30 April, 2007

Back to Work!

Well, so much for my visiting my wee ginger godson (and his parents) last weekend as filming called and I had to lie in the back of a van with 3 bloody (literally) corpses for a whole day. As one of the mostly dead and make up artist I had to be there. Day went well, make up, blood, corpses etc. Scott Ironside, as one of the removal men, spent the whole throwing us around the van in varying states of bleed: he's a tuff bloke so it was no problem for him.

We were a sticky bunch by the end of the day. By the way, I tried out a new 'blood' recipe given to me by Allen (of Darkness Aftermath fame) and it worked pretty well. Strawberry and chocolate dessert sauce with food colouring and a little red wine. Worked great and came straight off with no staining - bonus. The mixture had about half a bottle of food colouring (red and yellow) instead of the usual 3 -4 bottles. Nice one Allen, cheers.

Photos from the day will be up as soon as I get them from the photographer, Mark Wyness.

Just to save this post looking empty I'll include some images I was working on a few weeks ago for a possible new project. I'm still getting used to Vue 5, so have been trying out some giant space cities (everyone loves those don't they). Of course, I couldn't be bothered making a whole city for a render test so got a pre-made one from those lovely folk at Daz studios (Poser stuff / Bryce). The Dystopia city block sets are great fun and very well modeled, they can be set up in Poser or Daz studio, then opened in Vue with textures intact - instant big space city. I used 2 sets out of the ten to make a little city layout, then chucked in the environment and a few Vue presets for dressing to finish it off.

With animated flying things and vehicles on the roads I think it would serve pretty nicely as back plates for some project. These images are as rendered, with no post work as yet.




11 April, 2007

Comic Artist Encounter 2...

As some of you fine fellows may know I'm a bit of a fanboy when it comes to comics. After many years of not seeing any I'm getting a fast trak course in modern comicy things from my mate Mike, who owns the local comic shop (Asylum books & Games).

Last Saturday I wondered into the store to find it empty apart from one bloke sitting at the main table, drawing stuff: as he was surrounded in comic artwork I guessed me may be one of the regular guest artists that visit, he was.
Jon Haward has been working in comics and illustration for over 20 years and has worked with some of the best writers in the UK and Americaland, of course I hadn't heard of him due to my comic sabbatical.

I stayed for about an hour and had a great chat, eventually moving on as the word had spread and a heap of people that had heard of him were staring at me with envious eyes (comic fans are scary folk - except me of course). It turned out that Jon is a good friend of the artist David Lloyd (V for Vendetta), that I had met at the store last year, which was nice. I've now met quite a number of artists and writers at the store and they have all been fun people, I think me being a graphics bloke with an illustration background helps and also the fact that I'm not dribbling over them to draw Wonder Woman bending over in 'that special way.'


I am actually doing a lot of film stuff at the moment, but its learning software n' stuff so it's not too exciting to write about. More later....