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.