Breaktime Studies

Hello all! Animation of the film is coming along very well; I hope to finish it by the end of Sunday. I'll then have three weeks for clean up, colouring and compositing; we're almost there! To do all of this though, I've been going in for early mornings and staying in for late evenings and so break-times are entirely necessary. Here are some studies from this week, done for stress relief.

Off I get back to work! Have a good week everyone!

The Week in Pictures

This time of year is enormously stressful at university as deadlines are getting closer! For the sake of my sanity however, I've been making sure to take some time out of university to get some fresh air, see the sunshine and do some drawing. I even went to London this week to see a screening of 'The Wind Rises' to review it for Skwigly (I'll keep you posted on when that's up).

I found a lovely little coffee shop this week where I spent some time
enjoying a creamy, marshmallowy, sinfully delicious hot chocolate and drew
people in the cafe, at the bus stop opposite and at the cash machine too. Each
of these drawings are roughly an inch tall, scribbled into my A6 sketchbook.

Later, I spent some time on a park bench in the sunshine experimenting with hatching techniques on the trees and seeing how few marks I could use to draw a dog. It sounds funny, I know, but it was a very enjoyable use of an hour, I have to say!

There was a piece of broken pottery in the park
that appeared very red against the green of the grass.

At life drawing, our model attempted to make us artists appreciate
the strain that a model is put through during a session. One of the
first years agreed to try a pose that involved putting all her weight onto one
foot while holding her arms out and agreed that it is really quite strenuous!

Life drawings after the break:

Drunken Snowmen and Other Shenanigans

Last night was my Google Doodle deadline. I'm sorry for not uploading this then, but something went wrong in the export and it's just worked now. Please enjoy this Christmas-inspired Google Doodle, featuring a drunken snowman.

Snowman Doodle from Julia Young on Vimeo.

Also yesterday, my review of 'The Book of Life' was published on Skwigly, so you can read that here if you'd like. It's a beautiful film and I recommend giving it a watch!

Until next week!

Google Doodle Doodle

Our current university coursework is pretty fun. We have to animate a Google Doodle in Flash and incorporate some interactive elements using actionscript. While I work on my final Doodle for the deadline on Monday next week, I thought I'd share with you a concept that I animated. Had it been my final Doodle, the animation would only start when you roll your mouse over the tree and leaves would follow your mouse. I would also have added an autumn-forest-type background. As it stands it's just a doodle of a Doodle, but I rather like it!

Autumn Google Doodle Doodle from Julia Young on Vimeo.

Until next week when you'll see my final, fully interactive Doodle! (I don't think I've ever used the word 'doodle' so often in my life!)

Digital Painting

When I was 16, my brilliant parents bought me a Wacom Bamboo Tablet for my Birthday. That was the beginning of digital painting for me. At the beginning of this summer, I made another technological leap in the medium; I bought myself an iPad Mini. Together with the incredible app Procreate and my Wacom Bamboo iPad Stylus, in 2013 I enjoyed a summer of digital sketching on the go.

The above image was the first finished painting that I created on the iPad. A quick disclaimer before I go on though; I painted this image using a Rapunzel picture book as reference. The staging, colours, idea etc purely belong to Disney. I used it to dive in at the deep end and see if I could create the same effects as in the book using these new and strange brushes and I'm pretty pleased with the result!

My next experiment was in textures and tones. I used reference images of ferrets off google for these. Ferrets are brilliant fun to draw I found - they make some great shapes with their bodies and they're cute too!

My last experiment I'm showing you today was made after I got the song 'Morning has Broken' stuck in my head. It was an experiment with the texture brush and lots of different modes of layers. Thanks to Photoshop, I'm very familiar with the multiply layer, but this piece was a masterclass in all of the other ones!

My next project after I hand in (and post!) my animation on Monday next week will be an Adobe project; playing with Photoshop and Illustrator, so there will certainly be some more digital art coming your way if you want to stay tuned!

Until next time!