ziv creative: 2011

Friday, September 9, 2011

Vector Mutt Saturday morning

This is a vector version of Mutt. I've drawn this on the lap top to and from my trip to Uni on Saturday for a tutoring session in CSS code. Lately, I'm starting to enjoy web code and I understand class selectors, descendent selector, how to code a whole web page from scratch. "Look Ma, no WYSIWYG!" Tonight we learned about Ajax, so I am prepared to start experimenting with it this weekend. Very exciting indeed. Its hard to manage both left and right brain learning at the same time. Illustration and Code. Not impossible though.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Character Drafts

Anthropomorphism is giving human characteristics to objects or animals.

This is also recognised in children's writing as, 'Personification.'

Did you know that Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated her first children's

book featuring anthropomorphic characters in 1902.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Baby Muttaburrasaurus children's book series

Donna Dyson, the funny, beautiful, energetic and charismatic educator and children's book author has been busy and inspired in writing the Muttaburrasaurus children's book series for the Museum I work at. I'm so grateful to have met Donna. She really brings the sunshine with her wherever she goes and she reminds me that life should be full of fun, learning and inspiration. I'm also grateful to have been asked to illustrate the children's book series after nearly 25 years in the creative industries as a graphic designer, it has been a long wait to land a job like this. So I really want to make Donna proud and breathe life into the Muttaburrasaurus character.

This is a very rough test using Painter 11 with some painting techniques and mediums, charcoal, pastel, ink, etc. I need to work out a very fast digital method of applying colour and tone to these drawings. When studying with Gregory Rogers, an amazing Australian children's picture book illustrator, I learned that it is customary for illustrators to sketch the entire book out in pencil first. No colour is applied whatsoever until the publisher has approved the drafts and they are final and signed off. Then the colouring process begins. This makes complete sense knowing how time consuming each part of the process is. One can't be going back and forth in an ad hoc manner, changing and re-rendering scenes. So I am not too concerned about the final effect at the moment, I still need to get into the skin of the character and understand how he moves, feels, expresses himself and I need to be able to easily visualise him from any angle, position, with any props and inside an environment that I construct from my imagination. Its not a simple task, but the beauty of end result is bound to be endlessly rewarding from a creative perspective. And I am really looking forward to doing a wonderful job on these. Regardless of the limitations of time frames and the fact that Uni starts back next week and I will be learning HTML and CSS and Flash animation at the same time. Life can't get any more exciting than this. In fact, how does it get better than this!?