The Chicken Song | Update 01

I am incredibly excited about this project, and really couldn't wait to share it! Recently, I was approached by Ruth Butler to animate a music video for a song she had written. I'm about two weeks into this ten week project, and I'm happy to say that things are going very well. Ruth has a brilliant sense of humour and a clever way with words, which all poured into this quirky, entertaining little tale about a chicken and a golden egg.

Because the song is such a fun story, because Ruth wanted the lyrics to appear on screen, and because I needed to animate to a high standard quickly, I thought styling it like a comic book would be the best route to take. So saying, I'm looking forward to seeing the final result, and because I've designed everything according to both US Comic Book Dimensions, and HDTV, the story will look good in print as well as on screen when it's finished.

This is just one page in this little story, but there's a lot more to come that I'm very much looking forward to showing you!

PS: If you think that you, or someone you know, would have a good voice to sing a song like this, get in touch at allie22 (at) gmail.com! :)

Kinetic Text | God's Away on Business

It's done! My kinetic text project is officially complete. So here it is! 

Please do click through to see the complete process, from start to finish! 

WIP 4 | Kinetic Text | God's Away on Business

The deadline for this kinetic text project is fast-approaching, and so are the deadlines for everything else! But it's pretty satisfying to see a big project like this one creep ever-closer to the finish line, so I'm pretty happy with it. There are still a few little bits and pieces about this section that I want to tidy up, but done is better than perfect, so right now, I'm planning to get everything finished to a standard I'm happy enough with, and then I'll go back over to tweak it to the best that it can be.

WIP 2 | Kinetic Text | God's Away on Business from Alice Coleman on Vimeo.

Ballpoint Pen Illustration | Origami

Remember: These illustrations and more is for sale on Society6. Check it out!

The other night, I took a playlist of delightfully questionable taste, a ballpoint pen, a Moleskine sketchbook, and two hours to illustrate this. It felt like I was coming home, and it felt SO good. Ballpoint pen is still my jam. I've missed it oh so much. I missed drawing just for myself, just to get a tiny snippet of my own thoughts out on paper. Click through to read more, and see the rest of this mini collection!

1916 Easter Rising

I'm a little bit late, but I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter! In Ireland, Easter is significant both religiously and politically. I'm not going to go into detail (knock yourself out on the 1916 Easter Rising page on Wikipedia if you feel that way inclined), but I thought it would be an appropriate time to share this still video project.

You might remember last October I shared the colorization project above. Well, at the beginning of this semester we were asked to add movement to those photographs. So I came back to this one, separated out all the different layers within it, and added a bit of camera movement. I'm pretty happy with the end result!

WIP 3 | Kinetic Text | God's Away on Business

I've been feeling a little unwell for the past while, and it's been a struggle trying to balance college work, appointments for this that and the other, and general life. It's funny which projects become more difficult to manage... This kinetic text project is one of the more complicated projects I've got in the pipeline, but it's one of the only projects I seem to be able to wrap my head around lately. Hmm...

Anyway, here's a little update on the project so far! I'm having fun with it!
(Sorry for the kinda terrible quality though!)

WIP 2 | Kinetic Text | God's Away on Business

Okay, so here's the first "proof of concept" I can show for my Kinetic Text Project. I took out a lot of the textures for the sake of simplicity for the proof, but I will definitely be bringing those back, as soon as possible. (I miss them!)

This is actually the - what? third? - time I've tried to pull this little section together. It's been frustrating, but now that I've figured this out, I feel like I'll manage the rest of the project without too much stress. It's just a matter of sitting down and getting it done, second by second. 

Animation | Lightning Bolts

What's this!? A new blog post? With many more ready and waiting to come very soon!? How shocking!

Sorry. It was a bad joke begging to be told, and I didn't put up much of a fight.

In all seriousness though, while it's not a strict resolution for 2015* I am going to make a conscious effort to give a little more time to my work and my websites from here on out. This community and network is hugely important to me, not least because I worked hard to develop it, but between the twists and turns of everything else that's been going on in my life, I let things slip. So, I've done the work, and I've gathered the files, and I've made the promise. Posts are on the way! Concept art, games, animation, photography, illustration; the works!

So without further ado, here's a short animated set of lightning bolts, created in Toon Boom Harmony last semester. I actually really enjoyed the controlled chaos of it, and also the fun glow and after-burn effects. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope ye come back here next Tuesday to check out one of the biggest projects I've completed to date. See you then. :)

*Long story, short: I don't believe in waiting for a new year, or a new season, or a new anything to make positive changes. If you think something needs improving, start working on it as soon as you can. "Don't put off until tomorrow, that which you can do today" and all that jazz. And thus concludes that tiny tidbit of my brain, as encouraged by my secondary school assembly speakers...

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. :)

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.

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. 

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.

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 :)