The wedding video was successfully completed yesterday. This is the final result. 

The animated wedding video project I have been working on is drawing to a close. I have finished animating my scenes using Adobe After Effects. Towards the beginning of the project I posted some of my background designs. Throughout the project, I have developed these designs further in order to meet the requirements of the brief to a high standard. The following show some of the development that took place as well as animation.

Another valuable life drawing session this week. As I become more confident I'm experimenting with colour more and feel I'm significantly developing my personal style as well as drawing skills. When I first began life drawing, I struggled with proportion, something I have significantly improved in last few weeks which has given me the opportunity to focus on rendering and experimenting with colour as well as using a wider range of materials.


I've also been drawing on a much larger scale than I'm used to which was something else I found particularly difficult at first. When I began the life drawing sessions I tended to draw A4 size or less and now draw up to A1 size. 

These drawings can also be found in the life drawing tab under illustration on my website.

I really enjoyed this weeks life drawing session and I feel my style is developing more strongly as well as improved drawing skills each week. These are a few of my drawings varying from 30 seconds to 45 minutes. I was particularly interested in working on tone throughout this session and we completed an exercise as a warm down towards the end of just drawing the light and shadow tones we could see rather than line. I really enjoyed this and the abstract effect it created.
I used chalk and charcoal for the majority of my work as well as oil pastels. 

I'm currently working in a small team to create a 60-second animated wedding video for a client. 
We decided to use paper cut-out silhouette style to show the couples story to create an elegant, romantic feel to the film. These are some of the backgrounds I've designed as well as some concept art and a mood board. I am a background designer as well as an animator on this exciting project. We are using Adobe After Effects to animate and will be using textures to give the film a more traditional 2D effect as though stop-motion animated using paper cut-out characters. 

I feel that my life drawing skills have improved massively since going to weekly sessions. I'm also feeling much more confident with life drawing which I feel will greatly improve my illustration and design for animation work. 

I'm not particularly confident with my life drawing skills and it's something I'm very keen to improve for my developing practice project. I've been to a couple of sessions so far and can already see an improvement in my work. 

Below are some examples I selected from the most recent session I went to. There is a clear improvement between my drawings from the beginning of the session and my drawing at the end. 

I've been working on a pitch which I delivered to a panel of four members of the BBC Food and Farming Awards team today. They required ideas for an animated ident for each of the 10 award categories including an introduction and ending. Being particularly interested in design for animation I began my idea process by researching various illustrators and found myself inspired by the work of Ryo Takemasa. I was especially interested in his use of blocks of bold, vibrant colour and texture and decided I would like to create a similar aesthetic in my designs. 

As the awards are about food, the first idea that crossed my mind was recipes and cookbooks. I created some mood boards to reference in my work, one consisting of illustrated recipes and the other mainly of Ryo Takemasa's work. 

I made notes on several different ideas and then began putting together a rough storyboard. The sequence begins with a couple making dinner in a kitchen. The camera zooms in to a cookbook on the worktop which is then opened and the first award animation begins. It was really important to me that the sequences had a consistent theme all the way through and I decided to achieve this by having a character in each ident talk. However, the characters would not necessarily be people but rather animals and food. The inspiration for this came from Creature Comforts, something aimed at and humorous for adults. This was another important factor, that the designs and animation not be too childish as the awards and ceremony are for adults in the food industry. 

My aim is to create a lighthearted, charming, humorous and enjoyable introduction for the audience to each award. 

Below are the storyboards I created for the pitch. I designed the theme to be applicable to all awards so spent my time creating attractive artwork for the first two awards to convey my ideas clearly. 

Photography has been a passion and a hobby of mine for a long time but I've let it fall by the wayside since being in Bristol for the past couple of years. Yesterday, I decided to explore some of Bristol and get back into taking photographs. I had a brilliant day and it's encouraged me to get out and work on my photography skills more often. Some of the photographs below are also in the photography section of my website. 

Today, I was inspired by the work of Jonathan Yeo and his use of blocks of colour in portrait paintings (example left). http://www.jonathanyeo.com/portraits.asp?pnum=5

So, I completed a digital painting using Adobe Photoshop. The painting took around 5 hours to complete and was created using blocks of colour taken using the eyedropper tool from an image I found on Pinterest (original source: http://ldnfashion.tumblr.com/post/9594274263). Below is the finished painting as well as some screenshots I took during painting.