Caricature - Sean Connery

A long long time ago, I used to draw caricatures for fun but then for some strange reason, I stopped. Now many years later, I have decided to pick up the pen (well, tablet in this case) and reignite the passion. You only live once after all... or is that twice ;)

I was inspired by the amazing artist, Jason Seiler. I recommend checking out his work for a visual feast.
Before I began painting, I collected various reference images of Sean Connery so that I could build a greater sense of his character and 3-Dimensional facial structure. I then drew quick thumbnail sketches of his head to warm-up and get some ideas flowing.

Thumbnail Sketches

With this photo as my main source of reference, I decided to put emphasis on his large forehead, thick eyebrows and pouting lips. I'm not a fan of the extremely exaggerated caricatures so my aim was to make mine look humorous but less offensive than these. However, in hindsight, I feel I could've played about with Connery's features a bit more.
I believe the hair could have fit better with the rest of the painting but I struggled with that part. With practice I'm sure there will be a noticeable improvement. I added some finishing touches to the portrait by applying some depth of field and noise.
The next caricature/portrait I will paint will be a toss between the United legend, Ryan Giggs, and the star of BBC's Luther series, Idris Elba. I'm sure I'll have a lot of fun with whichever one I choose!

Tools used: Photoshop CS5 + Wacom Tablet

Blocking values1

Painting values2

85% complete - adjusting and more painting

My Personal Portfolio Website

Just so you know, I have a personal website to house my art/animation portfolio. It's a temporary flash site, but it will do for now :)
My Portfolio Website

I'll be keeping it up-to-date with my latest works.

Wicked Princess - Concept and Idea Development (CID)

Recently, I have been working on a project where I will create conceptual art for a potential video game. The game is based on the story of 'The Wicked Prince' by Hans Cristian Anderson and the artwork will be finished by May 3rd.
Here are the list of the assets:

Environments
-Magnificent Ship Interior
-Magnificent Church Interior
-Devastated Peasant Village Exterior
-Heavenly Exterior

Props
-Prince's Primary Weapon
-Magnificent Ship Exterior (as vehicle)
-Prince's Army's Tools of Destruction
-Statue of Prince
-Prince's Treasure Item - inanimate or dead
-1-3 x Mundane Props from Devastated Village

Characters (one non-humanoid)
-Prince/Princess Protagonist
-Numberless Angel
-Priest (impoverished or otherwise downtrodden)

I've been wanting to design something that has influences from West African culture so will use the culture/traditions/people/architecture as my main reference. However, I want this to be a fictional game world so will combine with reference from other sources too. At the moment, I have created mood boards (see below for examples) for each asset and  made some initial sketches.

Village Exterior

Priest

Wicked Princess

Princess Statue

There's a lot of free-flowing experimentation at this stage - no idea is set in stone. Below are a few of my initial thumbnail sketches (I've highlighted my favourites) for my version of the 'wicked prince'. As you can see, I've gone for a female protagonist.

Silhouette thumbnails are good for focusing on the form of the character and less on the fine details. This is a new technique for me and not what comes naturally to me, but I have given it a try in these initial drawings. Still needs improvement but I can see the benefits - a strong silhouette is a key asset for any character concept.

My recent projects

Hi guys,

Here is a collection of some of my project work from the past year.
In Nov 2010, I completed work on the Xbox Live game, Big Tidy Up game, for the environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. For this project I was lead artist and animator. Louis McLaughlin (Lead programmer), Tim Newsome (Team Leader), Chris Trott (artist) and Chris Owens (programmer) were the other members of the team. As well as our main duties, we all had a hand in the game design process which was a fun and fruitful process. We won numerous awards for our game and were very close to winning a year's contract with Rockstar North at the Game Republic Event.

In Dec 2010, I created an animation short with the focus on lip-sync. It was my first attempt at lip-sync, but it was a fun and challenging process. I also designed, modelled, textured and rigged the character, Francis the 'Lion'. I'm happy with this first attempt, but I feel the animation could be a lot stronger with a few more tweaks.

An on-going personal project of mine has been an original cross-platform product called, Sacred River. The project has been put on hold many times due to lack of inspiration and change in art direction, but I'm hoping to show you more very soon! Here is a concept image of the main character.

Let's get cracking!

I had cornflakes for breakfast

Hello and welcome to my blog,

Here I will share my art work and inspirations with the world :) although I do have my reservations...

There are obvious pros to online blogs and social networks but I value my privacy and I'm not much of an attention seeker. With our increased use of social networking and online blogs, privacy is becoming a rare thing and if we don't use a social network we are viewed as strange or anti-social!

Whether we like it or not, our lives are becoming more transparent.

But anyway, who am I kidding. This is an opportunity to showcase my work and hopefully catch the eye of prospective employers ;)

I will keep my mundane jibba-jabba to a minimum and treat your eyes to more visual splendor!