The Siren’s Front Cover Design v2

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Hello again and welcome to the final version of the cover I did to pitch for a staff job.

They liked the first one but wanted something more specific and by doing so I decided I could either curl up in a ball and freak out over the time I had wasted or I could face the challenge head on and do more with the cover than I had before. Generally I had been lazy and when you have a process that worked for years, namely the layouts and development of any given piece, you should stick to it. It is a tried and tested method and has worked for me in a number of projects. This time I took the concept they gave me, did some rough layouts for the placement of the characters and checked back with them about it.

An hours work wasted if they didn’t like them.

However it gave them a better chance to give me input as to what they did or didn’t like about the layout and I was able to move forward. With this in mind I took the final layout and created a 3D model of the alleyway, giving me perspective I could use.

Also I had reference from photo’s to work from, giving me a better idea of the way the light of the street would work and took this to the final pencils.

Once there you can go onto the final inks but in this case I completely screwed up on two of the faces and re-inked them using photoshop. Once the “hamster cheeks” were fixed I had a problem now with the lighting and colouring. Each stage had already taken a day to do and I needed to get on with the paid work. Luckily they understood and allowed me to develop the colours further.

This time I tried a colouring technique I thought would work better on this piece and created an adjustment layer set to hue/saturation to create a mask, which I then painted onto revealing the warm sun.

A number of my friends suggested that I put the right hand guys in the light too but I considered it and thought that since they are the bad guys, they should be in the dark side of the panel, in the shadows so to speak.

I hope you like it and think it was worth the 3 days work.

ANDY DODD ARTOONS

The Siren’s Front Cover Design

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During my short time as a freelancer I came across a job for a staff artist, with a short brief covering a series of characters in a specific setting. However, in order to get the job you had to do all the process, pencils, inks and colours to show you could do it. This was the result of that pitch.

ARTOONS

Captain Clevedon Page 9

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Captain Clevedon Page 9

This is one of my favourite pages, the perspective and the composition pull you into the image in a more dramatic way. Giving us the desired effect. When putting a dramatic page together it is best to pull the vanishing point higher so that you are viewing the image from a low angle and gives the impression of drama, movement.

Andy Dodd

Captain Clevedon P8

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Captain Clevedon Page 8

CAPTAIN CLEVEDON!!!

Yep! you heard it here first, well nearly first, I reckon pretty close to the first if that lass from 32 has mentioned it and you decided to tell all your mates, which might not be that many, about Captain Clevedon coming to the newstands…sort of. It’s one of those Kev F Sutherland thingies and I told him I could help with a page or two. Despite having loads of work on at the moment I managed to cram it in. So here it is page 8, the stages I sent to Kev F for him to see that I was working on the thing and not to worry about it missing the deadline. He did the lettering himself so I will see it at the Thought Bubble comic convention in Leeds soon this year…

Andy Dodd

Animation examples part seven

Chester

Chester here is the image I was given to create a banner, the site is still in the process of being put together and sells many interesting comics and books. I loved putting this guy together.

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Animation examples part six

Since the work on the Time Bomb Comics and Huddersfield University logo’s I went further and every month I try out something new to help improve on the skills I already have. I have worked in photoshop a lot when putting together concept art but discovered since that after effects is the video version of photoshop. I had to keep playing and so put this one together for part of my showreel in order to send to film companies.

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Animation examples part five

This is an ANIMATIC, its an animated storyboard which I use to get the timing on my animations when there are a lot of things going on. This is a very ambitious project of mine and still in the early stages. The idea is to morph the 3D characters from one to the other and work my way to the final reveal. I intended to have it done by the end of University but bills needed paying.

For now though you can look at the pretty pictures with that amazing music by Peter Gabriel

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Animation examples part four

Whilst at University I was in class when my tutor started scribbling an idea on the board. The rest of the group seemed to be more interested in Youtube and I saw straight away the way that his idea could be created. You know the feeling when you see an answer to a problem and get knots in your stomach? Well just like that. Over a period of a few weeks I was asked to put this together with colour changes, with triangles and without, with different slogans and blurbs. Finally we agreed on this and went with it. All done in 3Ds Max using a lighting system I had never tried and maps for the colours I never used.

A great example of the things that come up when working in the real world.

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Animation examples part three

During my time at Life Class I put together an illustration that I later used to test some special effects ideas. I discovered you could use the layers in as a 3D space. With this and a recently purchased copy of some physical effects I tested the idea out on this image.

Another rough animation but it gets me closer to that extra special job role.

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Animation examples part two

I had loads of fun doing this one. The intent being that it was going to be a 10 second animation and I asked my girlfriend at the time to help me with it. She can talk. So the end result became this. I never quite completed it but I did find it useful to go through the process of animating the different elements to gain knowledge in the use of flash animation. I hope you enjoy it too.

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