At the end of last year I completed some illustration work for Dungeons & Dragons’ latest ‘The Player’s Strategy Guide‘. As it’s been published now, I’m allowed to show the stuff I did for it. The book is full of incredible work by other artists too, so it’s a huge honour to be sharing page space with them. By the way, you can view the entire gallery of art from the book if you’re a subscriber to D&D Insider.
As over the years I’ve become quite comfortable illustrating with vector I mostly used Flash for my illustration work. Since discovering ToonBoom in 2007 however, it has become my new illustration tool of choice, so I used Animate Pro for these images.
Been playing around with some non-conventional fire treatment, for a cross between reality and fantasy. This is a seamless cycle (update: right-click the play button and turn Looping on – thanks andyland21) and will soon be for sale as an image sequence or Toonboom Animate Pro 2 .tpl
This caustic refraction effect is something I’ve always wanted to do in 2D. In Waterlollies and Dashkin, you’ll see where I’ve tried to use it on rocks, cave walls and even on the Auld Sage, but in Flash it’s hard to get it looking realistic. While my latest attempt (below) still involves quite a bit of drawing and FX experience to work well, the realism in the final treatment is thanks to some handy effect modules in Toonboom Animate Pro 2.
Here is a page dedicated to the effect that will soon be for sale in my store.
I’m not going to apologise for being inactive because that’s how I’ve opened so many blog posts, it’s getting old. The fact is that with micro-blogging (Twitter) sucking all my best thoughts out as they happen, there’s not much left for a full blog article. Besides, there’s only so many times you can say “still overloaded with freelance stuff but have big plans for Brackenwood”, before it sounds like lies.. especially with nothing to show for these big Brackenwood plans.
Flash or ToonBoom?
So what have I been up to all this time? I mean, it’s been almost two years since the release of Waterlollies. Soon after that, besotted with ToonBoom, some may recall that I announced that I may not do another Flash Brackenwood.
I admit now that’s something I didn’t really think about before saying. If I had thought about it, I’d have realised that Flash is where the Brackenwood audience is, particularly thanks to Newgrounds. If I completely abandoned Flash in favour of ToonBoom, I’d be alienating my biggest audience, the .swf audience. My YouTube channel just doesn’t give Brackenwood the same exposure as Newgrounds. Here are the figures at last count:
Having said that, if the Brackenwood feature film is 2D and I have any control over how it’s done, it’ll be ToonBoom all the way. As you can see with the D&D shorts, ToonBoom gives me so much freedom to do the stuff I’ve always wanted to do, whereas Flash is very limiting.
New Brackenwood started
OK here’s the announcement then. I’m currently working on a new Brackenwood movie for Newgrounds, which means I’m using Flash. Unfortunately Flash CS4 refuses to co-operate so I’m using Flash CS3. Without giving anything away about the story, let’s just say that it’ll answer a lot of questions. Questions about what? You’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime I’ll be posting screenshots and timelapse screen captures, thanks to Camtasia Studio (techsmith.com).
The reason I’m making all these promises now is to force myself to get the job finished. I always work better to a deadline that I’ve announced, because the pressure of audience anticipation lights a fire under me. For the release, I’ve set a tentative date for the first week of November (2 year anniversary of Waterlollies). It absolutely must get done by then.. so email me your encouragement and impatience
Screenshots next week! Promise. For now though, here’s something I found while going through some old backup hard drives. It’s a scene test from the Yuyu, containing rough animation. Enjoy!
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