Touchdown Turnaround!

Yes, that's a song reference title!

I got the alien kid turnaround finished last night, I'm not sure if back shots are entirely necessary... The back of him would be relatively boring anyway! 

Quite happy with the way it turned out (see what I did there?). Hands are always a fiddly part of any drawing, and I don't often have to draw them from the outside side angle... Took a few runs at it. Also spent a little bit more time tidying up the drawing this time. 

A note on the lighting of the side view, it looks dull because I was trying to keep the lighting consistent. So this is the side that's actually mostly in darkness on the other image.

Now for some research work... 

Mat out!

Alien Kid Front Reference

Oh my goodness! 2 posts in one day! You can tell that the deadline is looming... I had intended to do a full turnaround on this page, but I wanted to get some more practice using my new colouring technique. Yet again there have been tweaks to the process: 

This time instead of colouring onto a multiply layer, I coloured onto a normal layer, underneath the line layer, and shaded AFTER that on  multiply layer. This made it much easier to reliably get the colours right, regardless of the grey background I use, which darkens the colours if you're using a multiply layer.

The reason I use a grey background is three-fold; firstly, I find that a bright white screen gives me an ENORMOUS headache after a few hours intensive staring (drawing). Secondly, the brightness fools your eyes, colours are much more difficult to pick accurately (that part is mentioned a lot if you look for photoshop tips). Lastly, particularly on the shading stage, I find that having an overall neutral looking (dull) page helps get a much better sense of direction for the lighting. 

I still can't decide if I prefer to shade first and colour after, or colour first and shade after... Colouring first is a technique often used by anime artists, it seems to simplify the process, which can only be a good thing, and the finished look is for all intents and purposes exactly the same.

The lil' dude in the bottom left is my signature by the way, I was debating whether to put him on, but I think it's quirkier than just poking an "MF" on every piece.


I should have a proper turnaround finished tonight, but I'll upload it tomorrow, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing!


Mat out! *resists urge to put smiley face emoticon*

The Alien Revisited!

Hello all! I'm pleased to be having a fairly productive day here, getting a lot of ideas much better formed ideas now (about time I know).


Got some good feedback about the previous alien character I uploaded, but thinking about it, that alien looked much much too old to be the character in my 3 minute, which is supposed to be an alien child. So I had another sketch, which turned out quite well, I decided to give it a proper work up, though a quick one this time. I also thought it would be a good idea to show my process, even though it is constantly changing as I learn more...

As you can see, I started out with a portrait to get an idea of character. I do this occasionally when I don't have a specific pose in mind.


The process is basically a case of building on layer after layer. I still had a LOT of polishing to do, but at the concept stage, anything over a certain quality is overkill... Especially if you don't go with that idea. This whole thing took me just over an hour, much quicker this time after my previous drawing, which was experimenting with a whole new technique. Very briefly I'll explain the process:


Portrait > Sketch body / pose > Decide lighting direction (multiply) > Tone shadows (multiply) > Block in colours (multiply) > Add lighting (normal) > Add Highlights (normal) > Background (preset template), gradient from bottom left, add more smoke effect to darken bottom left, add signatures > Done

Quite happy with how the character turned out, I like the innocence in the face and the proportions definitely are more child like. I'm not sure I'd like to go too exaggerated with proportion, at least not until I have a definite style in mind for the film.

Here is the final stage again, it's far from finished, I left a lot of my sketch lines in... I like how they look. For a fully finished image, I'd have to neaten the edges up, possibly ink in some lines...


My next order of business on this idea, will be to get a finished design for the human boy character, and turnarounds for each. I'll also need to spend a lot of time on set design... It's my weakest area drawing-wise at the moment.

See you the next time I see you! Matty out.

Colour Theory In Practice

As a follow up to my previous post (here) about colour theory I thought I'd give a few quick examples of colour theory actually being applied to... things.

I hope you're appreciating the backgrounds, I think they jazz the place up somewhat! So with any luck this should help explain some things I perhaps missed yesterday. 

In other news, I spent most of the day in Harrogate shopping with Hannah today, hence the slightly shorter than usual post! Tomorrow I'm aiming to get some more development done on one of my 3 minute ideas. I'm also looking into a smarter way of storing my work on my computer, hopefully using smart folders, but it may take some serious re-organizing, so until next time!

Matty out!

The Basics of Colour Theory

Good afternoon all!


Now then, I've been mentioning colour theory a little bit over the last few days, so I thought I'd do a post explaining at least the basics of it. 

Now then, as you can see, this colour theory is based on an RYB (Red Yellow Blue) colour wheel. Red, Yellow and Blue being the primary colours, are the largest circles, the second largest you get by mixing the primaries and are therefore called secondary colours (Green, Purple, Violet, Dark Orange and Yellow-Orange). The smallest circles, are tertiary colours and you get those by mixing either primaries or secondaries.

Colour theory is a method of choosing colours that look good with each other, and more importantly, a way of avoiding colours that do not look good together. There are various ways of choosing harmonious colours, which I've shown in the image.

Basic complimentary colours are those that are directly opposite each other on the wheel, these are extremely high contrast. It is important to remember that even though the colours do compliment each other you do not have to ensure that the colours are used in equal amounts, rather choose one main colour and use the other to compliment it, for example in details or lighting etc. You can also use another pair of complimentary colours, as long as they are within 2 spaces of the currently used colours (Analogous).

Split complimentary colours are very similar, except instead of picking colours directly opposite, you choose one colour and then the 2 colours either side of the colour directly opposite (see image). You can choose any of the colours as your main colour in your scheme, and again, they do not have to be equally balanced.

The analogous colour scheme uses 3 touching colours on the colour wheel, they are therefore very low in contrast. This is often used when a specific colour is wanted to dominate a theme, the analogous colours can be used to to pick out details etc without distracting too much from the main colour. Commonly used in the design stage of characters and sets etc.

The tertiary colour scheme (my personal favourite) uses 3 colours equally spaced around the colour wheel (6 colours apart). This is much less colour restrictive than the other schemes as all 3 colours are so different. Again, often used in the design stages of characters and sets, when a dominating colour is not in the brief.

An important note, colours such as pastels that are lowly saturated (all near neutral colours), do not necessarily need to adhere to colour theory and can be used freely with each other.e

Here is a .png version of the colour wheel, you can import this into your drawing application to quickly pick up colours from.

On another note, I took a better look at my use of blog labels, noticing that they are not used as search tags as on other sites, rather a way to categorize your posts. I've had a little clean up of my labels, so you can now use the labels box at the top right to view posts that you're interested in seeing! 

Until next time! Mat

Hair Do Boompage!

Another day, another ludicrous lie-in... I blame it on the cold that I still have! 


A brand new idea for another 3 minute dawned on me in bad last night, it's still very much in the budding stage, but it's about a pirate girl. I decided to throw together a hair do style-page, not sure that any of them will be the final design, but any I should upload pretty much all development work I do. Keep in mind that the face is just a generic girl face I sketched out, not the definite face of the character:

I actually really like this hair effect, I do it using the same hard-round brush I use for sketching, with opacity and flow set to pen pressure. 


If I had to choose any of the above hair styles it would probably be the top right one, or perhaps the bottom right with the top right's bangs... Another page is needed I feel...
I'm currently also still working on the colour theory blog, but it's raid night tonight so I thought I'd better get something uploaded to keep up this daily streak I've got going!


Oh, short story for you to explain the use of the word 'boompage'. A few years back I was doing some very quick sketches, jotting down ideas and couldn't remember the word 'stylesheet' so just saved it as 'boompage', I of course immediately remembered it was called a style sheet, but boompage has kind of stuck! (I did say it was a short story, and I didn't say it was going to be particularly interesting). So now you know, any stylesheets I do, will probably be titled and labelled as boompage.


Anyway, until tomorrow: good-bye, aloha, auf wiedersehen, arrivederci, au revoir, adeus, and all that jazz!

Alien Sketch Cleanup

I admit I got a little carried away last night and today!


Last night I spent a few hours, creating a bunch of backgrounds to import into all my concepts, I'm trying to get away from the plan white backgrounds... Though I'll probably still use fairly plain backgrounds for simple concept sketches.

After I'd created quite a few variations of backgrounds, in various colours. I started playing around with ideas for a more professional looking ratworks signature; the kind that you see on concept studio's. I notice that a lot of studios use the whole name in the signature, not just the logo, and often find a way of incorporating the logo into the name.


I had a play around with some fonts, and some layout ideas, the rat standing on the w in ratworks for example, in the end I found one that I really like... Though I know rob wasn't expecting any changes like this, but now at least we have a choice of which signature to use, I admit I do like the 'stamp' logo we already use, but for more finished looking work I think I'll use this one.

 I'm still working on a decent looking presentation for how I actually arrived at this, and I should have that uploaded in a few days!

In other news, today I decided to try my first finished drawing, and I must say I'm pleased with how he looks finished! I spent about 3-4 hours on this today, I got a little carried away experimenting with a new painting technique I decided to try out. Usually, I spend a long time 'inking' all of the lines in, for a cartoony look, then block in the colours, and then shade. On this I went straight from the sketch (exactly as I uploaded it the other day) to painting and shading straight ontop. The resulting .psd file had a LOT of layers, but I think the finished look is worth the effort (and trauma to my computer's memory). Here's the pic:

The blogspot resizing makes it look a little fuzzy, so please do fullview! The blobs in the top left are the colours I picked using colour theory, these are tertiary complimentary colours. I should really do a blog on the basics of Colour Theory, which I'm still very much in the process of learning.

Until next time! Matty out!