MISFITS

 The finished group. Make sure you click on it to see it full size:

 Pleased with it. A couple of people have mentioned buying prints so if you're interested or know where to get art printed let me know in the comments.

Thanks to LoveTextures for the background texture and Junkohanhero on DaFont for.. well.. da font.

BYE

Nathan

Group pic up soon bye

yoo fink yoo can dick araan wiv ooss...

 Finished Kelly and Alisha:

Learning a lot from drawing them :) Nathan later then I'll have finished BYE

Simon

 Bit concerned about the difference in style to Curtis but we'll have to see what they all look like together:

I've started Kelly now and she's looking good if I do say so myself. More laterz bye

Pictures

 Here are some pictures by me.

This is a picture of a spaceman/octopus I did a couple of weeks ago. He's feeling a bit left out, maybe because part of him is: 

And this is a drawing of Curtis from Misfits. I'm going to try and draw the whole team:

More soon now I'm home for Christmas. Bye...

Craig's Direct Line Viral Phone

 Tuesday and Thursday this week I have been doing some 3D modelling for my mate Craig. He is doing Advertising Design and making a Direct Line Youtube viral ad for a project.
 I modelled the iconic red phone while Sooth Efricon Craig modelled the more recent red mouse (with some help from me :D) and is going to do the animation.
 Anyway here are some renders of the model. It's not very economical with polygons but otherwise I'm very pleased with it:

 Let me know what you think. OK. Thanks. bye

Find us on Facebook...

 We now have a public Facebook page for people to follow the progress of SkyWay.
So like it and join us on our journey :D
 Also there will be a new widget on the Blogodile for SkyWay's Facebook escapades. And we are working on getting an IndieDB page on the go as well.

That's all for now
Goodbye

Skyway update 30th Nov 2010

 We had our presentation today and it went really well. Ben and Ollie did the talking and really sold the game I think.
 Me and Rich spent the weekend building a prototype of our swimming/platforming gameplay to show in the presentation and you can see it here.
 Since my first Skyway post I have started and finished the redesigned pier couple, who are currently named Mr and Mrs Docherty:

Their proportions are slightly more humanoid now.

I have also designed Oscar's rocketcycle using classic, current and concept bicycles as reference. Here is the design in three different colours (the rocket is the thing behind the seat):

Pretty fancy I'm sure you'll agree.

More to come soon hopefully.

Bye

Greetings from Skyway...

 Ok, finally a look at what I've been doing for my Final Major Project over the last six+ weeks.
I'm working with Ben Williams, Rich Coughlin and Ollie Ludgrove (their work on the project can be found on their respective blogs) and we're still working on a team name.  

 I'm not going to talk about the game idea itself right now, not because it's a secret I just can't be arsed to explain. But it's called Skyway.
The initial idea was inspired by the superb artwork of Josh Keyes (whom(?) I have linked before) but has grown and taken reference from many other places and is now its own project.

 Here is an early environment moodboard I put together (featuring some of Keyes' paintings) to give a quick impression of the setting of the game:

 Next is my drawing of the current main character design. His name is Oscar Rocketcycle.

Inspired by: various Okami characters, Lupin III characters, James (and the Giant Peach (animated version)), Pocoyo, the Team Fortress 2 engineer and, the one that everyone seems to pick up on, Tintin. 

 This is Hooch, with and without shades. He is a bike shop owner and "dark green water" brewer.

This is an updated version of a design that was initially pitched as the main character but was deemed "too bad (evil, not shit)". 

We liked the character though so we changed his role and kept him in.

Can't really remember what his face is inspired by as it started as a doodle on my dissertation handbook.

His body, and possibly personality, is inspired by Flip and the other casuals from This is England 86, one of my favourite characters from the series.

 More character concepts. These two are the owners of the pier Oscar will have to rebuild.
References include Punch and Judy, Richard and Judy and Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show although they ended up looking like Paul Daniels and Germaine Greer.
I'm going to alter their design soon to make their proportions a bit more realistic as they are currently a bit too cartoony.  

 Next up is a concept of the style of the sky. The game is set in the sky so the player will be seeing a lot of it, therefore it needs to be interesting and pleasant to look at.
It's based on the battle scene backgrounds of the GBA Pokemon games and currently is actually a bit too similar so it will need a bit of playing around with before it is put in our game.

 Finally something on the technical side. I found a stupidly helpful Youtube channel by Andrew Klein which has a lot of Maya tutorials that are relevant to our project. Plus he sounds like JD from Scrubs.

Anyway, following one of these tutorials, I have had a go at normal mapping from a 3D model.

 The image below doesn't show a great success in terms of its usefulness but it does show the idea working. It is a single polygon plane (a completely flat square) but after applying the normal map and placing lights it looks lumpy and 3D so hopefully we can use this technique later on for other things.

That's all for now. More coming soon.

BYE

Tom's Shop

I was asked by my mate Tom on Advertising to make a 3D model of a shop plan for one of his assignments. 

It's a shop promoting Umbro's new 'A Frame' shoe range.

Here are the renders of the final model. I think we're both pretty pleased with how it turned out and, for me, it was good practise in maya.

The shop front. The main door is in the shape of the A Frame logo and this follows through into a tunnel into the shop:

The shoes themselves are presented on racks on the outside of the tunnel and around the shop. The rack on the back wall is in full view when shoppers walk through the tunnel.

The till area based on the classic Umbro logo, which also features elsewhere around the shop and in the windows:

The inside wall of the tunnel will be covered in promotional material and designs.

In the photo area at the back of the shop customers can have their picture taken in front of a large 3D Umbro logo, doing whatever they want, and the picture will be printed onto the box of their new shoes:

Well there we go.
bye

FARVERXMAS

Quick drawing of a sinister Santa Claus, crappily drawn as per requested by Lanny, who wanted it for a Youtube video of his LannyBOOM Christmas song.

Hopefully more updates soon regarding other stuff. I'm making a 3D layout model of an Umbro shop design for a friend studying Advertising Design so I'll put that up when it's done.

Bye

And now for something completely different.

Here's a kind of old school grime instrumental I made a while ago. I don't really know how good/bad it is or how finished it is.
It's pretty tinny becasue its basically a midi made in Guitar Pro 5 and converted to mp3 online. I didn't realise that by doing this the actual midi sounds change so it sounds quite different and slightly more professional than the original although some of the levels seem to have altered and some of the tracks are really quiet.
Also it's VERY LOUD for some reason.

bye

New Look

As you can hopefully see The Enormous Blogodile has a new(ish) look.
It's kind of along the same lines as the original but is now a bit fresher and more unique to me as it isn't a stock template.
Hope you like it.
Actually I'm not too bothered but let me know what you think bye.

The Revamp

After seeing Pete's revamped blog I think it might be time (tomorrow) to jazz up The Enormous Blogodile and move away from it's current default template design.
Although this layout is pretty basic and I've always found the actual post space to be a bit too thin it does get the job done and is suitable enough really. Maybe I'll try changing it and if it looks shit I'll change it back. Yeah.
Also, depending on whether this works, I'm trying out jump breaks.
Bye

Update: Jump breaks are useless and have been removed.

JUGGERNAUT!!!

You should only be able to equip Juggernaut/Painkiller online in Call of Duty up to a certain level (15/20 maybe).
This is because it's for people who aren't very good and they won't get better if they keep it on.

Recently...

I haven't done a lot of much.
I've slowly been working on my scenery picture for Day 25 but it's taking ages because I'm doing it in a really awkward way.
I've also started transcribing this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAkmOjeIVig in Guitar Pro 5 because I like it and need to practise more guitar.
I've been working on an idea for our final major project and refining ideas for other things.

I'm going to finish the two pictures I missed out of the 30 days of drawing.
I'm going to start back working on Attack Fox 1 and get it finished so I can start work on Muchos Muertes...
I'm probably not going to work on the Emma Watson picture for a bit haha
There's a flyer/t-shirt design competition for a local club (Meze) apparently coming up so I might have a bash. The prize is £500 I think.

That's it.
Bye

Day 30 (A Congrats Banner For Finishing The Challenge)

Well I made it. As Pete said earlier the girl who wrote out the challenge must have been running out of ideas at this point:

Not much to say about it. Seems like ages ago I started this but only yesterday that I was at the half way point which is weird.

Now to finish the other two. They'll be up in the coming days hopefully.

BYE

Day 29 (A Place You Want to Go)

Just about caught up. Here's yesterday's:

You should get the idea. Didn't spend long on it, thought the idea would be more interesting than how well it's drawn. It's mainly done in various digital airbrushes with some other bits and pieces added.

Last one later :)

Bye

Day 28 (Draw Anything)

A pitiful attempt at an "animation" for yesterday:

Day 28 (Draw Anything) from Oliver Elliott on Vimeo.
More like a slightly moving image really...
Based on the superb interpretation of "draw anything" by Rory.
Again created using only PS and WMM.
Last day tomorrow thank fuck :)
bye

Day 27wellnotreally

Another cop out I'm afraid.
Day 27 is draw someone you love and I'm drawing my Grandpa.
It's an important picture and, as I work quite slowly, I don't want to rush it. So, like day 25, I'm going to post what I've done so far, do the rest and then finish this one.
To make it slightly more interesting I've taken images from throughout the process so far so you can see how I make the picture. Some of the other pictures are done in a similar way so this will probably apply to them as well (annotations below):

1) The scan of the original photo of my Grandpa in the Royal Australian Air Force taken in 1944.

2) In Photoshop I alter the saturation of the picture giving it a sepia tint and up the contrast to bring out the high and low lights.

3) In Painter I draw the main lines over the photo on a new layer with the pencil tool. Normally I would draw this by hand, probably using a grid, but to save time I effectively make a tracing of it. This is cheating :)

4) Back in PS I create a backdrop from two textures, velvet and leather, from the internet. I make the velvet texture layer, on top, slightly transparent so that some of the detailing from the leather comes through and then merge the layers. 

Then I adjust the colouring and lighting to fit the picture and make the background less distracting.

5) Moving back into Painter and using the drawing from 3 I block out the main shape of the portrait using two colours of digital chalk. The colours themselves are extracted from image 2 using the dropper tool. Again this saves time :)

6) Next I use black chalk to block out all the large black sections as well as some of the black detailing. I have done this since college, not sure why. At this point it looks a bit like a graffiti stencil.

Well that's all for now. There's too many distractions here at the house in Newport!

Tomorrow will be the 30th day and I've still got three pictures to do aside from this one and Day 25 :(

Hopefully yesterday's picture will be up later on tonight.

bye

Day 26 (Something You Don't Like)

More catching up for the weekend. This is saturday's and it's two things I don't like:

Umbrellas are one of my Room 101 things and I could tell you over quite a long time how annoying, shit and useless they are but I won't. and spiders obviously.
This picture is a mixture of digital mediums I can't be arsed to list. I like it. It took just the right amount of time.
Going to try and get more done tomorrow as I've put it off a bit today and went into town for quite a while.

In other news I played the Vanquish demo and it is awesome. Also Craig Devine (Speccy Twat Camera Hire) has asked me to do another logo for him so I'm going to do that and hopefully he'll use it this time.
BYE

Day 25 (Scenery)... kind of...

Ok as you might be aware I moved back to Newport on friday and haven't had much time to draw blah blah blah.
As I'm quite stubborn and anal, I have to finish this 30 days from when I started so there will be a picture for every day of the 30 even if it wasn't done on the actual day. If that makes sense.
Well I've prepared the pictures for the last 3 days and am about to start working on the final images, however the one for Day 25 is going to take a very long time by the look of it so I'm going to post the mock-up (the altered photograph) for now, work on the others and come back to this one when they're done.
Actually I'm going to post the original photo as well to show you some of the progression the pictures go through when I'm doing one:

It's the view from Pete's room at Newport. Mine's very similar but I can't see "The Hill" and I wanted to get it in this picture.
Anyway apologies for the lack of an actual picture but I promise it will be done soon.
More catching up to be posted later on hopefully.
bye

Day 24 (A Couple)

Very quick/rushed one as I've spent most of today doing yesterday's and seeing people before I go back to Newport.
It's Charlie Brooker and Konnie Huq who got married recently:

Was thinking about doing Steve and Sarah because it's Steve's birthday but I thought it might be weird and gay and I couldn't be arsed.
Probably won't be a picture tomorrow as I'm moving back but will hopefully catch up over the weekend.
bye

Day 23 (Something You Need)

Yesterday's (was painting at Dad's again and was knackered).
Fairly self explanatory:

Background of digital oils with Mr. Motivator in something called tints or tinting or something...

Very pleased with it. Hopefully today's up laterz.

Bye

You what?

The Enormous Blogodile is now on the Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/EnormousBlogoVision.
It's like a lower quality vimeo at the moment but it could be used for different stuff later on.

I've put a thing on the top right of the blog with links to all the other blogodile caves and my email address for if you want to email me an email. I've also added a load of other unnecessary shit which you might have noticedbye

Day 22 (Something You Miss)

I did this one to look a bit like an advert:

I haven't had a proper drink all summer just a few occasional beers. Smirnoff Black is amazing.

This is a mixed media piece combining rich matt paint on walls, photography and digital text and imagery. Perhaps surprisingly the original photo was not adjusted or altered at all apart from the addition of the logo.

Depending on your point of view this picture took between one and nine hours to complete.

BYE!!!!!!!

1000... 1000 views ah ah aaaah

The Enormous Blogodile is proud to report that we have paid host to over 1000 views this month.
mental
bye

Day 21 (Something You Want)

I want... to see The Streets live...

because Mike Skinner is one of the best.

Done mainly with digital airbrush with Mike in digital "worn oil pastel".

Not much else to say, I'm quite pleased with it although I did rush him a bit.

Bye

Day 20 (Something Orange)

Phew, finally caught up with them.
Here's today's (yesterday's now) offering:

It's a pumpkin with some carrots in, in case you couldn't tell.

Like most of my pictures it looks better from further away. In fact when I uploaded it the thumbnail was a lot paler and desaturated and looked a bit better, but too late.

I tried a new medium, "Tapered Gauche" this time, and it's cool because it hides the fact that I rushed this one a bit by looking like it's supposed to look rushed.

There's some other materials in the background.

Two thirds of the way there now!

OKthinkthatsitbye

Update: Tried upping the lightness like the uploader thumbnail. Looked ok small but just looked washed out close up.

Day 19 (Something New)

Yesterday's picture done today as I spent most of my drawing time yesterday painting my Dad's bedroom:

It looks slightly odd. It's the exploded diagram of my Dad's new Dyson Ball hoover.
It reminded me of Shigeru Komatsuzaki's illustrations of Thunderbirds and other awesome sci-fi stuff (http://pinktentacle.com/2010/06/sci-fi-illustrations-by-shigeru-komatsuzaki/), really love his stuff.
I reckon the hoover parts look kind of like a space ship...
Hopefully Day 20 up later.
Bye

Day 18 (Just a Doodle)

After the runaway worldwide success of Day 16 I did another animation:

Day 18 (Just a Doodle) from Oliver Elliott on Vimeo.
You're welcome.
Veteran Blogodile fans will remember the Super Mario image from the early days (http://theenormousblogodile.blogspot.com/2010/01/itsa-me.html).
Bit of an audio glitch at one point by the sound of it but plllllllp.
Days 19 and 20 up laterz.
Bye

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

OK I did another animation today and managed to get it finished in time to upload to Vimeo before I leave, however my laptop is boiling and 74% into uploading I decided to open another tab which crashed chrome meaning I have to upload again which will take over half an hour (it's quite a big file) + the hour they add on for whatever reasons.
I thought about uploading it with the blogger video thing so you could see it but I think I'll wait until Sunday and get it in the best quality.
Sozzers but it gives you more time look at today(yesterday)'s pic and something to look forward to on sunday LOL.
anywaybye

Day 17 (Favourite Plant)

This is yesterday's, had a few things to do in the day so didn't have time to finish it:

This plant doesn't exist. It a combination of a Weeping Willow and Snapdragons, which do exist.

The leaves are digital oil and the petals digital chalk.

I'm very pleased with this one already.

Hopefully Day 18 will be up later, if not there's a chance it, and the next few days, won't be up for a while as I'm going to be at my Dad's and possibly busy for a few days after that. 

Anyways enjoy.

Bye

Just a small point...

It's been really annoying me. That new Nesquik advert is so shit. It couldn't miss the mark any more if it tried.

Day 16 (Inspiration)

An animation!!!!! wooohoooo!!!

Day 16 (Inspiration) from Oliver Elliott on Vimeo.

I did this using Photoshop and Windows Movie Maker with a tiny bit of Painter. Unfortunately I haven't got any other video editing software on my laptop nor have I got Flash.
I could easily spend weeks on Flash making simple stuff like this that goes on for ages. I guess I had plenty of time to make it longer but this is all I wanted to present.
Don't think there's anything else to say...
buy

Day 15 (Family Picture)

Wasn't in the right mood today to draw a picture from my own family so I did this.
Tried a new medium. The Painter brush was 'Tapered Camel' from the Pen Brushes.
Looks quite good and very realistic and has quite a nice texture but my hand is now dead as you have to press very hard to get bold colours.
Anyway here's the picture:

The colour palette and style is based on a Nazi propaganda poster of a family I was thinking about drawing. 

I kept the slogan "Ein Volk hilft sich selbst!" (yes that is an s!) as it is quite a strong and universal message and certainly not Nazi specific. 

I am not a Nazi :).

Grant looks a bit too much like a bald Captain Black but overall I'm happy I thinkBYE

P.S. Whoooooooaa we're halfway theeere...

Day 14 (Favourite Fairytale)

Well it's a day late but it looks alright. Usually it takes a while for me to like/form an opinion about my pictures.
Hopefully you can tell which fairytale it is. I haven't really got a favourite and I didn't particularly want to draw any of the other ones I could think of but I used to like this one so...

Day 15 should be up later.
byerz

Well it finally happened...

I didn't manage to finish a picture before I go to bed.
I have an excuse though, it was my Mum's birthday and we've had a lot of visitors and we watched a film so I haven't had a lot of time to do it. It's over half way though so I should get it done early tomorrow. It's looking quite creepy at the moment which is good :)
bye

Day 13 (Comic)

Haha not really a joke or anything and it probably won't make sense but...

Maybe it'll put the 30 days drawing thing in some kind of context. Couldn't really think of anything else :D

Bye

Day 12 (Most Recent Accomplishment)

WARNING: This one isn't very good as I was at my Dad's and I rushed it and I was working from a picture on my mobile because I forgot the cable that links my phone to the computer and I couldn't really be bothered and I was watching Casino Royale.

I like it though.

It's a wheelbarrow that I filled with apples for my Dad at the end of last month.

The apples on the ground have fallen since before you suggest I did a sloppy job.

Day 13 up later.

BYE

Come folla me...

After a discussion with Rory I have been persuaded to get a Twitter to promote myself and the blog.
Still getting to grips with it but here's the linker:

http://twitter.com/blogodiletweet

Goodbyyyyyeeee

P.S. there's a new tweet button below the Facebook Like so you can share the glory of the Enormous Blogodile with all your Twitter cousins.

Day 11 (Turning Point in your Life)

Something a bit different today. This is the kitchen of Fairoak flat 3 and although it's more a place than a point it does represent the start of uni for me and a new period in my life. Also it's the place where I first met some of my best uni friends for the first time.

Thanks to http://bashcorpo.dk/index.php for the paper textures :)
bye