Life Drawing and Anatomy

I still occasionally sketch the kids or people round the house or nearby. Back in the nineties I was very prolific in studying the human form. I sketched from memory, from life, copying artists and copying from photos. I have made realistic, stylised and caricatured portraits of real and fictional people / characters. Here's a selection of a few taken from old sketchbooks.

Grading and Colour Correction

The use of highend compositing software always includes being able to use the inbuilt sophisticated colour correction tools. Many live action composites require sometimes quite dramatic or enhanced colour, contrast and brightness settings. The range of looks and effects are very great and a lot of real atmosphere can be generated.

here are a few selected examples from across a broad range I've worked on at Liquid TV and SquareZero. Click pics to enlarge.

Retouched Models

click for images for higher resolution.

exercise in speed retouching - taking 20 minutes - that is quite slow by professional retoucher standards but I do not have warper plug  ins on my PS - using only Liquify and clone tool etc.

Face 'cleaned up' ie polished smooth and slapped in digital makeup. About half hour's work.

Fashion showcase

I have made some simple Photoshop exercises by seeing how fast I can produce some typical retouching, clean up and showcasing images.

Simple background removal and then removal of the dummy also. About 14 minutes - in high rez.

Removal of dummy and background. Made up back of collar.

Cut out from model and adding of fake inside area around collar area

Parallax Scrolling ( for game or animation backrounds )

Parallax view with complex multiple layers of 2d art. If scrolling / panning left to right, the layers at the back would move slower than the ones nearer the front. In this case the setup is for a zoom through the images not a pan or scroll. You can tell this because the panels are all the same width ( see below )

A simpler depth layout. The background sky would not move at all . The foreground palm trees would pass by soonest. The foreground elements have to be longer than the back ones as when scrolling they move faster past the camera.

This is a four level depth environment I made - the front layer was even longer but I cropped it. the back layer represents the widest camera framing. When layers are moving this scene gets a real feeling of depth. This is a concept for an iPhone game app background - the scrolling backgrounds being relatively easy to program and giving a great sense of depth to the game occurring in the foreground.

Maps, Geology, Geography

I started map making graphics back at Liquid TV in the late 90's - working on Pilot Productions Lonely Planet TV series -  'Globe Trekker', 'Treks in a Wild World' and others. I also made many maps combined with geology and geography for energy/oil and gas exploration visuals at Myriad Global Media and Western Geco.

animated + composited maps for Pilot Productions Globe Trekker series

Locator for Texas -Pilot Productions

Europe in 1939

Beko Olympic bid

3d geology formations

Oil site locations - global zooms

3d maps simplified

3d map locator

Udan Emas - oil and gas exploration project film .  Watch this animation here

Kris Energy

fully 3d rendered maps

Lengo bridge locator maps

3d map / site layouts  many more of these here.

USA States locator for Alabama

still from a China locator on global planet orbit and zoom

architectural visualisation

pic in pic maps with explainer 3d animation

terrain map with 3d elements

Tullow Oil - illustration maps for printed book project..

illustrated isometric maps

illustrated isometric map

 

some maps made for RPG games...

fantasy map 

fantasy town

hand drawn map for local event

Selected Composites

Over my career I have composited a huge range of media - mixing everything and anything up - all sorts of artwork,  chromakey, CGI, particle effects, photographs. I've comped titles, virals, films and promos. I've preferred node based software - having been a user of Avid's Illusion . For many years after I used Shake, getting to an advanced level making massive node trees. Now that even Shake is dying off I learned Nuke a year ago and getting myself up to speed on that has been fun. Here's a selection of bits I've comped.

2023 Tourism Australia - DOOH

2023 Indigo DOOH

2024  DOOH screen commercial

Speedo hologram event film

Mazda TVC

BBC  I Caesar - docu-series recreations/ animated matte paintings

BBC idents 'Science You Cant See'

Martini hologram vfx, 3d , comp

Industrial Salt pop promo