Caravan Palace

I'm moving back to Clonmel for college this weekend, this is technically my last post of the "summer." and I went swing dancing for the first time last week; so it's couldn't be a better time to share a Caravan Palace! (Note: This illustration is available as a print here. :) )

Can you believe it's September? I can't. This summer was such an incredible one, and the time has absolutely flown by! I still can't believe that in less than a week I'll be back in classes and lectures. And this year is going to be different in many ways. For a start; I'm going to be living on my own this semester! I'm moving into a tiny little house on Friday, although I still legitimately think I'd have been better off buying a little caravan and living in that instead.

Buying a caravan and doing it up into something cool and quirky and weird, and touring around Ireland or Europe or somewhere (anywhere), is something that I'd love to do at some stage. It's my idea of a perfect summer really; driving around a country or continent, discovering new places and new experiences. A little caravan palace? That's the dream!

Which brings me on to swing dancing! It's something that I've been wanting to try out for a really long time, and last week I actually managed to find a class and take it! Caravan Palace - a swing band - is one of my favourites (I fully intend to see them perform live someday! Just look at the video above! Incredible stuff!) and because I'm a former gymnast, I really missed dancing. So I took the class, had some fun, and I've been listening to Caravan Palace since.

Ultimately, this post feels like I'm about to head back into the routine. Ballpoint pen in my Moleskine sketchbook; it feels good, and familiar, and welcoming. Tomorrow, I'll have my last full day at work (the photo above was taken on my lunch break this afternoon - I've gone to that bench in that park most days this summer), I'll take a day or two to take a step back and breathe, and then I'll kick off next week in full swing!Till then!

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! 

Progression Reel

It's always fun to look back on old projects. For this progression reel, I went back through all of my first year work, and added it all together. It's interesting to see how my work has developed. And it makes me so thankful that we stepped it up a notch with the change of software in year two!

Animation | Side Step

I have less than a week of classes left in this semester! It's been a tough one, no doubt about it. I've still enjoyed (almost) everything we've learnt, but it feels great to start wrapping everything up. Plus, I've got a whole lot of stuff planned to keep me busy in the summer, and I can't wait to get into all that; it kinda feels like a Friday, heading into a two/three month weekend. :)

Anyway, this is the latest animation I've been working on, and I've been really looking forward to sharing it! We were asked to use our own character (She's somewhat simplified, but does she look familiar?), plan it out, and eventually add colour and a background. Click through to see what I produced, from humble beginnings to the last stand.

Ps: If you stick around, you'll see this again soon! I've got a progression reel in the pipeline!

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.

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 | Atlantis | Character and Environment Design

Recently in college, we were tasked with pulling together a design package for a story based on "My Irish Myth." We were given the choice of working on a story that we're creating in groups (more on this later) or a new story of our own choice. I decided to go with a new story; The Lost City of Atlantis. It's not a "traditional" Irish myth, certainly, but there are some people who believe the city of Atlantis sank off the coast of the Emerald Isle, it's one of the best known myths globally, and it's one of my personal favourite legends, so I thought it suited the theme. At this stage, it's very much still a work in progress, but I'm having a bit of fun with it, and because it's St Patrick's Day, I wanted to write about something at least vaguely influenced by my culture. And so, today, I want to introduce to you the first character I've designed for the The Lost City of Atlantis (but with an Irish twang). 

This character is called Síofra (she-o-fra), which means elf or sprite. I'm still fleshing out the real spirit of her character, but at the moment at least, she's a mischievous Atlantean who likes to explore the world around her. 

And this is the first background layout I've drawn up; Síofra's house. Located in a cliff-edge environment, but with a distinct Irish style, the house sits on it's own tiny island and is reached only by a wood and rope bridge. 

Finally, I just want to say, Lá Fhéile Phádraig! Hope everyone's having a good St Patrick's Day! :)

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. 

Flame Animation

Just a short and sweet little post today. Here's a flickering candle flame, which I animated towards the end of last semester. I had fun with it!

Also, just a quick heads up! There's free shipping in my shop until the 8th of March! :)

Photography | Tones

Last semester, I also studied a photography module, which was something completely new for me. Yes, I have taken photos before, but I had never taken the time to really get to know how to use a DSLR to its full potential. So, photography class was a bit of a learning curve, and its a skill I would love to develop further. These shots were taken for a photography assignment in the past few months. Click to embiggen them!

Flash Game | The Getaway

BIG post today! I spent a solid chunk of last semester working on this interactive programming assignment. Weeks and weeks of drawing, animating, and coding, all working together to create a short and sweet little game called "The Getaway." Click HERE to play the game yourself!

"The Getaway" is a single-level flash platform game, which I made with my friend Kirsty. What I'm showing you today is the game bible, which basically shows you every element of design that became a part of the game; including character designs, environment layouts, user interfaces and start/finish screens. I also wrote a short(ish) backstory to give the game a bit of meaning, and added a few of the early sketches. Be sure to click on the images below to make 'em bigger, and click HERE to play the game yourself! :D

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.