still need to talk about but can't currently.

Thanks for reading and I hope you're as excited as I am for Crumbs!

Design Forums Competition

I have been a member of designforums.co.uk for a few months now and was asked if I could make a blog entry about their new contest launching today. Certainly sounds like a fun idea, I might enter myself. Hopefully any designer folks of any media reading this now will consider entering as well!

I'll let Tony and Sean take it from here!

Contest details


- The competition will run for six weeks in total (two week application stage, four week runtime)
- The application stage will require people to submit Name, DOB, Location, their area of design and one random word to the pot.
- Two words will be chosen at random to form a fictional company name for the design brief.
- Entrants are then free to create anything they like, from branding, through to illustration or video promotions for the fictional company.
- When the entries are submitted, entrants must also submit a small (paragraph) brief along with their entry, explaining how they interpreted the company name.

The main competition stage will run for four weeks, and at the end, the entries will be collected, given to our guest judges and evaluated.

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CLICK TO SEE THE PRIZES

The winner will receive;

1 x Wacom Intuous 4 XL Tablet

1 x Corel Painter 12 

500 x premium business cards supplied by Stationery Direct


Second place will receive;

500 x premium business cards supplied by Stationery Direct

1 x years FREE gold hosting supplied by OneSixTwo.net


3rd place will receive;

500 x premium business cards supplied by Stationery Direct

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If anyone has any questions at all, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

Thank you for your continued support and we hope to see you around the forum.

Tony (tony@designforums.co.uk)
Sean (sean@designforums.co.uk)
www.designforums.co.uk

Well, I'm intrigued. Think I'll give it a shot! And of course if you're a creative yourself, hopefully you'll consider doing so as well.

As of right now, after weeks of writing dissertations and development, I'm off to plan comic pages and animations... FINALLY.

Dissertation, Lizard Cops Art and Pigeon Head

Yeah, the title isn't exactly the most creative thing I've come up with. Shaddap, I've been using most of my brainpower scrambling to get this dissertation done the past few days.

I'm pleased to say that it's going very well though. It's been quite helpful that a lot of the discussion points in my dissertation were looked at beforehand in my other written modules. Basically, I'm discussing how success can be defined and how that can be applied to the practice of webcomics. If that makes sense. IT BETTER MAKE SENSE. IT'S ALL I'VE WORKED ON FOR THE BEST WEEK.

Anyway, I've wanted to update this blog after my rather... dispirited entry (I'm starting to feel much better after throwing myself into this writing and I'm hoping to improve further after I can work on artwork again) but due to the amount of time spent writing, I haven't let myself get distracted with creating art. So it's been a few weeks since I've drawn much else.

However, before I threw myself with little abandon into my dissertation, I managed to scrounge up my finished entry for the Lizard Cops fanart competition, which is currently under voting now. I don't think I'll win but it was fun to do! Plus, I've wanted to draw Stanley and the dog character for a while now.

I wanted to keep the look quite close to the original show so I tried to do the background in a similar style to Rachel's. Although I couldn't resist colouring the lineart of the characters, I just can't seem to leave it black for some reason. Hmm.
Stanley only gets serious business if his doughnuts are threatened. Or if someone takes away the last pink sprinkled one, like dumbass dogboy here. Who no doubt will be too scared to leave his house and buy anything ever again.

"First the handbags and now THIS?? WHY??"

This was a fun interval to work on. Thanks for the opportunity, Miss Normand! Also go watch Lizard Cops if you haven't. I've linked it a million times now, JEEZ.

I hope to upload an entry with more Crumbs artwork once the dissertation is handed in, as well as share an exciting development... although that last one might need to wait for a bit. There will definitely be more Crumbs art in the future though, I promise you all that.

Until then, here's a selfie of me and my pigeon mask. I've meant to share this on the blog for a while now.

Drained

I try not to bring in my life problems on this blog unless I can find a way to be creative with them. Lets Emmanimate is mainly to share any artwork, development and progress on any projects I'm working on as well as the finished result. It's generally meant to be a professional place for my work... or as close to professional as I can make it anyway.

But long story short, I've been drained in every way possible. Emotionally, physically, mentally... just a series of events in the short space of a month, varying from recovering from surgery to life changing events, that have basically left me with no energy and very little drive to do anything productive. This is the first time in weeks that I've actually drawn something and for a cartoonist, that's hardly a good thing.

The problem with me is I'm not a particularly open person when it comes to my own emotions. They're always on the back burner because I don't view them as important in comparison to other people. I'm the funny person, I'm here to cheer people up, to be there for them. Not load my problems onto them. Unfortunately, this often means they fester inside until... well, this happens. A long time of little productivity, if anything. So instead, I've taken the time to quickly sketch out a small vent piece that has helped me a little bit- to see a visual representation of how I've been feeling. Seems a bit dramatic but it's mainly to get the 'feels' out in a creative way rather than letting them stew any longer.

I've had this sort of idea for a while now, where the colour slowly drained out of a person, leaving them as a sad shadow of themselves instead. It's pretty much on the nose to how I've been feeling. I normally use bold colours and lines but it seemed out of place for something like this, hence the sketchy lines and the blocking. Kind of adds to the whole 'not feeling like myself lately' deal, you know?

Oops, I actually meant to remove the 'Fuck it' on the shirt. I think I felt especially crap when I wrote that. Ah well, might as well keep it. If anything, it adds to the whole thing. Feel free to give any suggestions and comments, this was just to vent but I'd still like to learn how I can improve.

Thankfully, I seem to slowly but surely be coming out of that funk. Every day I feel a bit better and I'm just aiming to get back to my work mentality, where I can churn out a lot of art and be able to focus on that. Hopefully that'll be the case once the bloody dissertation is out of the way. Which I'm meant to be focusing on right now. Ugh.

So yeah, hopefully I haven't made myself look like some overly dramatic wimp. And if I have... eh, we all need a whinge from time to time. Thanks for reading.

Crumbs Fanart: Green Vs Stanley

It's that surprising and wonderful occurrence where someone wanted to make something for me! Rachel Normand, creator of Lizard Cops (Eeee, episode 2 will be coming soon sjhsjkhjdk) saw I was being a sad panda and decided to be all "I SHALL FIX THIS!" *Whoosh* and then this amazing creation appeared.

It's just utterly perfect. Green would be enough of a dickface to snatch a doughnut from someone and come out with a quip like that. Although he's hardly one to talk; I'm surprised that tree branch is still standing. Maybe it snaps afterwards and Stanley gets the doughnut back. Hmm.

... I will most likely be drawing that. Mmhmm, yep.

SPEAKING OF, I have been working on my entry for the Lizard Cops Art Contest. I'll just share a part of the sketch for now as the majority of it is at the unpolished poop stage. It will be involving Stanley as well.
This dog just cannot catch a break, can he. Well, a few broken bones maybe.

So yeah, hopefully I'll finish that this weekend!

Thanks to Rachel Normand for being her awesome self and if you haven't seen Lizard Cops yet WHAT IS ACTUALLY WRONG WITH YOU EDUCATE YOURSELF

Kay, bye guys!

Birdbrained Collection Complete and More Concept Art

I should be in bed now but I'm... uh, long story short, I need to distract myself right now. Besides, the college internet is being a giant prat so I don't think I'll be able to upload an entry tomorrow. So might as well be productive while I'm fending off sleep.

OK, so you might have noticed that indeed it's true, the Birdbrained collection is now complete! I may or may not add other birds in the future if people wish for me to but for now, I'm leaving it as is. I have to say, they all look fantastic together. Very colourful!

You can view the collection and buy the shirts RIGHT HERE.

I've also dabbled in some concept art here and there as I develop the characters and settings to help me dig into the story better. We'll start with a little idea I did for Hope. As she's a religious bird, I thought it would be fitting to recreate the classic holy dove imagery: the blue sky, bright sunshine and rays and of course the dove (well, in this case fantail but shush) itself. All she's missing is the plant they sometime include in her beak.
I'm considering making this a poster or a print in the future if people like it enough. Yes, no?

And as both Ashleigh and Rachel were doing some world building for their projects, I decided to do some artwork of one of the main buildings in the comic, an abandoned building in the town that the pigeons in the city often go into for meetings, shelter and so on. I did the same building at different times and weather because I wanted to see how that particular building would look. I'd like to create more settings once I think of them in better detail.
The raining one is my favourite one I think. It was the first one I did and I think I spent the most time on it. The Secret Promise perfume ad on the side of the building is actually an affectionate nod to a GCSE Media project I did with my friend Stacey, where we had to film our own advert. I wonder if she still has the footage...

Yeah, when the building is seen in the comic, the sign will always be different. Because shut it, that's why.

I'll make the pigeons colourful next time, I was mainly focusing on the background for the time being. Perhaps a shot of one of the pigeons overlooking the city. Hmm.

Also I should reeeeally get cracking on the script. Minor detail there. Oops.

Anyway you know the drill, any comments/advice/whathaveyou, just lay it on me in the comments. OK, catch you all later champs!

Slight Hiccup In Development

Yeah uh, if you know me in real life (or follow my twitter page as I was whinging about this constantly), intense stomach pains got me into the hospital before I was able to complete my project development work and hand it in. I came out with two weeny scars, aching everywhere and an exhaustion I'm still trying to shake off. Damn anaesthetic. Or however you spell it.

So I'm all discombobulated with my work right now and I need to figure out what I need to get done and when. I feel I should have recovered faster than this- it was just a keyhole operation and a laparoscopy, surely that shouldn't have been a big deal? I don't know, I don't really get sick often. Or at least nothing worse than a head cold.

Either way, I need to get a mitigation agreed. I was PLANNING on doing that today but the damn exhaustion took over again. I need to get over that tomorrow, the sooner the better.

So I don't have a LOT to show you guys, especially not in terms of the Realisation. And I also have to do the dissertation and... oh god, my head. But I have some little things I've done that I'm able to share. I'd also like your opinions on a few things actually.

Bit first, a cool picture of Scarlet. Always meant to colour this. I also tried a new shading style as well. It looks pretty good. Might use it more.

And now, the new Crumbs background. It's not done, I need to add Jay still but I wanted to add SOMETHING new considering I've been off the circuit workwise for nearly two weeks.

There it is in full. You can see it in action RIGHT HERE. And if you want to see the old background, you can look at the vlog again.

What I'd like to know is which works better. If you have any preferences or advice on what I can improve, please let me know!

Now I'm off to eat something and attempt to sleep and then not sleep in tomorrow like a moron. Wish me luck on that.