Illustration / Shark Liver Oil

The Old Man And The Sea

So, recently my brother (Dave) and his friend (Matt) released a series of podcasts called Shark Liver Oil. It's a podcast about books, but it's not as dull as you'd think.

The reason I'm writing about it here is because I recently started listening and one of the lines in the first episode (The Old Man and The Sea) tickled me so I thought I'd practice my "do more illustration" resolution by creating one based on this.

I am quite aware that standing alone, this does little for the observer who has not listened to the podcast ("what?.. a harpoon..? what? why? ...Some kind of die hard reference.... I don't remember a shark in the film.... what? I've read the book but i don't remember a festive theme..."). So in that respect it fails to reach a wider audience, but I thought I'd do it as some kind of fan art, and at the very least get a free plug on the podcast (ahem).

So a little explanation. The two are chatting about the book, explaining that it is about an old cuban badass of a fisherman who goes hunting for a shark. Dave explains that it is basically "Bruce Willis Goes Fishing". So there you go.

Shark Liver Oil

Updates!

Well, it has been a while since my last post, but today is a designated "do stuff on the website" day. There are some cool projects I've been working on recently, a couple of which are online, a couple are still pending release.

I've been trying to get a bit of variety in my work - a lot has been influenced by my self promo animation, which has had a great reception and has found me a bit of work, which is good. I'm quite aware that it is playing on the current shape layer/ vector style that is getting a lot of love in the motion graphics community, and while this isn't a bad thing at all and it still looks fresh to me, I've been trying at every opportunity to diverge from this and get out of my comfort zone a bit more. 

The way that I'm going about this is to approach projects from a different viewpoint (whether it is 3D, film, stop motion) and to get more into illustration. This has always been a weak point for me - and by that I mean the act of actually sitting down with a pen/pencil/paintbrush and drawing something that looks good before I touch it up in the computer.

I think that doing personal projects that involve this will help significantly. This is mainly because when faced with a commercial animation project, I think "how can I make something that looks good, but can be easily animated and turned around on time and to budget by one person?" When illustrating a single frame, these restrictions disappear and I can play around with styles without worrying about how layers and textures will animate. This in turn will hopefully spawn some techniques that can carry through into my animation.

Anyway, more on that in a different post. And more on what I've been up to in a professional capacity in a third post. Today might be a bumper-triple-post kind of day, which I'm not sure is the right way to do things when maintaining a blog (in fact, I'm positive it's not what you're meant to do) but what if It's another 2 months before I find the time to post something? Just pretend that they are all spaced out at regular intervals and we'll be fine...

Illustrated Aliens | Motional

This is a fantastic and ambitious project by Illustrator/Animator Andy Martin. I just can't believe how much thought and effort he has put into this.

Every day on his blog Illustrated Aliens, Andy uploads a new character illustration that will inhabit a planet. At the end of each month he releases an animation about the planet that involves the characters he has designed, and a print of the planet and characters. Each animation has it's own theme and message that reflects the characters design.