ILLUSTRATION

These are a few examples of illustrative artwork we have created. Most of them were created on the computer in Adobe Photoshop CS3 using a Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet, but I usually choose the medium for a piece of work (whether that be CGI or traditional) based upon the working brief. CGI is a lot more efficient in most cases - not all cases, mind you! - but I find techniques you use with traditional drawing media can also be applied when working on the computer, and vice versa... although I do miss having access to a quick CTRL+Z "undo" when painting! ;)

DOCTOR WHO

It's getting to be a bit of a habit of late, but I'm finding myself rendering whole characters in our artwork, rather than just working on the visible areas of a picture. It allows you to adjust the compostition how you want, which is mighty useful when it comes to putting everything together at the end, however it equally creates extra work, which for the majority of people who view it, won't even be seen! The characters here were all drawn considerably larger originally, but I scaled them down for this final composition to allow for more space for the background. Some of the details on the clothing are a bit too loose (one of the problems that arises when you don't have a super heavily defined outline to work from) but I'm quite pleased with how things like the Tardis and the Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver turned out.

FIGHTING SPIRIT (version 2)

These two character illustrations were originally used on the previous version of the website (y'know, the one that we only updated ONCE in the space of a whole year!). Rather than bin them once the current redesign went live, I decided to give them a second shot and combined them into the new image you see here! Both the characters were created on separate layers; the original idea was so that the "final" image could be adjusted to fit the old website design. I've repositioned them in this version, which meant I had to redraw the female character's lower legs. She's not really the most "cute" female character we've drawn, something possibly due to her rather wide, athletic build. I actually experimented with squashing her for this composition, which DID make a difference to how she looked, but in the end decided to keep her the way she looked originally.

Quite what this picture has to do with any sort of "fighting spirit" is still a little vague. Nunchaku-wielding badass aside, I think it looks more like "mildly angry gym membership dispute" than a traditional martial arts scene or street fight brawl. The background image does use part of a photo I took while in Hong Kong in 2011, so there's some (albeit highly miniscule) link to classic martial arts action films there.

VINCECHAN.COM - ARTWORK, FUN STUFF

The funny thing about this image, at least for me, is that it's based on something that really happened. A colleague asked me to make a couple as animal masks for a class assembly, an elephant and a camel. I made them as large, fully-painted images on thick A3 paper. Painted, cut out, all good; it's not something we get to make every day! The masks were made to fit an adult-sized face, however, so when the children put them on, they looked absolutely massive on them!!

Elephants are pretty standard in terms of how they look (e.g. you couldn't mistake one for a kangaroo or something like that!), so it was pretty easy to draw an elephant mask for this picture. The camel mask didn't go quite right, possibly because the ears are shaped more akin to a big cat (is it more like a cheetah mask?) than those of a camel. In terms of colouring this illustration, I gave the masks a separate outline from the characters to make them stand out. Because the "stroke" layer style only goes around the main vector path shape, I had to redraw details as black vector shapes on separate layers.

I produced a series of additional animal masks that you can download and wear yourself (you know you want to, plus they are almost guaranteed to make you look ultra hot!). You will find them in our Fun Stuff section.

VINCECHAN.COM - ARTWORK, INTERACTIVE

If you haven't already played our MA Digital Practices Major Study final project, "Hathfield" yet, shame on you! :P Just kiddin'... No I'm not; go check it out and then this illustration will make more sense!! While the game was inspired in some ways by the "Silent Hill" games -- it's one thing to whack undying freaks over the head with a piece of wood scavenged from a fence, but we all know that once you find the flippin' metal pipe, it's PARTY TIME!!! -- it did seem to revert into much more of a traditional zombie horror, hence all the un-dead freaks in this picture chasing down the hero, Howard Thomas. Making the zombies look like zombies was a challenge. The simplest way seemed to be to alter the colour of their skin or to use explicit gory details, like the zombie with the side of his face ripped open (nice!).

There are two additions to this image that didn't make it into the final version of the game. Firstly, here I have drawn a female zombie; there was only one female character in the game (non-zombie), which featured a walking cycle and attack animation that took ages to make and yet the character only ever did anything at the start leaving the rest of the grunt work for YOU to do (typical...). I had planned for more interaction but as the project developed, the focus was turned towards on the conversation dialogue trees.

The other addition we see here is the "Growler" in the top left, an enemy character I designed for the game that was cut due to time restraints. We filmed the motion capture sequences for rotoscoping and everything for the character, but in the end chose to just use the zombie characters. It's nice (if that's the correct term?) to see the Growler here. If you're curious about the name, it's a reference from the "Bo Selecta" TV sketch show featuring the "Lorraine Kelly" character ("Can you see me growler?").

VINCECHAN.COM - ARTWORK, COMICS

This character was originally created as an example for a superhero comic drawing project I taught at school. I went through the process of designing the way the character looked, both normally and in their superhero alter ego guise, as well as outlining the story for a short six-panel comic strip. The initial designs were all drawn as quick sketches in Photoshop but later example we used in class were drawn using felt-tip pens and pencils (i.e. the same materials and equipment that the children would use to create their own work).

For this illustration, we've used our more conventional CGI methods -- isn't it slightly weird to consider drawing on a computer with a graphics tablet more conventional than drawing with a pencil on paper??? The rather garish orange outfit was chosen as it mirrored the colours we had available to us when colouring the paper illustration example we did for school. One observation one of our pupils made was that his superhero disguise wasn't that different from him as normal, just that he was wearing ski goggles and a cape! Also, the initial drawing we made featured the character with unusually large hands (they were literally the size of his thighs from hip to knee!). I explained that by making his day job an "IT Consultant", so he'd be having to type at and fix computers all the time!

VINCECHAN.COM - ARTWORK, ILLUSTRATION

Created as part of the current website redesign, this illustration is partially based on one of my characters, "Daneen" from an old comic series I worked on way back in 1997-98. As with a lot of my recent output, this illustration is rendered using our no-outlines technique. I start off with an rough sketch, either drawn straight on the computer or as a paper sketch that has be to imported into Photoshop. I redraw the sketch afterwards anyway as the size we work at on the computer differs from the paper size. I've been a bit lazy of late, preferring to just take a photo of the sketch on my phone and drag in into Photoshop that way rather than digging out the scanner! The four "Artwork" illustrations you see here were all drawn entirely in Photoshop, however; no paper was harmed in the making of these illustrations! ;)

This illustration probably shares a few similarities with "Winter Babe" (see below) in that the character here is also wearing rather thin clothing -- there's nothing wrong with that as it is summer after all! ;) The colouring could have done with a few darker shadow tones to help give it a bit more depth. The shoulder and arm details are also a bit messy.

WINTER BABE

"Winter Babe" isn't actually her name (I rarely name characters I draw unless we're working on a story, and even then they're usually referred to by numbers half the time) but it's a moniker that seems to have stuck following her original appearance in our Christmas 2004 E-card, and if you look closely in the background, you'll spot her in our Rising Stars of Manga UK 2007 comic competition entry on a advertising board poster.

If you've visited our About page already, you should have seen what this illustration was made for, a slightly jokey/patronising (you decide!) demonstration of how to know when you can click on a link. The winter scene background was added for this version of the picture. I chose to use a one-piece bathing suit rather than a two-piece as possibly a homage to the "Baywatch" TV show - cute lady with a rockin' body and blonde locks in a tight red one-piece bathing suit, oh yeeeah... :D ...It also made re-colouring the image for the separate rollover images easier as i could just duplicate and move the initial coloured layer to the top and then change the layer blend mode to adjust the layers below! ;)

DEVIL MAY CRY 10th ANIVERSARY COMPETITION ENTRY

Quite by chance while browsing another website, I found out that Capcom-Europe were running a fan art competition to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the first "Devil May Cry" game. The competition deadline was just one week away from when I found out about the competition (it started in June 2011, I only found out about it in the middle of July!), which didn't leave me a lot of time to come up with something. Not to be put off or frightened by a little effort, I managed to pull this picture out of the bag ON TIME AND BEFORE THE DEADLINE - Go me!! :) ...The competition deadline was subsequently extended by a few days! :P

I went through a number of different ideas for this picture. I knew from the outset that I didn't want to have Dante just posing looking buff or anything like that - the "Devil May Cry" games, to me at least, have always been much more about an "attitude" and style. Humour needs to be there as well as they're far from being the most straight-faced of action games! I chose to draw the characters based on their "Devil May Cry 4" designs, which is also why I used the Marionette enemy. DMC aficionados will probably be up in arms that I drew Rebellion (that's the sword, just in case you're not familiar with the series) when Dante isn't in his Devil Trigger mode, though...

Ideally I would have liked to have used a similar vector shape/path technique as I'd been using with my other illustrations for work, but time restraints being what they were, I opted to use a more painterly style for colouring this picture. It works in pretty much the same way, everything being drawn or coloured on separate layers, but retrospectively I could have used fewer and just blended to colour together. The amount of detail I put in was really mad - stuff like Lady's boot, up close it's all there but you can't even SEE most of it when the picture has been scaled down! I the other problem is that the painterly style clashes somewhat with the heavy drawn outline. It gives the whole thing a comic book-style look, but it's not bold enough for a piece of actual comic art as all the details are lost with the under-saturated colours. Booo!! :(

SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL AWARD COVER 4

I've had a to make quite a few changes to the version of this illustration on the website compared with the original version. The original featured a large text area along the top, but simply cropping around the drawn characters would still have left possibly a few too many location details in the background photograph. I also had to move some of the characters slightly in order for them to all fit into the 600x800 image dimensions we've used for the website, but generally they were in fairly similar places in the original version.

My original idea for this illustration was to have the characters walking forwards, towards the viewer, however I felt that was possibly too similar to the characters in the previous cover illustration (see below) so ended up going with a side on viewpoint. I had thought about reusing elements from the different cover illustrations we had done in order to save time, but in the end chose to just draw each illustration separately with their own characters and things.

Best things about this illustration are the "Yummy Mummy" character (that's actually what I called the layer group in Photoshop), and also the fact that anyone who knows the area in real life should be able to point out that the characters are actually running AWAY from the school!

SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL AWARD COVER 3

I liked how this third "travel award" cover illustration turned out - unlike the others you see here on the website where I've had to modify them, I didn't need to make any real changes to this image other than removing the text at the top. In some ways this was one of the harder images to visualise; I knew what I needed to include in the image but initially wasn't really sure how we would go about fitting them all into a single image. I started out with the four separate sections sketched in rough (the two children walking, the child on the bike, the policeman, and the bus stop scene) and just rendered each one separately. After they were all coloured, I just need to add the different coloured background shapes.

The illustration still suffers from a lack of darker shadow tones, but I think the very flat colours matches the cartoon style of the illustrations as a whole. The bicycle details turned out a lot better than what I expected even though it only uses a grand total of five separate colours (count 'em!). No one else has commented on the fact that the bus does actually say "Not In Service" and yet is still seemingly taking on passengers!

SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL AWARD COVER 2

The second of our "travel award" cover illustrations suffers somewhat due to the lack of additional dark colour tones. While you should still be able to distinguish between the two characters, they are rendered in a way that uses the same coloured vector shapes/paths for the different areas of the image. By using darker tones for shadows you can create a greater sense of separation that you lose when you are not working with a drawn outline. I mean, it still works regardless (imho), so it then becomes much more a case of the visual style or what you're used to working with.

The original version of this cover illustration that we eventually used for our application featured a bitmap image map as a background. For the version you can see on the website, I've removed the map (although I left the red line markings). I actually prefer this version as it keeps things looking clean without detracting from the characters.

SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL AWARD COVER 1

Following on from the cover illustrations I did for our school's "curriculum evidence" folder, I was asked to produce a series of covers for use with our school's "Sustainable Travel, Accredited and Recognised, Higher Standards Level" award (to give it it's full title - I'm just going to go with "Travel Award"!). Unlike our earlier cover illustrations where I had a lot longer to complete them, I had considerably less time to work on these illustrations. With that in mind, I chose to adopt an outline-less vector graphic visual style. While I usually use the vector pen tool in Photoshop to colour anyway, previously I would have drawn a final outline as a top layer before colouring using vector shapes/paths. This graphic style effectively allows you to remove that first stage and just get on with the colouring, although it does require you to use more coloured tones depending on the detail of the initial image. These "travel award" cover illustrations, though, all used fairly basic cartoon-styled characters so it wasn't as much of a problem as the more detailed work we'd create later in the year (see above).

The illustration you see here is only the lower part of the cover. As this, the front cover of our application featured a lot of text, I needed to reserve most the space for where the text would go leaving only the lower area for the illustration. One of the advantages of using vector shapes, is that you can scale up an image without ruining how it looks - a problem you always get when scaling up bitmap images and outlines). It does show up the relative lack of detail in the characters, however, but this was also due in part to the fact that, like with our earlier "curriculum evidence" folder covers, we were working at lower image resolutions than were ideal.

CURRICULUM EVIDENCE FOLDER COVER: YEAR 6

I could have gone all out and produced some kind of epic WW2 scene for this illustration, but in the end, with time constraints being what they were (not to mention the fact that my back was killing me from being hunched over our laptop for anything up to five hours a night working on these things!), I chose to use a simpler idea for this final "curriculum evidence" folder cover illustration. I based the figure on a photo of "Winston Churchill" (ohhh yes) that I redrew in Photoshop. The photo was only of his face, however, so I had to draw the hand based on a separate photo - I took a photo of my own hand for the pose, which explains why in any historical photo of Churchill you may see, he probably had fatter hands!

The image works in the sense that you know it's about Britain due to the use of the Union Flag in the background and on the text. Churchill posing with the V-sign is fairly iconic as well, so most people would understand the historical context, but there's not really a lot else there that involves the theme. I suppose, though, that with a broad subject like "Britain since the 1930s" you could include all manners of different ideas.

CURRICULUM EVIDENCE FOLDER COVER: YEAR 5

We seemed to make our Key Stage 2 "curriculum evidence" folder illustrations feature more realistic (although still "cartoony" in terms of rendering) imagery. Blood splatters aside (the gore is suitable for the illustration as it's all in context), this image originally featured a naked Medusa but I decided to add the body armour to cover her up for the final version - I have included both versions of the illustration on the website so you can compare the two. The design for the character used the idea that snake bodies are very muscular, hence why the Medusa has row upon row of abdominal muscles running down the snake half of her body (although curiously she still has hips, but that's because she's a LADY after all!). The soldier character isn't based on "Perseus" (so no winged shoes or anything like that), so is more likely to be your average generic soldier bloke who's about to get turned to stone! ;)

I created the Medusa skin effect by initially colouring her using a conventional flesh colour (multiple layers of tone, etc.), and then duplicating the layer group and changing them to green tones. After rasterising the duplicated group into a flat layer, I used the eraser tool to draw back the regular flesh areas in the layer below. This allowed me to maintain the same light/dark shadow tones while making it stand out from the rest of the vector-coloured shapes.

CURRICULUM EVIDENCE FOLDER COVER: YEAR 4

This illustration came out looking somewhat cartoonier than what we'd planned on doing. The anime-style colouring techniques we've been using probably emphasize that more than anything - the figures are all drawn with thick solid black outlines. In a way, using a cartoon visual style allows you to get away with (to an extent) poorly proportioned figures and wonky compositions. The soldier's shield was drawn a lot smaller than it should have been compared with how long his legs are/would have been. It's a stylistic choice.

I wasn't sure what to do for the background initially. I had planned on using the Italian flag colours (red, green and white), but after a bit of research I found that there was a specific Roman flag design that used yellow and black (the image of a bird). Obviously for historical accuracy we chose to use the latter colour scheme, but I still think the colours of the Italian flag worked better with this specific illustration - if you look at the background you will still see where the three sections of colour would have been marked out.

CURRICULUM EVIDENCE FOLDER COVER: YEAR 3

You can't have an Egyptian-themed image without some reference to the Bangles' song, hence why the two figures in this illustration are indeed walking like Egyptians (NB: I am aware that people from Egypt MAY NOT actually walk like this way all the time, if at all!). I was quite pleased with how this illustration came out. It uses more realistically proportioned figures than the earlier illustrations we did for this series, although I know that the poses are a bit weird!

Following on from the earlier illustrations, which either featured stupidly complex backgrounds no one would ever see, or non-existent backgrounds images and gradient fills, I decided to create a proper background image this time using a more abstract style. It helped differentiate from the drawn figures while still keeping in line with the general style of the image as a whole - the two characters are striking funky angular poses, so their shadows are drawn in a basic angular way, which is then extended onto the pyramids in the far background and how they are coloured.

CURRICULUM EVIDENCE FOLDER COVER: YEAR 2

While the horse we drew in our Year 1 "curriculum evidence" folder cover illustration came out looking more cartoony than we'd originally planned, the dragon in this illustration for our Year 2 cover looks a lot more aggressive that in the original sketch. It still had the really big eyes (eye?) but it had rounded teeth and a more playful/curious facial expression. I found that as I worked the final outline, it all became a lot more spiky and angular, which in turn changed how the expression looked.

I began to use the vector shapes/pen tool a lot more for drawing details in than in the earlier illustrations we did for this series. I think that came about from the added detail we put in when working the image outline. I could have gotten away with a smooth surface for the dragon, but the creature has scales and so required them to be added in when colouring. It works better this way than had they been drawn in with the black outline (they would have stood out too much). The darker green tones help blend in with the rest of the colours. They're really more like shadows on the surface than larger primary elements of the drawing (e.g. the wings or the spines along the creature's back).

The flame effects are probably the weakest part of this image. I chose not to drawn outlines for them in the same way as with the scale details on the dragon, but they could have done with using multiple coloured layers for the different parts of the fire. I'm not sure what layer effects we used in the end; they all look a bit flat, which could also be due to the imagery behind the flame layers using flatter colours (as opposed to the more detailed areas of the dragon, like it's neck or face).

CURRICULUM EVIDENCE FOLDER COVER: YEAR 1

This, the third "curriculum evidence" folder cover we worked on, was actually the one that took the longest to complete. It features a fully drawn and coloured background on separate layers (so if you were to hide the characters in the original Photoshop file, you'd see all of the castle and everything else). It possibly amounts to wasted time since I'm unlikely to reuse any portions of this image for any other piece of work, but I felt I needed to develop the background imagery as much as the main characters after our aborted background image for our Reception cover (below).

This illustration manages to capture most of what our initial pencil sketch looked like. I didn't scan any of the pencil sketches for the illustrations in this series (of the ones we did sketch on paper - by the end we were doing everything on our laptop); they were all redrawn straight into Photoshop, so slight differences are to be expected. The final horse looks a bit more of a comedy cartoon horse than in the original sketch (still a cartoon horse, obviously, but it was less goofy-looking!). Admittedly I've never been 100% confident of drawing horses, something that goes WAY back to when we did all our fantasy "Terris" character art illustrations in the late '90s. I always felt they came out looking too cartoony, so I guess how this one turned out is no real surprise!

CURRICULUM EVIDENCE FOLDER COVER: RECEPTION

The idea for drawing our school's Reception staff as superheroes came up earlier in the year when speaking with a colleague, and it was something I chose to revisit when producing this illustration for our "curriculum evidence" folder. As a lot of our drawn artwork over the years has tended to favour more of a Japanese/anime-style, there haven't been many opportunities to draw superhero characters (although curiously when collating the work for the current website redesign, I was reminded of our Batman-esque "150 Man" character from our Manga Jiman 2008 competition entry!).

The slightly garish colour choices was intentional, something to reflect the early days of comic printing. My own preference would have been for something a bit darker and gritty, but that probably wouldn't have suited the tone of the image as a whole! I had originally planned to get a proper background image drawn for the illustration, which I probably could have done in the end but ended up leaving it as the rather horrid-looking mish-mash of filters and gradient fills. I think the screentone fill pattern would have worked better had it been offset at a slight angle. As they are (all at 45 degree angles from the original fill pattern), they look too regimental and exact.

Of course, technical issues aside, the real problem we had with this picture was more the costumes. I think it would be fair to say that female superhero characters, of which these designs were inspired by, tend to veer toward the more risqué side!! You've gotta keep it clean so everyone's gotta cover up! ;)

CURRICULUM EVIDENCE FOLDER COVER: NURSERY

I was asked to produce a series of cover illustrations to form part of a "curriculum evidence" folder. Our school has been moving towards using a more "creative curriculum" that differs from the standard stuff outlined by the old QCA planning. Lessons are taught through topics so it is important to document the work done by each year group in such a way that is easy for people to view. Each illustration I produced, therefore, was based on the particular theme/topic the year group had been working on.

These images were all drawn at a pretty low resolution. The reason for this was partially so that they fitted the Flash template border I had made that would run around the edges of each page, although equally it was due to the initial concept sketches we did for the first few illustrations being fairly simplistic. This, being the first, was completed relatively quickly. Rather than scan the paper sketches, I redrew the sketch in Photoshop before working the final outline and coloured layers. All the picture elements are on separate layers, which are useful for adjusting the final composition, but does run the risk of losing a central focal point in the picture.

I was tempted at one point to give the starfish in the bottom right of the picture eyes, but they made it look like something out of Super Mario Bros. (it's something that always seems to end up in our Christmas e-card illustrations, though!).