H.M.Punton Illustration & Animation

I have finished setting up my final piece from the unity project for Riso print. This is just as a small project for the final show at my college. I broke the image up into 3 colours which can be printed as any colour available. So I have the green layer, the grey layer and the purple layer which can be printed in various colours from bright pinks to dark blues. I look forward to seeing how well this turns out since I really liked how my last Riso work went.

For my work based learning project I had to create a finished piece as part of the Cheltenham Illustration Awards as part of their Unity theme. I started off by coming up with different concepts to base my illustration around. I ended up deciding to create a piece with a historical theme, I wanted to depict a scene with multiple historical figure remembered from history for uniting their people. I chose individuals from different countries and era's since I wanted the piece to fit into the theme of unity and everyone coming together. I wanted the piece to have an ethereal feeling so I decided to depict each of the individuals as undead  going together to create the them of being united in death. I started off concepting out rough sketches of how I wanted to lay out my piece. I then decided to ask for help from people on my course with posing reference. Once I had a with poses I liked nailed down I decided to refine the sketch into some line art which I would use as a guide f...

As part of my work based learning project I was advised to look into companies that work in the illustration or animation industry to get an idea of the sort of place I could end up working once i'm finished college. I have mainly stuck to looking at illustration agencies and studios since that is where my main focus is with my own work. I looked a a lot of companies ranging from studios that do a lot of 3D work and others that focus more on graphics & design. I ended up the most interested in two particular companies: AtomHawk Atomhawk is a illustration studio which does freelance work for various companies, usually helping out on larger projects like big budget video games like Mortal Kombat and massive blockbuster movies like the Avengers. Their list of services includes: concept art, production design, motion graphics, UI/UX design and Marketing art. I am more interested in the rough concept art they show in their portfolio than the more finished marketing art. I like ...

The World Illustration Awards is a competition held each year and calls for entries from both well known artists and new artists alike. The competition is a good way for illustrators to showcase their work and allows the us to see some of the newer trends in the industry. I was looking at an article covering the 2018 awards on We Are Bulletproof's website  [link]  and they showcased some of the key themes that stood out to them. Fantasy Cityscapes This trend is one of the more fun ones to have been highlighted from the awards. It mostly consists of these large fantastical city environments with a lot of detail and different things going on so that each time you look at the piece you see something new. I like the use of colour that these pieces have, a lot of bright inviting colours help give the pieces a very broad appeal. I personally would like to work on environments more in the future and think the more isometric layout can create a very compelling design. Cutout ...

I decided to look into past entries from the tangled theme of cheltenham Illustration awards since with my work based learning project I am working with this years word prompt of unity. By looking at past entries I hope to get an idea of the sort of work the awards are looking for and then I can compare that to my own work. It's quite difficult to find images from the prior years awards and even harder to find images that show the full pieces and not just a corner of them. I don't know why the awards photography is like this but here is some images I was able to find. Last years entries Things that stand out to me about last years entries are the prevalence of traditional work compared to digital. it's kind of hard to tell either way with some pieces but I imagine most of those are done traditionally as well. I tend to stick to more digital work with my pieces and I don't know if thats a good idea with the lack of digital work you see in the past entries. Though...

For one of my projects at college I was tasked with creating short experimental animations using footage I took myself and then using Cinema 4D to track the footage and finally composite objects into the scenes. I went up the the castle near my home and took some footage of different areas as well as taking some footage of the surrounding streams which lead into the castles moat. some of the experiments I played around with were things like mapping the footage onto objects and then using those objects as masks, that way I could have other objects looking like they were going behind things in the scenery. I used this technique to make it look like the red tubing was wrapping around the castles tower. I also used this to make a short animation with golden rings coming out of different slots on the castle. I then tried messing around with more effects on the object I was using as a mask and ended up adding some glass reflection and transparency and this made it so I could have objec...

As part of my print making project I also tried my hand at Riso Printing. Riso printing is somewhat similar to photo copying and requires each colour of the illustation be sperated to different layers and be run through the machine seperatly. The colours you get from Riso printing are limited but also very colourful and bright. I wanted to create a very eye catching image for my riso print so I chose very bright colours which I thought would be fun. I tried to keep in the wolf theme I had for the previous printing methods. I am excited to try out more Riso prints in the future since the technique is very simple to use with any digital illustrations. 

For this project I was tasked with creating a narrative piece which could be either an illustration or an animation. I decided to go with illustartion since its what im personally more intrested in and I also decided to create a follow up piece to my charcter design project. In that project I created a design for a monster charcter based off of the Japanese Oni (ogre).  I also wanted to design a protagonist charcter in that project but really struggled with nailing the design down so I really wanted to give myself a reason to go back to the designs from that project. For my narrative I had the idea of depicting a battle between two charcters as a tryptich since I wanted to try out some more dynamic poses. I wanted both of the charcters to seeem like refections of eachother so I used a lot of side by side poses. The art style I went with was inspired by Genddy Tartakovsky's work on the 2003 Star Wars: The Clone Wars cartoon. I really like the geometic and angular sh...

Relief Prints Last week I finished up my relief printing using the roller press. I wanted to finish up by doing some two colour prints. the first one I did was done by turning my acrylic square over onto the side without the illustration on it and then putting it through with red ink to create a perfect red square. I then waited for that to dry and ran through over it with the illustration in black. This gave the effect of the red poking through the gaps of white. The other two I did were both done by putting red and black on the roller together. this created a nice gradient effect. I did one horizontal and one vertical. the vertical one came out looking more distressed due to the ink running low but the horizontal one came out really clean. I am happy with how these 3 prints came out and think it was a good way to finish my relief printing off. Digital Narrative - story boards  These are the story boards i'm working with for my narrative project. I've ...

I managed to complete a decent amount of relief prints since last update. I started off by doing some dry prints where you run the paper with the plate through the roller press without ink. this gives an embossed effect to the paper which can look quite nice. I then started to use the different ink's, starting with a classic black. I then experimented with the different colours available. I managed to get red and blue prints done as well as a good amount of black. Overall I am really happy with how my updated artwork went with this technique. the relief printing method picks up a lot of fine detail and when compared to screen printing feels a lot more clean and tactial to do. I think I would defiantly choose this method over screen printing if I want to do prints in future. T arget M y target for this week will be to get some more experiments done with the printing. I want to get a black print done on red since I think the contrast will look really nice. I ...

I have started work on the relief printing part of the project and taken my image from the previous  part and gone back in to add more detail since this printing technique shows detail better. I wanted to almost replicate tattoo art style by adding the heavy black shading to the piece. I have already had the piece sent to the laser cutter and got my etched acrylic back. Target: -I plan on getting some relief prints done by the end of this week and should have an update with images of the prints next week. 

For my alternative techniques project we are looking into a bunch of different print making techniques like Screen printing, Relief printing and Riso Printing. I've completed the screen printing using this Day of the Dead wolf skull design and I thought I'd post some of the prints I ended up with. T he first 3 are all just acrylic on different coloured card and the final is a print which is done much the same way. My first few runs with the screen worked out better, as it went on the paint started bleeding or missing large spaces out. Don't know whether this is just from the paint mix being off or if the screen itself was becoming too loose. I quite like some of the results where it didn't work perfect like the black print on the red which has a nice worn look to it.