From the sketchbook, a Pterosaur head study drawn by.. er… accident. I made a post somewhere about ‘listening to the scientist‘ didn’t I?
Feilongus youngi: Oops.
1
Recently rejected diagram for scientific paper..
Really, I don’t know what the problem is?
A Great Illustrator passes..
The name Dan Varner is probably not well known outside of those who enjoy wildlife and reconstructive illustration. I’ve enjoyed his illustrations of prehistoric sea life for many years and admired his ability to approach the photoreal but maintain the beautiful qualities of paint.
Tylosaurus proriger by Dan Varner
Sadly Dan has passed on after a battle with disease, for those of us who know his art his fantastic contributions will be sorely missed.
2011: Year of the Prehistoric Kitteh
With 2011 behind us, and in the tradition of self absorbed internet navel gazing, I thought I’d pass on how this little blog is doing.
Thumbs up From king Iguanodon!
Optimistic Painter started back in 2009 with the ‘optimistic’ aspiration that it would help me get my painting trousers on and get brush wiggling, since then it’s grown beyond any expectation, with 18000 people going through the turnstiles this year!
Why oh why did they come? Well, it’d be a mystery to me too but WordPress give some nice stats that might help! To start, top searches for 2011 were for, I kid you not, “Creepy Forests”!
A little project I did for Stefan Le Mottee as a background in a short film. The other top search was quite unexpected, especially as I can’t even type it without checking the spelling. It was Quetzalcoatlus, with the ‘Big bird Goes Postal’ illustration proving pretty popular.
Of course these may have been the top searches for 2011, but they were far from the post with the most hits. Back in June Dave Orr of Love in the time of Chasmosaurus and I were discussing Dinosaur TV Tropes with the possibility of doing some posts together. Just for fun I haphazardly collaged together a little gag cartoon. Dave ordered me to immediately post it in my blog for the betterment of all humankind… or er, mostly frustrated scientists and paleo-nerds.
A minor…er, very minor, internet meme was born! Kitteh garnered more hits in a single day that OPB usually got in a month! Since then the adventures of Kitteh have continued to be popular so I’ve kept chopping up bits of photos haphazardly to make new ones, who am I to argue with the public!
2011 continued the paleo themed illustrations with the above mentioned Quetzalcoatlus and a painting I wanted to make ever since I’d done the ‘official’ scavenging Tarbosaur back in 2010 for Dave Hone.
2011 was also the year of my clients being kind and allowing me to post about some of the other projects I’ve been involved in. So thanks to all for putting up with me asking “Is it ok if I blog this?”
I’d better wrap this up. 2012 is already shaping up to be interesting, with at least two ‘official’ paleo illustrations slated thanks to Dave Hone (watch out for ‘cute fuzzy death from above’!) and more freelance work and non paleo illustration on the way.
So thanks for watching, you’ve kept me painting! And have a great new year!
Matt
Animated Mr. McGee narrated by Hugo Weaving!
One of the projects I was involved with earlier this year in house at Blue Rocket Productions was development of an animated version of the Mr. McGee children’s books by Pamela Allen.
To my surprise I found the trailer we’d done online at the Youtube channel of Australian TV producers Blink Freehand, who produced with JDR Screen.
In a star move they enlisted Hugo Weaving to do the narration. To be honest I did do some fairly lame Matrix/McGee jokes around the studio. I’m pretty sure only I was amused.
It really was a team effort with Paul Newell doing character design and Stefan Le Mottee rigging and animating. My job was trying to emulate Pamela Allen’s illustration style and adapt it for animation. So the line work, colours and design of the characters and backgrounds all had to work in motion but still reference the illustrations by Pamela. In the end we all did a bit of everything. The youtube clip compresses the texture work quite a bit, so you’ll have to take my word for it!
This was all then taken and animated beautifully by Stefan Le Mottee with direction by Blue Rocket’s David Gurney.
Kitteh: A Predator Meets His Match!
Here’s the latest Kitteh. I’m finally getting down to the nitty gritty of predator/prey tussles, so many tropes…
For best effect please imagine the narration is read by Kenneth Branagh.(make sure he gets especially tremulous on the last bit)
Animated Idents
I had the pleasure of doing a smattering of smaller animation jobs here and there over the last few months. These have been fun as often they call on a variety of skills and the whole project needs to be put together quickly, so you’re usually with it from start to finish.
The two Idents (essentially moving logos) in this post were produced at Blue Rocket Productions under the direction of David Gurney. David is fun to work with and has a spontaneity that can take projects in fun directions.
The first is for Tasmania’s government funding body for film Screen Tasmania.
The soundtrack in the Screen Tasmania Ident was produced by the talented Nicholas Storr.
The second animation is for The Australian Script Centre. There is no established audio for this one so I grabbed some music from freestockmusic.com/.
Both of these Idents were made using 3DS Max, After Effects and Photoshop.
Little Tip: I really like adding grain to the things I do but find the film grain in After Effects takes far too long to calculate. I’ve found making a grain loop created in Photoshop does the trick, simply overlaid on top of the footage in Multiply mode then adjusting the opacity to taste. For all I know this could be the oldest trick in the book!
Hello Cocky! (extant therapods for the paleo crew)
A little while back during a project at Blue Rocket Productions I was given the job of painting some parrots in the style of a bird book. My usual role at Blue Rocket has been very much the ’3D animator guy’, and though I’ve done some illustration work and concept art there before it was nice to be the ‘go to guy’ for some illustration style painting. I’m pretty sure this blog may have had a little to do with the decision too.
In any case, I didn’t have much time so I knocked these out over a day and a half and had a great deal of fun doing it.
Galah
Major Mitchell Cockatoo
Black Palm Cockatoo
Thanks to Blue Rocket for allowing the use of the images!
Meanwhile, on the Internet….
Annoying things in forums.
Hopefully self explanatory.
The Long Beach: a short animated film
It’s about time I released this film into the wilds of the internet.
Made by the talented Mauricio Milne-Jones and myself in 2006 and based on a short story and script by Helen van Rooijen (good on ya Mum!).
The original short story had no dialogue in it and I wanted to keep it that way to reach a wider audience and allow the narrative to come from the actions of the characters. It seemed more elegant that way.
It’s definitely one to relax and watch with a glass of red, weighing in at almost 12 minutes it’s a long short! While it’s not ‘arty’ by any stretch of the imagination it does ask you to put things together a bit.
It did ok at festivals for a long sentimental film that asks the audience to think a bit, if it were a short punchy comedy it would have done much better!
A big thanks to everyone who contributed, Alicia, Duncan, Matt D, Grace, Nando, Nina, the use of facilities at Blue Rocket Productions (and you David G!). Plus some helpful advice from Adam.
For those to whom like to know these things, made using 3DS Max, Lightwave and a bunch of Adobe products!
Oh, and if you see this broadcast on TV in the USA, let me know, I’d love to know who the distributor is so I can kick their backsides!
