H.M.Punton Illustration & Animation

Apotheon is a 2D sidescroller I came across after I finished Triptych project which had the same Greek pottery style. I thought since I didn't get to put this game in as part of my research for that project I could at least highlight it here. I really like the style of the art for the game since its a very unique and claver choice since that style art is already layed out for a sidescrolling game. I haven't seen any games with a similar aesthetic. I also like the way they are able to change the colour pallet for different environments and yet keep to the overall style. If you'd like to see the game in motion you can watch some here.

So I have finished my Sequential Images project and handed in so I thought I would do and overview of the project and do a strengths and weaknesses assessment. As you can see I ended up going with the Griffin head from The Great North Museum for my triptych, which I mentioned in a previous post. After coming up with three Ideas, based off the objects found at the museum, I then narrowed down those ideas until I was left with the one I wanted to do. The Idea I ended up going with was this idea of using symbolism to represent the downfall of the Macedonian Empire. I had this idea that the griffin head was originally a figurehead of a ship and after researching Griffins in Greek mythology I found out that they are usually associated with with kingship since they are part lion (king of beasts) and part eagle (king of birds). So I ended up thinking about the griffin figurehead as a symbol of Alexander the Great (Iskander), who was the literal figurehead of the Macedonian Empire. As...

As part of my Sequential Images project I was tasked with going to the local museum and to look at the items for inspiration for a three image sequence I would be creating called a triptych. I had to look through the Items and find things I found interesting or thought I could create a narrative around, weather it be a narrative with environmental/political message or a more straight forward story arc.We were told to try and keep away from the animal exhibits just so we could focus on a story around an inanimate object and be more creative with our ideas. After looking around I was then told to narrow down the objects to my top three and use them as the starting point for my ideas. These are some of the highlights I found while walking around, I'm very fond of history having studied it in the past somewhat so most of the items that gained my attention were from the Ancient Greek, Ancient Egyptian and the other Cultural exhibits. Though there...

For this project I was tasked with creating a bunch of different looping animations meaning the animation had to end leading back to the start. This project was good way to get me to try out a whole bunch of different mediums since I got to create things using methods from cutout to digital drawing using software such as Photoshop and Illustrator. I feel I could have done better on this project if I had gotten more animations complete since I came out of it with a bunch of unfinished experiments. I also need to work on my documentation of my workflow so it's easier when looking at my sketchbook how I got to the final result. Strengths   I think I tried a decent amount of different techniques over the course of this project and everything I created was quite different from each other. I managed to learn a lot during this project of what is expected of me on this course which will help going forward I think my workflow going forward should be more organised ju...

I am currently working on an idea for a animation loop for a project based around the Cosmic Turtle from various religions and the Terry Pratchett Disk World books. The idea is to have the elephants on the back of the turtle walking around in a circle looping with the earth on their backs moving with them all while the turtle is looped swimming forward. This would make for 3 pieces of simultaneous animation and seems like it could take a while to complete. Especially since just getting the elephants done was complicated enough with there being no reference for that sort of movement. Hopefully I have enough time to get all of the parts together before the end of the project.  I think I'll set myself the target of getting at least the turtle finished and animated and get both parts together and see from there how much time I have left.

I was told it would be a good idea to talk about some artists that I like and have influenced me on my blog so I thought I would start off with one of my all time favourite  comic book artists, Greg Capullo. I really like his work on the Spawn and Batman comics. I love the way he makes everything seem threatening and aggressive using sharp shapes on things like the fabric of the cape or the claw like fingers. I also like the way the deep shadow is used obscuring features mixed with the glow of the eyes and so on. It really help draw attention and gives everything an unnatural feeling. I hope I get an opportunity in a future project to look at more of his work for inspiration.

I was given the task of setting up a new blog as part of my Higher Education Illustration & Animation course. I previously Created a blog for my last course, Animation, Gaming and VFX, which can be found here: http://lordmacnton.blogspot.co.uk/   I have been tasked with using this new blog to track my own personal development over the course and for my first post I was told to create a self evaluation of where my skills are at now. Where my strengths are: I have a pretty good understanding of traditional art from previous courses like Graphics and doing art in school.  I have picked up a decent amount of digital skills from my last course. I feel confident in both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. I'm good at coming up with concepts for pieces of work. I tend to be able to come up with a good amount of concepts around a given theme What are my weaknesses and what do I need to work on: I tend to prefer drawing to animating as I tend to find animating a...