Don't Starve - Wednesday

Have any of you played the PC game, Don't Starve, by Klei Entertainment? If you haven't, you should! One of my assignments in college this term was to create a new character to be placed within an existing universe, and while some of my friends picked things like Adventure Time and Valiant Hearts, I picked Don't Starve. And I am so glad that I did!

So the first step in the process was research, research, research. I studied the game itself, paying attention to the the line weight, the colours, the shapes, and everything in between. I made some interesting discoveries that I might not otherwise have picked up on; almost every character in the game wears red, for example, and the males only have pupils, while the females only have whites in their eyes. The playable characters, as a set, are incredibly unified, right down to their names: almost all of them start with the letter W.

I also researched different types of characters that I might like to design; and eventually settled on a Horologist, whom I named Wednesday*. Then I was able to sketch out some ideas (throwing away most of them!) and eventually figured out how I wanted my character to look. Below, you can see how I drastically I changed the character from the original sketch into the final lineart.

The next step was colouring, which was a LOT of fun! We were taught a technique of colouring that I had never used before, which allowed for easy changes later on. It worked out quite well, I think! I experimented with different hues and things, but nevertheless I stayed true to the game's styling, and went with a predominantly red colour scheme, with a lot of black scribble detail.

The final part of the assignment was to place the character in different lighting situations, which was my favourite part, by far! We were given five different themes: 01) Mid-day sun 02) Dark rainy day 03) Moonlight 04) Sunrise 05) Haunted House. We weren't asked to design the backgrounds, per se, but I got a little carried away with them... 

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the end results. What do you think? Does my character fit in with Don't Starve? Do you have a favourite lighting condition?

*In honour of Wednesday Addams, whom I love, and think would fit in with the game perfectly! I also watched The Addams Family recently and remembered how much I loved it all over again. 

Tamara Glenn

Introducing Tamara Glenn! I drew this a few weeks ago, but spent so long fussing about with colours that I hated the sight of it. I'm still not 100% sure about the colour choices that I went with, but I wanted to share her character anyway. I'm still figuring out her backstory too, but eventually I'll put together proper character sheets for all of these. :)

Construction Worker A

I only realized when I came back to college (hurray!) that I forgot to post a few character designs I drew over the summer. This is one of them; A Construction Worker with a shovel. :)

Like the other character designs I've done, I started with a digital sketch and then went over that with a sketchy line-art style. 

Colourisation

I'm back in college! This is one of the first assignments of the year; to colourise a black and white photograph that has something to do with the 1916 Easter Rising. The photo I chose was taken in 1915, in Cork City. It's of a group of the Irish Volunteers, including my great-grandfather, Sean Scanlan (second from the right in the back row). Click through to see the original photograph and my progress with it.

Mishmash

Here's a whole bunch of doodle-pips and playin' around sketches and animations from August, which was a bit of a rollercoaster for me. There's some fanart (Animaniacs, Skottie Young's Oz characters, Up etc) some warm-up sketches, and a handful of distraction drawings/animations (you know the type - the things you do when you want to just take your mind off things). Hope all of you lovely people had a great August, and are as excited as I am to be saying hello to September. :)

Le Vélo

Let it not be said that I animated nothing this summer! For the past few day or two I've been playing around with this little guy. It's short and sweet, so I drew out each frame of the cyclist in Photoshop, then imported the PNGs into Flash. I sketched the background (if you can call it that) in Photoshop too, but tweened it in Flash. It was largely inspired by a sketch by Karl Kwasny a few years back. :)

Competencies Performance and Development Programme Icons

Three things: Dublin is cool, icons are fun, and working full time in a graphic design company is a curious experience.

Hayley Maller

I've done another character design : Hayley Maller! She's a drummer with a very black-and-white, no-nonsense approach to life. Her icy personality is disarmingly intense, and her music is just as powerful. 

Harley Davidson

Hello everyone! Hope you're all having a wonderful week. Tomorrow I'm off to Dublin zoo to meet up with a few college friends, but I'll be back here on Thursday. I'm so excited to see them all! In the meantime, I've been working on a requested tshirt design; a Harley Davidson. It's just about finished and is now available on both Society6 (with free shipping right now!) and TeePublic (tshirts on sale for just $14).

Helios Philip Lament

Here's another character design I've been working on recently for a fun personal project I've had in the pipeline for a long time. He's an intrepid explorer and happy hitchhiker, who's been everywhere and back again. His story is closely associated with Arista Spice.

North American P51 Mustang

Last week, taking a break from character designs, I started working on a new illustration for my S6 shop. It's a P51 Mustang - one of the earliest models - to go with my little collection of WWII aircraft blueprints. It took two long days to get the pencil sketch finished, and then another four or five hours on top of that to flip it digitally and finish it off.

WIPs, the finished project, the rest of the collection, and a little more rambling after the jump. :)

Vrit

Vrit is another character design I've come up with recently. He's second in command, under Captain Maroon Mauls, on board the Eleemosynary ship. He's sly and sinister, but he's exactly what Maroon needs to keep him focused. Not that Maroon is ever particularly keen to listen to him, of course.

WIPs after the jump :)

Arista Spice

Recently, I've been really focused on character design. I'm trying to be more consistent, more efficient, and more distinctive. So I've been trying out a range of different styles of drawing and colouring, and I think I'm finally settling down into a nice rhythm.

WIPs after the jump :)

Jazz Musician's Apartment

This is something of a long running project, I suppose. I finished it a few weeks ago, just in time for Pen & Pixel 2014 but I started it way back in the first semester. It's ended up being a kinda hybrid drawing, in terms of media. Traditional lineart, digital colouring, and traditional shading.

Birthdays

Today, One Curious Chip is two years old, and I myself am twenty! I decided to take this opportunity to step away from my work for just a little while, and write a short personal post. After the jump I'll talk a little about what I've been up to lately, and I'll probably make vague promises about the future too :)

MotoGP Riders - Ballpoint Pen Illustrations

Over the past few years, I've become more and more passionate about motorbikes, riding, and racing. In my mind, MotoGP is the most spectacular motorsport out there. The circuits, the teams, and the riders are all incredible to watch, and every single race has me on the edge of my seat. It's worth watching, I'll tell you that.

Audio Soundscape - A Tale Of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is a segment of Neil Gaiman's Sandman: Worlds' End. Using the graphic novel excerpt as a script, towards the end of 2013, me and two friends (shoutout to Kirsty and Jamie :) ) captured all the dialogue needed to build a soundscape. I also created my own foley, and used sound effects from on-line sources. This is my version of the tale.

Animation Reel

Over the past few weeks I've worked on a whole bunch of short animations, as part of my college course. They've been a whole lot of fun! Things started simple, with a basic bouncing ball sequence, and building up as I learned more about squash and stretch, weight, anticipation and reaction, and various other elements of animation. I made a short reel just to show you a little selection of what I've been up to; from bouncing balls, to Kerplunk, to a pinball machine, and a study of light vs heavy. Hope you like it!

Race Against Time

Back in the first semester of college, we were tasked with creating a stop-motion animation inspired by a turn of phrase. I picked "Race Against Time," because there never seem to be enough hours in the day and I'm a (motorbike) racing enthusiast. I come from a family of petrolheads, too, so getting my hands on props for this project wasn't too difficult either. The helmet and gloves were my own, the steering wheel came from my brother's kit car, the overalls are my brothers, and the clock faces were given to me by an old art teacher who'd worked in an antique clock shop at some point.

I first started capturing images for this project one late night in a multi-storey car park in the city. It was a fun night out with my dear friend Emily, but ultimately ended prematurely, as it turns out taking photographs for a few hours there was frowned upon by security...

So, a change of scenery was called for! Thankfully, Emily's father let us loose in his office building for a night when no one was around, and it turned out great. In that one night, we spent many long hours moving things inch by painstaking inch, taking hundreds of photos, and making many a fresh cup of tea to keep us fuelled up. By three in the morning, we'd just about run out of steam, but we'd managed to capture everything I needed to string together a minutes' worth of stop-motion. What do you think? Was it worth it?