Bernie Wrightson in close-up

Time to GO LARGE on Bernie Wrightson, one of the most influential and inspiring artists to many comic, graphic novel and illustration types for many years.

This is one genius artist that just makes you think 'How the hell did he do that'. What we have is a mixture of images that have depth, sensitivity and mood; echoing equally the etchings of Gustave Dore, Piranesi, and the modern comic work of Kevin O'Neil and John Hicklenton.

Dore

Piranesi

   

O'Neill

Hicklenton

  It really amazing what you can achieve armed with a pen! The subject matter, though often grotesque, is also highly emotive and exposes the humanity of the most inhuman characters.

This mans work will continue to have a profound effect on its audience for a very very long time.

Bernie Wrightson 1948 - 2017

What follows is a close-up look at some classic artwork by Bernie Wrightson.

  

Rest in Peace Bernie!

Punch Bag character designs

This is the first of a series of regular reports on my new film; Punch Bag.This is being made at Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent, where I am a Senior Lecturer in Animation (Twitter: @25fpsstaffs).

It has been some time since I have made any animation of my own, I have been teaching for about five years, but prior to that I was a freelance Animator working in London and Manchester. This will be the first animation that I have made using Maya.

The designs are simple silhouettes. I have moved on from the previous Steam Punk designs but have retained a lot of the influences. There is a human engineer / mechanic, and a lot of robots.

The robot was put into Maya as an image plane and I started start sketching the shape in with polygon primitives. I will pit lots of grabs into the next post.

The human character will be sculpted in clay as a maquette first; then photographed to become a series of image planes in either Maya or Mudbox. I will probably use Maya to keep the poly-count down.

The human is very much inspired by the Team Fortress II characters...

...while the Robots are all me.

The 'look' of the whole thing will be very like a Mike Mignola comic; BPRD and Hellboy are my inspiration...

 ...Toon Rendered to create lots of flat colour, with large areas of dark shadow; very Film Noir.

More soon...

Better still.
 The black is blacker..some textures...and I stole someones face.

The Flaming Nun,... in ink..and in colour...partly.

Much better.

I hope to do some retro letratone style shading on this...soon...

Still trying to get my entry for charactr #4; Nuns with Guns, ready. Pencil design is going well but the legs are a bit off at the moment.

 I have less than 24 hours to get it finished and a very busy day tomorrow. Its going to be close...again.

The final nuns are starting to come in to the forum; http://www.charactr.co.uk/final-voting-thread-for-charactr-3-t105.html. Some good ones already.

I set the new task on Friday. This one is 'Tattooed Spider Woman'. That means I could get anything from a shadowy, smouldering femme fatale from the days of film noir, to a mutated spider-human cross-breed. Should be some interesting submissions.

I made the sheet below to give some inspiration, and to show that there are many ways that this one could go.