I recently found myself thinking about an animation I'd created in my first-year of University. The idea of it was to create a 40-50 second hand-drawn animation running at at 12 frames per second, I remember spending around 3 weeks on it around other University work and drawing around 500 frames on A4 paper. So I was a bit stumped why I had never included it on my portfolio.

Then I watched it back. At the time I had been in a bit of a rush to get the animation all compressed into a video. It was 3:00am the night before it was due, my scanner wasn't working and photographing with a DSLR camera was proving tricky. Which was when I remembered "you can create stop frame animations on a 3DS can't you?".

This lead to a real drop in the quality of the video and watching nearly 10 years on it's a bit difficult to make out what's going on at times. At the time it served it's purpose though and is actually one of the factors for my class mates asking me to join their groups to create the animations in 2nd and 3rd year projects.

So after all of this time I though it's finally get it uploaded but I also through that I could do a major over hall of the animation adding in new camera angles and developing the story a bit more. The  following is the rough pass of the upgraded animation that includes new scenes and traces of the original animation. The next step following this is to draw in a proper original character and up the frame-rate so that it all looks slicker.

Since I designed my OC Cammie, I've always had a plans to animate her or make some short comics featuring her. The little sloth was originally concepted as a mascot for a games and media website (Button Bash Gamers) and as a big gamer myself  I've got this vision of her being an overly excitable and over-energetic gamer. When it comes to outdoors activities well her lazy-sloth nature then takes over. Unfortunately while I always start getting plans together something always comes around to slow the progress.

Recently however I've found the motivation to actually start animating again. Primarily the animations I work are of the short-looping variety such as character animations for character models and sprites or motion effects for web applications. At university I did have a 30-40 second animation of a character a parkouring though a simple hallway and have done some longer motion-capture sequences but little else in terms of telling a short story.

Above is the first of what I am hoping to be a series of short animations featuring Cammie the Sloth and my avatar alter-ego Flatty. The next step is to draw out the animation itself. At present the plan is to either use ClipStudio which I have recently been trialling or Adobe Animate which I am also pretty new to.

The plan is to update this blog post with updates as to my progress regularly.

While volunteering at GamersFTW writing video games I was asked by the owner of the website if I would be interested doing some graphic design for his main business Pixel Patches. It was here that I picked up some commissioned work to design a number of logos for various companies. 

Originally I decided not to include these in my portfolio as these were paid for pieces of work. However I spoke to the owner of Pixel Patches who assured me that it would be fine to do so. He'd also mentioned that unfortunately some of the companies no longer existed (originally designed 4-5 years ago).

Showcase Betty

The Spec - "Design a logo around a Betty Boo type of character wearing lingerie. The design should be stylish and sophisticated rather than suggestive.Expecting the character to be quite subtle/muted with their lingerie being a red/crimson"

Cake Hive"The Spec - "Design a stylish logo for a startup cake company." Very little else was given for this as the client did not have a clear idea of what they had in mind hence there there was a lot of back an forth with the concepts. The design in image four at the bottom was the final design chosen.

Smith & WalkerThe Spec - "Design a sophisticated lion themed logo for a law firm." The client on this had a clear idea in that they wanted a shaded regal lion all in one colour so that it could be altered to any situation (Bronze it or apply a gold effect).

PLT Services

The Spec - "Design a number of cleaning themed banners to promote our various cleaning services. Characters to be simplistic in form and easily interchangeable with in scenes."

So I created my avatar back in 2014 after university, 6 years on I think my style has changed quite a bit and my long hair has gone so I thought he could do with an update.

Around the time I created him I was really into Shantae and the Pirates Curse and loved the art style so my avatar was influenced heavily by that along with a number of other drawings at the time.

The idea now was to match him up more with my other characters, Cammie the Sloth and Nibs the Gerbil.

Avatar Timelapse

For a while I did some work for We Are Digital Vision creating promotional videos and guides for their Wix apps, Rollover and Button Magic. The videos I created included demos/trailers for upcoming packs, feature updates, tutorials and how to guides. These videos were created in either Premiere Pro and After Effects.

More examples can be seen over on the We Are Digital Vision YouTube page:
https://www.youtube.com/user/WEAREDIGITALVISION/featured

Rollover Example:

Button Magic Example:

Along with the creation of these videos I also wrote step-by-step guides and features on the applications for the knowledge base.

Really want to do some more with my Sloth Kid but referring to her by that all the time wasn't really ideal...So now she's taken the name of Cammie!

So started off the exploration with just a couple of quick profile views for the character. Used to do some modeling in Maya which recently I'm tempted to try out again so this might come in handy!

I also wanted to get more of a feel of her personality so I continued on with a character study sheet for her. Felt afterwards that I need to work on my facial expressions so next time I experiment with that.

Artwork Timelapse Part 1 

Artwork Timelapse Part 2 

Recently I started writing reviews again with the guys from GamersFTW and was asked to create a new mascot for the site. I thumb nailed out a couple of ideas for the new Button Bash Gamer mascot.

This character wasn't selected but I liked enough to continue it.

DeviantArt

Also, as a bit of a test, I recorded myself drawing her up in Photoshop using my shiny new Gaomon tablet.

As of recently I have been working on creating a series of transitional animation that could be used in picture application. Essentially when a user hovers over or clicks on an image an animation effect will play revealing a secondary image. While these below are in GIF format these would also be saved out as SVG making them scale-able and giving users the option to alter the colours to their preference.

These animations were created using a mix of Photoshop and Illustrator.

So recently I started writing reviews again with the guys from GamersFTW and was asked to create us a new mascot.

"The Button Bash Gamers, or BBGees for short, are a group of friends united by two passions: video games and writing. We have assembled like the New New Avengers to bring personal, light-hearted video game content to your screens."

We've dropped off a little recently but I'm looking to write something new very soon (just need to stop playing games and get on to writing about them).

If your interested you can check us out at www.buttonbashgamers.com

To see more (hopefully) regular updates of my artwork, such as the images featured below, check out my gallery over at DeviantArt.

Here's the level designs for the cat game and the cat flap asset.

Cat Flap Design