Self-Portrait

A painting from the weekend - I was trying to see if I could draw myself in the style of the characters I'm designing for the film and I got a little carried away! The difference you see between this self-portrait and the one topping this blog is 10 months of artistic development and hair growth! I'm also continunig my inktobers. To the right is a study of the main character from Marvel's 'Daredevil' series that's currently on Netflix - I'm completely hooked!

Master Studies

Last week I visited the John Singer Sargent exhibition that's currently on at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It's an incredible exhibition that runs until late May, so if you have the time, I'd really recommend it! This is a study of Sargent's  'Madame X'. One hour, Photoshop.

Master Studies

Another master study, this time of a painting called 'Valley Thunderhead' by Renato Muccillo. Animation on the film is almost finished, so soon I will be painting backgrounds and I figured with Muccilo's dramatic skies and use of lighting his paintings were appropriate to study in preparation. Photoshop 30 mins.

(Original)

International Women's Day 2015

As some of you may have been aware, a couple of weeks ago we celebrated International Women's Day. A friend commissioned me to do a couple of quick illustrations of inspirational women and has agreed to let me share them with you here. These two lovely ladies fit the bill nicely I think!

Master Studies

I don't know how many of you are aware of the recent (hashtag)21days by Noah Bradley on twitter, but the idea is to spend an hour a day for 21 days working to improve your art. It's been a busy week so I've yet to be able to make it a daily habit, but here is one of my master studies from the project. The original on the left is 'Anna Obolenskaya' by Carolus Duran  and on the right is my study of it. One hour in Photoshop.

Colour Keys

One of the things I did before Christmas was colour keys. This is only one example, but it should give you an idea of what the final film will look like. Josh is responsible for the linework in this example, and I coloured four different versions over the top. Again, hopefully it gives you some indication of what our collaboration will look like in the end!

Mood Boards

Hi Everyone,

Painting mood boards was incredibly exciting for me as it marked the moment when what was just talking about a film finally became actually working on pre-production to make the film! I thought today I'd share with you a few mood boards I did right at the start of the project.

A Very Exciting Brief!

I've not posted university work in a little while, so I thought today I'd let you know what we're up to; we've kicked off our new brief; pre-production for our final film! I had been looking forward to this for months so to have it officially start was completely fantastic! I'm collaborating for this project (and the production of the final film) with my coursemate Josh. The story idea is his but we're working very hard to bring it to life as a team. In our excitement last week, we even began a little pre-production instead of concentrating on our AfterEffects coursework. I thought today I would share with you two promo paintings that I did to get you as excited as I am for this project!

Studying Colour

Recently I bought myself the book 'Colour and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter' by James Gurney. It's a fantastic book and makes me realise just how little I know about colour theory! With that in mind, I've been doing really quick (15 min) colour studies recently just to try to get a little better. Below is one of those studies, done on the iPad app ProCreate, and beneath that is the reference photo I used. Mine is a little more blue-tinged than the original image because of the screen inaccuracies between the iPad and my laptop!

Photo found on DeviantART

Before I go, you may notice that it's a Monday today. I'm posting on a Monday because the next few Fridays are going to be fairly nightmare-ish in terms of finding time to post (I'm moving out of my student house and deadlines are approaching!). Instead of going on hiatus though, I'm just temporarily moving the posting day. It will be back to normal soon!

Until next week!

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!





Doodles and Skwigly

Hi all! Sorry for missing last week but to say it's been hectic doesn't even cover it! First of all, have a quicky flash doodle animation.

Flash Flower Doodle from Julia Young on Vimeo.

Second of all, I thought I'd update you on what I've been up to for Skwigly. At the beginning of the summer I had the enormous pleasure of interviewing Peter Lord and David Sproxton at the premier of the new 'Morph' series that was aired on YouTube over the summer. They were completely lovely and Peter Lord complemented me on my Morph-making skills! If you haven't already seen the series, watch it here and enjoy!

More recently, I headed down to the Bristol Encounters Short Film Festival. Each day of the festival has its own write up and the highlights have their own articles too. Have a look here if you want to see what I thought of Day 3 but spoiler alert, I enjoyed it immensely because I met Glen Keane! Honestly, it was such an incredible day!

He was there to present his film 'Duet' and the interview I had with him will be on Skwigly's Youtube series 'Lightbox' soon, so keep an eye out!

Until next week!

Concepting

The other day I felt the need to both be productive and blow off a little creative steam by working on something different for a couple of hours. The result was that I put together a couple of concepts for my housemate's game project. His brief was to do an old abbey in the style of the 1992 'Dracula' film, on top of a cliff with waves crashing below. He also wanted a couple of interior shots. Here is what I came up with:

Improvement and Nostalgia

This week I returned for the first time in a while to my old Deviantart page. Having created it at the age of 15 and not having posted to it in two years, it was filled with work that I was once really proud of. Going back over the 100+ images that were on there though, I marvelled at how much I've improved since then! I've now deactivated that account, but for nostalgia's sake I'd like to put here the few images from that account that I am still proud of. 

Age 15 - I did a project on Rodin and made 3 sculptures of hands; a

child's hand, an adult's hand and an older person's hand. I then did a series

of etchings of piano keys so that the final piece was both 2D and 3D.

Age 17 - In 2011 I kept a series of sketchbooks and resolved to draw one image every day.

Unlike my current illustrated journal, these images were mostly from my imagination.

Age 17 - Another page from my 2011 sketchbook series. This one was drawn at Halloween

and eventually I used it as inspiration for my first year character design university project!

Age 17 - This was the year I really started experimenting in Photoshop.

I titled it 'cozy' and used a 'knitted-jumper' type texture on the image (my first

time using textures!) and I feel very nostalgic looking at it now. 

Age 18 - This I think is my favourite of all of my old drawings. My teacher

at the time was doing a Masters degree in Psychology and she gave each of

us a questionnaire to fill out to help her. I loved the concept 'draw your mind';

it has so many possibilities!

Until next time!

Summer Holidays

Hello all and happy summer holidays! I've been looking back on the year this week and thought I'd share some things with you. Thing number one; I found this photo of me from the day I finished animating. Take a look at tired-but-happy me with my stack of frames!

So tired, but so happy!

Thing number two; the lovely Bethan has posted some more of the backgrounds she coloured for me. Check them out here!

Thing number three; a production test for which I used AfterEffects for the first time ever! A big shout-out to Amber (one of the lovely third years) who helped me work out how AfterEffects works!

Production Test from Julia Young on Vimeo.

Thing number four that I should have mentioned a while ago; I went to see 'The Wind Rises' in London before its official release and my review of it has been published on Skwigly. 

Backgrounds and Collaboration

As some of you may remember from posts past, I have the good fortune to have a wonderful friend and part-time collaborator called Beth. She kindly agreed to take on the task of colouring some of my film backgrounds and now I'm posting them here for you all to see! She took my sketches and made them into something beautiful!

In style, I want to give the film a storybook/fairytale quality and Beth, being of the concept-art-strand of my course and up for the challenge, really delivered!

More Character Work

Well, upon finishing my pre-production image I had 113 pages of work, some of which I've shared with you already, and I have some here too. It's not all of them, but I hope you enjoy these highlights.

A couple more promotional images/colour storyboards; these give you a feel of what the film will look like when it's finished.

I have shared with you plenty of drawings of mice but not too many of the bird. First of all, some studies:

And now coloured action sheets!

Finals

This graphic will be adapted into the title slide of the film. As it stands, it makes a promotional/teaser poster! Thank you to all those who gave me feedback on it, you know who you are! Also, here are some action sheets:

Story

This week was very exciting as. with the help of my coursemates, I finally have a title for my film! It's called 'A Midnight Tale' and to celebrate I will share with you the premise of the story. As we're limited to making a 90 second film, it ends on a 'to be continued' note, even though I had the whole story scripted and conceptualised. Hopefully it will leave you wanting to know what happens next!

I also finalised the designs of my characters this week. Here are their expression sheets: