502 - Chelsea Blecha

Chelsea Blecha is an illustrator and VisDev artist. What first drew me to her was her shopfront series:

I really like her use of colour and her loose brushwork. Similarly to the previous 2 artists, she has a Q&A section of her instagram. These are the ones that spoke out to me the most:

I really like the advice she gave here, and her thoughts on how to self study gives me something to work on. All of the different study methods she gave are things I want to do and will use to improve my skills over summer.

502 - Abigail Whitnall

Abigail Whitnall is a prop designer working at Ritzy Animation. I found her through Ritzy Animation's instagram, in which they had an "artist takeover" where in this case Abigail took us through a day in the life of a prop designer working at Rtizy. I found it really interesting to see what she does in a day and the behind the scenes of a studio (albeit working remotely due to covid). As part of this, she also did a Q&A afterwards where I asked this question:

Abigail is a recent graudate from Bournemouth so I was quite curious how she got her job, plus I find it interesting hearing about other people's experiences. Here is a link to her portfolio which she talks about: 

https://www.whalbi.co.uk/prop-design 

It's really useful to me to see other people's portfolios for both the standard of work required as well as what people are putting in them and how they are laying them out.

In addition to this, I found this question and this tip very useful:

My takeaways:

• Make a great portfolio - really dedicate time to making it the best it can be and work on projects outside of uni to help enhance it. Currently I don't think my work is that great but I think I should still make a temporary one as a base to then improve from.
• Networking is something that terrifies me and I am horrendous at anything social, therefore finding out that she got the job from just applying online (rather than how most people get it from knowing other people or being reccommended it) settles some of my anxieties
• Designers are constantly revising their works - the first version isn't the final one
• The 80/20 rule is something I should apply to my own work as I love the effect it gives 
• I should try out prop design

502 - Nik Henderson

Nik Henderson is a freelance illustrator who works primarily in children's books and animation. I found his work through instagram and was drawn to his unique style:

The texture combined with the neutral and often overlaying colours really appeal to me, and I love how despite being very flat (a stylistic choice) the believability of the world is still there. On his instagram he has done some Q&A's, here are the ones that affected me the most:

I've found that a lot of the artists I follow will do or have done some instagram Q&A's, and I always find some very useful information.

My takeaways:

• Schoolism and Domestika keep popping up as great, affordable online resources to learn more of the technical skills/foundations, and in my free time I really should do some of these.
• I've been focusing too much on my technical skills! Part of the reason I love environments is how you can be incredibly imaginative with the worlds you put the characters in, but I've told myself that that can come later once I've become better at the actual painting and the foundations. However allowing myself to get imaginative would not only benefit the appeal of my backgrounds, but would give me more motivation to do them as I would enjoy it more (and hopefully that will show in the outcome)
• I should experiment with making my own textures and brushes

502 - Devin Elle Kurtz - BG Art Series

Devin is a BG painter working predominantly in the American 2D TV animation industry. She is most known for being the lead BG painter on Disenchantment, and her instagram is full of amazing advice on BG painting. During last summer, she did a 3 part livestream all around BG's which I attended, and found insanely helpful. 

The first part consisted of a presentation covering the basics - what different types of BG work there are, the different pipelines, skills required, portfolio tips, how to tackle BG's despite them being daunting and finally a BG paint demo of a scene. This contained a wealth of information that I found incredibly useful, especially as BG paint is currently the area I want to go into.

Here is the link to the presentation video and the actual slides:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4s2aIAKZ6s&t=1s&ab_channel=DevinElleKurtz 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-57RCbndRB5BiyjYiA6ayH_Lg5VCsmuFK-BtEkXwuao/edit#slide=id.p 

The 2nd part was a "BG Art Roundtable Discussion", featuring artists working in the industry. Here, they basically sat, talked about their own journeys and a bit about themselves and then answered quesitons related to BG Art. This was an amazing resource that I will come back to a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRqGK0XsuSk&t=1s&ab_channel=DevinElleKurtz

The final part was a live portfolio review. This session wasn't recorded but luckily I was able to watch it live. It was really beneficial and educational for me to see both the standard of other people looking to get into the industry's work, as well as the advice and critiques given by actual professionals.

Here are the notes I took over the 3 sessions:

Two things I found really interesting is that the advice to show less but stronger work in your portfolio, and that it is completely OK to have under 10 pieces was given by both Angela Sung as well as Devin. The same goes with the advice to include pieces that show a variation in time of day, therefore I'll make sure to heed both of these tips when I make my own portfolio.

502 - Isobel Stenhouse

As part of the uni's Visiting Professionals series, we had Isobel Stenhouse come on and talk to us about her life in the industry and advice for graduates. Here are some things I really liked and took away from the talk:

• Everyone's journey is different, and sometimes it's good to try out things you wouldn't normally do. Isobel herself ended up going more into the production side of things before moving back to the more creative area with trying out concept art
• She strongly suggests online courses to improve your technical skills. There are plenty of courses on Domestika, Schoolism and currently she is doing a concept art course at Escape Studios.
• She recommends looking for professional mentorships as people are always willing to help others out in the industry. Sites such as Festivus and AccessVFX are good for this
• Knowing people and making them aware of your goals is a good idea, as she wouldn't have gotten the concept art job if her director friend wasn't aware that she wanted to go into a more creative job

502 - Amanda Holm

During the career's week, Kahenya wanted to contact more industry professionals and see if any were up for giving a talk to our class. One of the ones he managed to get was Amanda Holm, an animator at The Line in London. It was amazing that we were able to sit down and listen for several hours, and I learnt a lot. Here are the notes I took from the talk:

One of the things I found very inspiring about Amanda's own journey was the fact that after graduating from The Animation Workshop, she moved straight to London and freelanced for 2 years before getting a job at The Line. To help with actually getting work, she contacted loads of studios, just asking to look around and chat in order to make some contacts. This sounds terrifying to me but it also shows me how it's ok to do something like this, and how it actually works. She also stressed the importance of just emailing people and asking for feedback or showing your availability to work.

This talk was also really great for shedding some more insider knowledge of the London animation scene, and how everyone really does know everyone. 

Finally, similarly to Angela, Amanda talked about how moving up in the hierarchy to roles like art director isn't for her due to how less creative they are. This really made me think about what my own goals are for the future - currently I dont know yet, it's something I need to research more.

502 - Angela Sung

Angela Sung came to the uni to do a talk with the concept art and animation course. She's a BG painter, BG designer and art director who has worked mainly within the american TV animation industry, and is someone I've followed for a while so this talk was amazing for me. Here are a collection of notes from the talk and subsequent questions:

I found this talk incredibly useful. It gave a lot of insight into what it's like working in the TV animation industry in America, and a lot of the advice was applicable to any animation industry as well. It was also great to hear about Angela's own journey - I really enjoy hearing about different professional's journeys as they are always so different, however the main takeaway is to put myself out there and make my own oppurtunities.

It was also interesting hearing more about the art direction role, and finding out that despite it being a higher position in the hierarchy, it is less art based and almost more production oriented.

There were also some great portfolio tips, and this talk made me realise how important it is I do more practice, focusing on fundamentals and worrying less about style.

I really love Angela's work, so I will probably try and contact her to ask more specific, skills based questions, probably about her use of colour and the vibrancy she achieves in all her paintings.

504 - Initial Ideas

For this project I am working in a group with Ducky and Luke. We each went and researched the briefs initally to select ones that we would be interested in, and narrowed it down to either the giffgaff brief or the Audible one, however we ended up choosing the giffgaff one as it was tailored more towards animation.

From there, we had a meeting to discuss ideas:

(Luke's work)

Luke pitched us this idea, and both me and Ducky thought it was great and fit the brief's criteria well. Here was some of the constructive feedback I gave:

• Part of the brief requied us to use the catchphrase "Recylce your old phone. Get some cash in your poecket. Cha-ching." and that was missing from the idea. I suggested either replacing the end "CHA CHING" with the full catchphrase or having it at the start.
• The idea is split into 3 different visual styles, therefore I suggested to have the styles merge into each other a bit more to avoid it becoming too jarring. I suggested doing this by having the different visual styles being the main aesthetic of that scene, however they should still feature other medias. For example the stop motion scene could feature giffgaff's iconic doodles rather than be solely stop motion
• Finally, part of the brief required us to show the sustainability angle of the process, which wasn't really included in this idea either. I pitched this idea to the group for that side of things:

The group liked this, so I suggested that we could have this at the start, and to tie it in to the rest of the advert we could make this be something that the character is watching on the screen, essentially an advert within an advert.

In the brief, it says that the advert should be 20 seconds long. We have a lot of information with this idea so I'm worried it will be hard to condense it  to this duration. I suggested having 5 seconds for my advert section, and then 15 seconds for the main part of it.

Part of the reason we really like Luke's idea is because it splits the workload nicely: Luke will be animating the hand-drawn scenes, Ducky will do the stop motion ones and I will do the after effects ones. In addition to this, Luke will be the director, Ducky the producer and me the editor/compositor.

The next steps:

• Ducky will be putting together the moodboard of both giffgaff and our inspirations, as well as compiling the pitch presentation slides
• Luke will be creating an animatic for the 15 second section of the ad, as well as doing a style test for one of the scene's he will be doing
• I will be creating an animatic for the 5 section section of the ad, as well as doing a style test for that

We will then need to get together and practice our pitch.

502 - Finances and Developing Freelance Rates

Both sessions covering freelance have been extremely useful to me, both about knowing my worth and understanding the process of it. It's helped me a lot with my confidence about it.

Using the spreadsheet provided by Mike, my required income is £8,504. After calculating cost of a new computer, art materials and one-off purchases, my total amount that I could live comfortably off is £12,854. Assuming I work for 30 weeks in a year in 5 day weeks, my minimum daily rate required to achieve this amount would be £86. Assuming I work 7 hours a day, the minimum wage for a day would actually be £87.50, therefore £86 is an absolute minimum. 

I worked out that to earn 20k (pre-taxes), a daily rate of £133.33 would be required, therefore for me I think setting my daily rate anywhere between £120-£150 would be a good range.

502 - Winter Tree House Challenge

I have had a lot of difficulty finding competitions for background painting/design, but one I have found is by an artist I follow on instagram (Ekaterina Boguslavskaya) to design a winter tree house. Here's the challenge:

I thought this would be a good challenge to use to try out a process I've been wanting to experiment with more for a while, which is to do the drawing traditionally using pencil and charcoal, scan it in and then colour it digitally. I started by doing some digital thumbnail sketches of my ideas, using this pinterest board for inspiration and referenes:

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/eaglefour444/winter-tree-house/

I really liked the idea of having the house embedded into the tree canopy, and ended up settling on the bottom right version. There was something about the playfulness of scale with this that I really enjoyed, and the house peeking out on the left gives me an oppurtunity to create a raggedy, wonky looking building akin to boxtrolls. From here, I did a couple of sketches of the house, getting a feel for drawing on paper and how best to use my tools:

I used the art of boxtrolls book as a big inspiration for the house, and I found that style translated to pencil really well. For the trees, I tried shading with a blending stump but I wasn't sure about the smoothness of the look. I also decided to add some smoke to give the background more life. From here, I then drew the full background and scanned it in:

I'm really happy with how this looks, the scale of it really appeals to me and I feel the pencil shading brings enough contrast and thus focus to the right areas. Also, I feel it looks a lot better scanned than the original, as it mutes the colour of the pencil a bit whilst increasing it's contrast. I then coloured the drawing, to give the final image:

I wanted to go for a muted, evening look and wanted to avoid making the image too white despite the snow. This would allow the lights in the houses to really stand out, and also separate the smoke from the snow. I'm really happy with this overall, and I definitely want to practice more tradigital art. I still badly need to practice my drawing and composition skills.

--- Edit ---

I didn't end up winning the contest but I did get a feature on the artist's story, and this post ended up getting more reach because of that:

502 - Copyright

I found this seminar very useful for clarifying copyright, as it was something I knew about but not in enough detail. The seminar made me realise I need to be much more aware of copyright laws for both my own work as well as using others, especially with sounds from royalty free sites as I need to do better at crediting them.

Reviewing my work I've realised that I've made no steps towards protecting my own work. I think I won't do anything on my instagram as the compression results in the images being very low quality, however when I update my website I am going to add a copyright label to it as that features much higher quality images. In addition to this, if there are any works that I am particularly proud of I may add a signature or copyright label on the image itself, just to make it that little bit harder to steal.

Career's Fortnight - Animation Industry

This talk was amazing as it contained so much insider information that applied directly to us. I'm aware that this was from the perspective of Brown Bag films, however a lot of the information given was similar to my own research done about the tv animation industry. 

Again, I made several pages of notes so I'm not going to list it all here, but essentially the talk cleared up a lot about what happens at a studio, what routes you can take to break into the industry as well as what recruiters are looking for. I think one thing I really need to work on is to improve my speed at painting and creating backgrounds, as that is valued very highly in the industry.

Career's Fortnight - Graduate to Freelance, Creating Oppurtunities for Creatives and Networking Skills

Graduate to Freelance:

This webinar was about Ben Waddleton's experience after graduating and becoming a freelancer with his own studio. It was really interesting to learn in depth about his journey, and the main things I've taken away from it is to just get my work out there much more, even if I don't think it's that great, as well as not be afraid to learn by making mistakes. It's also quite normal to learn on the job rather than know everything before getting one. A final tip was to make connections with your clients more than just with the business side of things, as if they remember and enjoyed working with you they're more likely to reccomend you to others.

Creating Oppurtunities for Creatives:

I feel like this talk was more catered for general artists than artists wanting to go into a specific industry, however there were still some tips that I found useful. These ones being:

• it's not a linear path, it's ok to not become something straight out of uni
• most creative jobs aren't advertised, you have to snuff them out yourselves by just talking to people and approaching companies yourself
• sometimes to help you you can reach out to non profit companies for extra work experience or connections

Networking Skills:

Despite this webinar I still find the idea of networking and talking to people terrifying, however it included some useful tips:

• try to be interested rather than interesting, it'll make them more likely to remember you
• be your authentic self, if you don't know something just be honest and even better, ask them about it
• most people value helping others, as long as your request is respectful
• ask open questions
• try and follow up on your connections. One way of doing this is to ask them about their work

Career's Fortnight - Your CV

This webinar was incredibly useful and contained so much information. My notes are several pages long, but essentially the main tips I took from this in creating my cv is to keep it very concise and easy to read, as reviewers only take about 7 seconds to look at them, and also to not be cliche. If I want to write that I'm good at teamwork for example, instead of just listing that, I should give an example of something that shows I'm good at it.

It also settled some of my anxieties a bit as they talked about how if you don't have much work experience, you can structure your cv to feature the eductation and skills first which brings more attention to that.

I think the next step for me is to start compiling a list of everything I've done that I think could feature in my CV.

Career's Fortnight - Personal Branding

This webinar was very useful to me as it pointed out how important my image is on social media, and highlighted that I really need to improve my social media presence. I've always found social media hard, both in terms of uploading my own work as well as with talking to others, however having a strong social media profile in this industry is extremely useful and almost necessary.

After this talk, I realised that I needed to do a few things. Firstly, instagram is pretty much my sole social media app, therefore I need to update it to have a bio as well as a drawn profile picture. I also need to upload more, and more frequently to it. Here is the bio that I added:

I find things like this really hard as I tend to overthink everything, but I looked at other artists and they mainly included what they do, where they've previously worked as well as a bit about them. 

I previously had a illustrated profile picture however I really don't like it anymore and didn't think it was fitting to represent me, therefore I just changed it to a photo of me till I create a new illustrated one.

In addition to this, I want to update my website with more recent work and a portfolio, and then link it in my instagram bio. I also want to create a linkedin as both this webinar and later ones talk about the importance of a good linkedin profile, and finally I may give twitter another go even though I find it confusing and scary.