Just recently, me and my fiancee watched “Coraline”, the movie, together. In case you didn’t know – it was directed and written by Henry Selick, a director who worked with Tim Burton on such classics like “Nightmare Before Christmas” or “Corpse Bride”. It is based on a novel by Neil Garman and kept in a surreal, Burton-ish style of animation. The story is basically about a girl who thinks her life sucks, finds a magical door to the Other World made with dolls that look like her parents and friends, except that everything is just too perfect. Until the day that Coraline is asked to put the buttons instead of her eyes to stay forever. She refuses and everything turns into a nightmare. Very scary nightmare.
After watching Coraline, I felt so inspired by the animation and how everything looks in that movie that I decided to do a quick recap of Burton/Selick combo most known animated classics and keep it in case I needed some illustration inspiration. Now, I’m sharing this collection with you, have fun!
Continue reading ‘Inspiration: Tim Burton and Henry Selick’
Published on
March 17, 2009 in
Daily;
As promised, the mini-tutorial / reference about how my blog’s mascot, the cute robot I-404 a.k.a. “Eye” was born. If you’re looking for detailed tutorial about how to do digital painting of a robot like I-404, you might not find everything you would like to see here, because I won’t cover the whole process in details, but I’ll show you my workflow and how everything was put together.
Small disclaimer, before we start — I’m also a beginning illustrator, I mean, I always drawn something on paper, but just recently I started to digitalize my works, so if you’re a illustrator with experience and want to give me some tips on how to improve my workflow or the tools I use, feel free to drop me a line in the comments. Thanks in advance!
Grasp the idea
The idea behind I-404 was simply getting a mascot for the site, just to put some more life than just plain text in it. The I-404 is the robot which tells you when you gone wrong way on my blog and allows you to go back where you were before or suggests you the different exit. I-404 is currently visible only on the ‘File not found’ page, but I hope to incorporate him here and there in my blog’s layout so you can get familiar with him.
I wanted it to be a robot, because I simply love robots. I love the whole idea of anthropomorphic androids that will be dedicated to help people where they can’t help themselves. As a kid I watched Star Wars and Stargate with my father, who’s a science-fiction geek since when I remember. As a teenager I read enough S-F novels by P. K. Dick, S. Lem etc. not to b influenced by futuristic visions of androids. Also, robots have become a big part of popculture around us and we can’t help it. That’s why I decided a robot will be an icon of my site.
Continue reading ‘Tutorial: How “Eye” was born’
I’m happy to inform that my blog, following the properly done pages trend, has now a nice, creative (I hope), user-friendly (I hope) ‘file not found’ page instead of basic, plain Wordpress plus K2 404 page. It also features my new mascot, I-404 (alias “Eye”), who will be popping here and there on the blog as an official mascot of the blog. Took me few long hours to draw him, but I’m quite satisfied with the result.
In next few days I’ll try to post illustrated tutorial on how Eye was born, what were the basic inspirations and what are the steps to draw your own, unique, illustrated mascot using any bitmap editor of your choice (Eye has been born as a regular pencil drawing and then was 100% ‘digital painted’ using a tablet, no illustrations or vectors used, which probably can be seen at a first glance)
Hope you like the new 404!
