Animation Apprentice

Apologies to anyone who has tried to visit the site over the last couple of weeks - we’ve been changing servers and it all went do-lally. But everything should be back up and running now - if there are any issues, please let me know in the comments below.

Meanwhile, here’s a sock monster I made. His name is Mr Antrobus. Thanks to the lovely Nicky, who last night over a few shandies introduced a whole table of girls to the joy of socks.

WIP of a painting for Sarah and Aaron. Thanks for the commission, guys! Click here for a larger version.

This is the finished product! See here  for information on the recipe and a before photo. I would have posted this last night - but after eating a huge plate with really creamy mash potato and quite a bit of red wine, I could barely move, let alone post.

My plan this evening for the first thing-a day is to turn all this into this…

It may be a bit of a cheat, as I was planning to do this anyway - I’ve got some friends coming over for dinner. But I’ve never made the recipe before. It’s from the awesome SBS cooking show Food Safari - every episode, the host goes to the houses of Australians of a particular heritage - say one week to Italian Australians, or Lebanese, or Japanese Australians, and gets them to cook their traditional dishes, then eats them and makes yummy noises. The videos of all the recipes are online - watching them is addictive. I got the braising beef steak from this butcher shop in Holborn - it’s convenient because it’s on my way to work, but it’s also a pretty special butcher shop - their napoli sausages alone are absolutely delicious. As for the recipe - I’ve sealed the meat and prepped all the veggies - it’s ready to start cooking as soon as I get back from work. Then I too will hopefully be making yummy noises….

This year, I am planning on doing lots of things. So for the month of February I have signed up to thing a day, to kick start my blogging for one, and to get me doing lots of stuff (including animation) and getting better at it. So some of these posts might not be strictly animation related - but never mind. Thanks to Iain for the heads up on this one…

Three life drawing sessions, three different results. The first two sessions were with Meetup, the last was at Uli Meyer’s studio (thank for inviting me, AnneMarie!). It’s been a while since I dedicated any time to life drawing, so the first time was more of an ease-back-in. The second was ostensibly a Betty Page burlesque meetup. It ended up more like an S & M session, in a plate-glass fronted art gallery right next door to the islamic community centre. I love London.

The last session was an exhilarating 2 hours, filled with very fast poses. I tried using a brush pen again, and a grey marker. Unfortunately the brand new marker ran out half way through the evening - but I really like the way the short poses and the brush pen forced me to be a lot more decisive about what I put on paper. I shall have to experiment more.

More pictures from the sessions here…

I finally managed to watch The Pearce Sisters at the London International Animation Festival this evening (amongst other things). This is the new short by Aardman, from a story by Mick Jackson. Anyone who’s read Mick’s excellent book of short stories Ten Sorry Tales will know that The Pearce Sisters is just one of several beautiful/gruesome/eerie stories, all of which would make wonderful animations. So kudos to Mick, and here’s to seeing more of your prose in animated form.

And please go to the LIAF if you are in London. The 15 shorts we saw tonight were (for the most part) excellent, and all wildly different (apart from the Supinfocom stuff, which all starts to look a bit same-y. Wonderful, but same-y)

A bit of a break I know. Sorry about that. I’m trying to get back into the life drawing - here’s a collection from the last two sessions, at Wapping on Saturday and today at El Paso on Old Street. It took a while to get back into it, but I’m really enjoying it again.