Michael Blake

LINK to watch on Vimeo: NIEMANDSLAND https://vimeo.com/714797252 Animated in ink and pencil on paper, a WW1 soldier tries to save a dying horse during an attack of deadly phosgene gas. This is my final project for 2nd year at UWE Animation.  It took roughly 3 1/2 months since the initial idea at the beginning of February - Stills from finished film: 800 and something sheets of paper. The original art I produced for the pitch: First character design and animation test (digital): Final character design (digital): First pen and paper animation: Storyboards: Inspiration for compositions taken from engraved war art of Otto Dix and Goya. Inverted the values for compositions with lots of black. On the left is the scanned image, on the right is the final frame: Thanks for watching/reading - wouldn't have been possible without everyone's help and advice.

To feel more comfortable with the process of painting, I spent a few weeks painting still lifes in black and white/monochrome - glasses are interesting, refractions an that. The 'blurriness' problem mentioned in previous post continues -  Using watercolour pencils over the top of the gouache to make hard lines and edges helps a lot.  For this drawing/painting a lot of the form is given by the watercolour pencils. Experimenting with colour: The only watercolour pencil on this painting in the shadows to get the proper darkness and in the delicate light rays across the surface of the gloves. Black watercolour pencil acts pretty much opaquely, but white pencil doesn't. It's more like a filter, mixing with the paint underneath. Might be a brand thing though. Water soluble graphite sketch, very quick:  

A whole day in the New Forest, quite soon after the initial attempt back in July. These are the results, scanned from an A3 sketchbook: I'm presenting these next images cropped and uncropped so you can see the difference. After these messy edges I made sure to get some masking tape for future experiments. Still struggling with blurriness, needing to use a smaller brush for the finer details. I've got to give full credit to James Gurney (Dinotopia man) for the inspiration to get back into gouache as a medium. His YouTube channel is pretty remarkable - lots of informative videos about gouache/oil painting.

Wandered into the New Forest w/ my bro over Easter - no leaves on any trees. The day was grey/cloudy, changing later for some intermittent but very strong angled light.  Went down the length of a little winding tributary, finding somewhere to park our collective arse and whip out the brushes. I drew a couple experiments in composition, thinking back to Will Eisner's great PDF on sequential art. Initially I wanted the patch of light behind the fallen tree to be the focus, using the dark trunks either side to act as a framing device: Then I remembered that I haven't used watercolours since junior school - so I cut the composition back to focus on the fallen tree on its own - quickly shading in the darkest values: For the painting I used a 1cm cheap-o synthetic brush, watercolour straight out of the tube, and water straight out of the bottle: As a quick 20 min sketch/painting I'm pretty pleased with the final result (so pleased I even signed it, would you look at that) - but -...

I made loads of these things - just a Conan-style character milling about - no story attached or anything. Might repurpose for future things, field of sticks is a good idea I think.

- uploading some old experiments in Photoshop from April 2021 -