Fanta Designs

Last week for our character design class we were asked to come up with a new character for the recent Fanta campaign, with the intent of launching a new fictional flavor : Papaya. If you don't know what Fanta is, it's some kind of orange crush which used to be available only in Europe but is now all over the world. Their new campaign is very young, colorful and energetic, and their characters have a bit of a Playmobil look to them. You can check the work of Psyop, the studio responsible for the campaign, on their website :

http://www.psyop.tv/?s=fanta

Below are my original designs. I picked the girl character to move on with and develop further. I'm pretty happy with the poster mockup idea, so I'm working on coloring that as well.

Hope you like it!

Goodify

Lately I did a small contract for Goodify, a startup company who "makes it easy for organizations to track, reward, amd promote its good doings". The needed a landscape illustration for their homepage, as well as their Twitter and Facebook pages. It had a to be fun, bouncy and colorful, which I think turned out pretty well in the final illustration.

The whole thing was done on Illustrator. Below is the image I delivered.

You can see the final result on their homepage (at the very bottom). They made a few minor adjustments to best fit the website, which I think make it look even better!

Their website :

http://goodify.com/

Their Facebook page :

https://www.facebook.com/Goodify

Their Twitter account :

http://twitter.com/wegoodify

Flip A Crêpe

First somewhat interesting 3D animation assignment made at Centre NAD. We were given a rig of an arm holding a pan, and we had to animate it so that it looked like the character was flipping a crêpe. 3D animation definitely isn't super intuitive at first when you come from a 2D animation background (errr f-curves...I'm sorry, what?), but I think I'm slowly starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. This was actually pretty fun to do, once I figured it out after spending 3hrs flipping a fake crêpe and staring blankly at my computer not really knowing where to start.

You can watch it on Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/49400486

New deviantART account!

Guess what? 

You can now follow me on my new deviantART account as well as on my blog! Double the fun right! 

http://minimonstermill.deviantart.com/

Homage to Shaun Tan

So school has officially started again, and it's quickly becoming clear that this will be a pretty intense year! I have fallen back to part-time Illustrator status at Woozworld, working about 15hrs/week, and am slowly getting back into the full-time student life. I'll do my best to keep updating this blog with new school work as well as Woozworld material whenever I can. 

To kickoff the semester, I'd like to share my first assignment for my new Character Design class. As a quick way of evaluating the general drawing skills of the class, our teacher asked us to reproduce an image (illustration, painting, silkscreen, etc.) in the medium of our choice. And as a second part to our homework, we had to offer our personal interpretation of the piece, with no limitation of technique or style.

I chose an image from Shaun Tan's wonderful and inspiring book The Arrival. I really love how he merges detailed realistic settings and characters with the most unusual creatures. He has a great way of mixing the natural with the fantastical, and reminds me a little bit of Hayao Myazaki in that respect. Their styles are very different from each other of course, but they both seem to nail that delicate mix in a way that resonates with me.

Any way, so I chose the very last image from his book, which you can see below. I have included both parts of my assignment, which was done entirely on Photoshop using a stylus. My first impulse was to use pencil on paper, which I'm more comfortable with when it comes to something this realistic. Though I use a stylus on a daily basis, I'd never "painted" in such a style on Photoshop, and I felt a bit threatened by the idea. But since I'm all about learning new techniques and working in different styles, I gave myself a little challenge and kept my use of pencil and paper to a rough sketch. I'm pretty happy with the results, and proud of myself for stepping outside of my comfort zone here! Turns out painting on Photoshop is super fun too!

Back to School!

So it's official, summer's over!

After four months of going from job to job and contract to contract, cumulating experience and making new contacts, it's time to slow down on the professional and refocus on the educational. I have had an amazing break, and am extremely grateful for all the great people I got to meet, and the great things I took part in. It's a little hard to put a stop to my full-time job at the studio, as I have gotten really fond of the place, the work, and the team, but I am thoroughly excited to start my third semester at Centre NAD! Plus, I am lucky enough to be able to remain at Woozworld part-time for the school year, which pretty much means I get to have my cake and eat it too for the next few months! :)

For the occasion, I am posting a few more images of some of the things I drew for Woozworld in the past month. Again, all material below is property of Woozworld Inc., and has been released in-game already. You can visit Woozworld at www.woozworld.com

Woozworld update!

It's already been 2 months since I've started my job at Woozworld! Time has just flown by, it's crazy. I still love it as much, and more so now than ever. We moved into our new offices last week, to accomodate our rapidly growing team, and the place is great. We're super close to Jean-Talon market, which makes for an awesome neighbourhood, and the studio is sooo much bigger than the previous one. Also, I have a window seat which is pretty sweet!

And most importantly, I've become pretty comfortable with Flash, which really helps the creativity flow. Once you've wrapped your head around the technical stuff, it's actually a lot more enjoyable and simple to go ahead and draw. I started off doing garments only for the first few weeks, which turned out to be a good thing. Outfits are probably the hardest thing to do because the process and file structure is somewhat more complex than for other elements. So I think it's good I got that mastered first.

I was very excited to move on to furnitures and environments afterwards though! Now I'm drawing anything from clothes to chairs to cites and secret grottoes! Best job eveeeeer! :)

I figured I'd show some of the earlier stuff I worked on before we moved, when I was still doing mostly  garments. Everything down here has already been released in the game, and I checked with my boss to make sure I was allowed to show stuff online! Please note that the character isn't one of my own designs but simply our template puppet which we use to draw all of our clothes. All images below are property of Woozworld Inc., and you can see them in game at http://www.woozworld.com/.

In case you're wondering, we always draw the rotations as well. So we end up with 8 drawings for each outfit, which allows the 2D characters to move around in every direction.

Enjoy!

(I assume someone from Woozworld is probably watching again so hi! :))