Europa Gangs rough assembly; first look at a new project.

Having done the creature collage project with students several times I was looking for a long term; just-for-the-fun-of-it, collage project of my own to dip into now and again.

scroll down for full pics

These are test pieces for a new stream of work based on the idea of designing sci-fi street gangs and placing them in real life surroundings. The origins of this go back to an idea I had in 2018 for squads of four soldiers, each with a different talent / theme. Then I saw the illustrations of Gerald Leung:

 [https://www.outregallery.com/collections/brackmetal] 

...about the same time as the release of Apex Legends and another viewing of Walter Hill's The Warriors. So I started to think of gangs and I started to think in threes and I started to think of themes. Caaaan you dig it?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GxSwUcm_XE&feature=youtu.be

Gerald Leung: Brackmetal

Walter Hill's Warriors

Apex Legends; EA & Respawn Ent.

As I was about to take Animation students to Prague for a week exploring and drawing; I made some quick character assets to drop onto images of the graffiti that I knew was in Prague. As the first characters all had guns it seemed a bit less visually aggressive (and cliched) to have spray cans and cameras as their weapon of choice. 

More gangs are in the pipeline utilizing the cultures of skateboarding, tattooing, basketball, hustling, biking and surfing.

So these are the beginnings of the work; rough composites following on from the tests in Prague, with bits missing, fuzzy edges, etc.

Plague Doctor gang member on top of Fuchs 2; a venue on a bridge over the Vltava River. Looks disused but isn't.

Kabuto gang member, tram lines near Charles Bridge / River Vltara.

Old Town gang member with experimental aerosol cannon, Tesnov, Prague.

Old Town gang member; graffiti wall (not much graffiti in Old Town itself).

New Town gang member, Underpass near Vltara River.

Kabuto gang member, outside derelict canal building near Barton Road swing bridge, Manchester.

Sketching in Praha (Prague) 2019

A couple of sketches done while in Prague with Staffs Uni Animation & Games Animation students. Been a while...

Sketching the view from the Male Namesti fountain 1560

The Old Town Hall from across Old Town Square.

Character Mash-up - Silhouettes, Mark Making and the power of blind ink-blot creation.

Epiphany; looking at a sketchbook belonging to Joanna Quinn and realising that every mark made on the paper was actually quite beautiful.

Joanna Quinn mark making.

Problem; how to get a room full of students to have that moment. Everyone hears the principles of character design; silhouettes, shape hierarchy, variance, reinforcement, negative space, forceful shapes (Mike Mattesi), etc. But the power of a good mark over a bad one can make a drawing powerful and lift it above the weaker ones; even if they are all using these principles.

The point of the following exercise was to give them marks; ink blots scanned into Photoshop, and have them create characters from them. That way they CANNOT draw flat, boring lines of regular thickness and NO energy. Dynamic marks are built into the workshop. Interesting marks >> interesting character.

Get this; when making several sheets of ink marks I found that I got much better results if I worked with my eyes shut and thought about the brush pressure.

Most of my workshops are designed to channel students towards creating characters that they would never consider creating, using shapes forms and marks that they have never used before.

Getting a creative out of their comfort zone is a major part of this job and success at that usually leads to a much stronger ideas. With an understanding of dynamic shapes and forms students will create much more visually dynamic characters.

Supremely satisfying moment with the mouse character above. One student wanted to bail out at the start and go home to draw the characters using a Cintiq. HaHaHa...no chance!

His resulting characters came as a massive (positive) surprise to him. I love moments like that! 

My own example to kick of the workshop.

It is important to remember as well that these workshops are for mixed classes of traditional animation, digital animation, stop motion and CGI games students. Some of the have a real resistance to 'arty' techniques so combining ink blots and Photoshop this way is a very effective technique to break down any walls of resistance.

The following weeks workshop allowed the class to detail each others designs using the principles of volumetric curves to create form.

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

Next up; animation for these silhouettes as well...

Exquisite Corpse Animation preparation with After Effects and the Duik plug-in.

Next up for the Exquisite Corpse characters is Animation.

Not too surprising for an animation lecturer really.

I am getting ready to make an animated version of one of my own characters. I'm going for After Effects and a plug-in called Duik;  https://rainboxprod.coop/en/tools/duik/ to make the rigging quicker.

I'll post results as they happen but for now here is the character tidied up ready to be rigged...

When this is up and running it will form the basis of some hopefully-simple instructions for the students to follow. Then we can make GIF's of future workshop characters.

Exquisite Corpse character workshops continues...

After the success of my Exquisite Corpse workshop for Intervention Day on Halloween 2017; I have used the same workshop for Offer Holder Days, Open Days and Time-to-Connect Days here at Staffordshire University Animation Dept. Basically its a collage character creation task using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Bridge and four and a half Gigabytes of images. Most of the images come from the Flickr account of The Biodiversity Heritage Library.

 https://www.flickr.com/people/biodivlibrary/

Ages of participants vary; most were around 18 but some of the visitors were as young as 12. Everyone got to grips with the concept pretty quickly, had fun with the workshop and these are some examples of the work produced...