Helen McCarthy: A Brief History on Manga& Anime

So today I attended a lecture on a brief history of manga & anime. It was highly interesting learning everything about the art that is manga and discovering some unknown facts about the industry. Helen McCarthy was a wonderful lecturer, she was very kind and had a cracking sense of humour. She gave me advice on getting into the manga & anime industry (if I was ever to do so) and she said the key to being successful is to have a brilliant show reel AND portfolio. With those two you can't go wrong according to her words. She even advised I one day visit Japan to become more involved in the country's culture.

It's worth thinking about...if I had the money to travel there!

Work In Progress: Costumes

Playing around with alternative costume designs. Unfortunately these won't go into my show reel as I feel it would ruin the quality of my work, so I'll show them here and maybe on my website.

A little programme called Alchemy...

I just realised I have very rough sketches drawn in the software Alchemy. The results are quite amazing, I never knew such a programme existed. It was incredibly helpful with clothing design for my characters in terms of drawing everything equally without one side being less even than the other.

Threadless T-Shirt Design

Over at Threadless.com I have designed a cute little character named "Little Soapy Fro" for one of the many challenges hosted by the website. By submitting my design I'm promoting my work thus gaining it a bit more publicity. Here is the shirt design below:

Here is the original artwork for it, since then has been slightly changed:

The contest remains in voting stage as of now and will take a while until I hear the results. The prizes include:

• $2,000 donated to the school of your or your kid collaborator's choice!
• $500 Threadless Gift Certificate (can be redeemed for $200 cash)
• $2,000 in cash from Threadless! 

Very impressive I must say.

Work in progress once again...

More Work In Progress...

Work in progress of the younger protagonist of my game concept. I've figured out a new painting style to give my characters more personality. Plus I've been aiming to perfect backgrounds so they aren't so dull. I plan to paint each background of my character portraits like this. A certain colour defines their theme as an individual, for example this one's theme is lilac/purple and makes her recognizable from the main protagonist.

Work In Progress: Simply Magical

Featuring a close up on the younger protagonist's hand casting a spell and her performing a summoning trick.