Andy Council

Andy Council is an illustrator and graffiti artist from the UK born in 1974. He was born in the Georgian city of Bath, Andy Council and now lives in nearby Bristol where he loves the creative vibe. His work is full of urban detail and he’s drawn everything from huge cutaway diagrams of cityscapes through to dinosaurs made from streets and houses.Dinosaurs combined with architecture are a common theme of his designs.

Andy studied animation at Bournemouth Art College, and has diverted many of the skills he learned towards illustration.

Drawing is at the heart of Andy’s work, which combines physical and digital imagery. His drawings are scanned in, and colour is added using a computer.Recently, he has begun exploring with more natural media – acrylics, inks and spray paint. Street art and graffiti are important influences for him.

His studio is part of an active library In Bristol. They have the large old bindery section out of the back. It is a crumbling Victorian building with lots of interesting rooms in that they use to store work. Along with the Librarians who work there Ihe shares it with several other Street Artists. It is one of his favourite places to be and he will be very upset when it eventually gets knocked down and turned in to flats.

Here are a few of his designs:

And you can find him here –>http://www.andycouncil.co.uk/

What are 2D and 3D Animation?

2D animation focuses on creating characters, storyboards, and backgrounds in two-dimensional environments. Often thought of as traditional animation it creates movement in a two-dimensional artistic space. Work in the field of 2D animation requires both creativity and technological skills.

3D animation is the process of generating three-dimensional moving images in a digital environment. Careful manipulation of 3D models or objects is carried out within 3D software for exporting picture sequences giving them the illusion of animation or movement. However, this is completely based on the technique used for manipulating the objects. The procedure of generating 3D is sequentially categorized into three main sections and these are modeling, layout and animation and rendering. Modeling is the phase that describes the procedure of generating 3D objects within a certain scene. Layout and animation phase describes the process followed for positioning and animating the objects within a certain scene. Lastly, rendering described the end result or output of completed computer graphics. The process of production is successfully completed with the careful combination of the sections mentioned above and also some other sub-sections.

 

The easiest way to explain the difference is by using examples of animation that you might have seen.I will be using examples from Disney and Dreamworks since they’re the most know animation companies on the West.

Snow white, Cinderella, The little mermaid and the Junglebook are animated movies that use 2D animation; Zootopia, The Incredibles, How to train your dragon and Toy Story use 3D animation.

3D animation is also used as special effects on live action movies ( the dinasaurs from Jurassic Park and the Robots from Tranformers, for example).

 

Tumblr artists (general overview)

Many illustrators can be found on Tumblr ; some who share fanart and their drawings freely, some who take comissions for their work and the ones still learning who share hoping for their work to be constructively criticized. Comics, fanart, illustrations that are made from scratch and eveything in between can be found if you know where to look.

From the ones who take comissions, prices vary depending on who they are and what you want ( lineart, doodle, simple coloring, the level of shading, complicated/smple bakground, how many characters despicted…) .

I won’t showcase their works here because most do not like their artwork reposted without permission or at all, so i’ll talk a litle about a few of them and give you links!

Of course, I can’t talk about every single artist on the site, that would take years but here are a few of them that I follow :

Mars (smokeplanet) is a comic book artist. Their comic Long exposure (http://longexposurecomic.com/) is currently on-going . They sell merch about the comic and the comic itself – when the chapter ends and can be printed – .

Blinddetermination is also a comic book artist (http://blinddetermination.tumblr.com/) but instead of it being her/his own charaters, he/she has a fan comic.

Phobs (http://phobso.tumblr.com/)  is an amazing artist. Her digital art and sketches are incredible.She’s also a comic book artist.

RegectedPrincesses (http://rejectedprincesses.tumblr.com/ is her tumblr  and this http://www.rejectedprincesses.com/ is her site) is an illustrator who illustrates ‘Women too Awesome, Awful, or Offbeat for Kids’ Movies’. Historical figures, myths and some from literature, thoug most of them are historical. She has already published a book and is on her way to her second one. She reacherses the history and crossreferences this women and then illustrates their story.

These are just a few of the artists that can be found. Most artists from tumblr have a Patreon where their followers can donate to help them keep it goin, or to pa for comissions.Some have printed works you can buy too.

 

Joe Mcnally – photographer

Joe Mcnally is an American photographer who was born in Montclair, New Jersey. He is currently based out of New York City and resides in Ridgefield, Connecticut.He has been shooting for the National Geographic Society since 1987. (He’s in the picture above)

He received his bachelor’s and graduate degrees from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. From 1994 until 1998 Joe McNally was LIFE magazine’s staff photographer, the first one in 23 years. His most well known series is the “Faces of Ground Zero — Portraits of the Heroes of September 11th”, a collection of 246 giant Polaroid portraits shot in the Moby C Studio near Ground Zero in a three-week period shortly after 9/11. A large group of these life-size (9′ x 4′) photos were exhibited in seven cities in 2002, seen by almost a million people. The exhibit and the book, printed by LIFE, helped raise approximately $2 million for the 9/11-relief effort.

He has shot cover stories for Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, Geo, Fortune, New York, Business Week, LIFE and Men’s Journal, among others. McNally’s advertising, marketing and promotional work includes FedEx, Nikon, Sony, Land’s End, General Electric, MetLife, Bogen, Adidas, Kelby Media Group, Wildlife Conservation Society, Epson, and American Ballet Theatre.

He has also written , so far, three books about photography :

• The Moment It Clicks (2008)
• The Hotshoe Diaries (2009)
• Sketching Light (2011)

He’s known for heavy usage of CLS and Speedlight. Here are a few of his pictures that I personally like  (mostly his portraits, honestly)  :

You can find him here –>>https://portfolio.joemcnally.com/index/G0000uB0VEgMG_LI/I0000kdtsvA7fm4o

 

Invisible Cities Project (photoshop) – Report

Student: Sara Isabel Belinha Pereira

Professor:Daniel Pedrosa

Santa Maria de Lamas, 15 December 2017

This report was made with the intention to explain the steps I took while making this photoshop project, part of the school subject ‘Oficina de Multimédia B’.

Before making this report, I made a brief apresentation of my finished project in class. The goal of this project was to make a surreal illustration on the program Photoshop using only pictures taken by us.We were randomly assigned an “Invisible City” from Italio Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities” – mine was Ercília (in portuguese) or Ersilia (in english). You can find the description I had to use below.

(“In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationdhip of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form. “)

My illustration focuses on the early stages of the city.

To be able to do this project I had to experiment a lot on this program, since I have never used it before. I ended up not seeing any youtube tutorials and experimenting on the go and when I had questions about something I couldn’t figure out I googled it. It would probaly have been easier to watch a few tutorials at least but I was having to much fun even though I probally didn’t explore the tools the program possessess to their full extent.

Anyways, I started this project by reading the text and doing a sketch of what I wanted to represent.I decided on doing one of the early stages of the city, where the strings weren’t quite so many to warrant a move. I ended up having a lot of freedom on this since the only thing really especified were the strings so I had my fun with the houses.

I took a lot of photos – though many don’t really have a good quality – and these were the ones i ended up using :

The first thing I did after I opened the program was size it to and horizontal format. Then I added the backgroung for my work, a part of a painting i made, though it resized to an even smaller part than it was before.

After that I did the main street using a photo of a rug i had at home. To isolate the rug I used the erasor tool ( i did this everytime I wanted to isolate something, I tried other ways but they didn’t work so…).

Then to do the side street I copied the image of the rug I isolated, resized it and erased some parts.

Afterwards, I isolated the tallest wooden block the same way, though I had to do this part several times since things kept going wrong. I messed around a lot with all the tranformation options.

I did the same thing for the smaller block. (At this point in time they didn’t look like the image bellow which was taken after I finished, besides resizing I hadn’t done anything else).

I copied both buildings a few times and decided to mess around with the transformation options, I ended up using the deform option. Since I thought that all of the buildings being the same colour was boring, I tweaked the tones – I also had a lot of fun with this.

To make the windows I used a photo of my kitchen cabinet , isolated it the same way I isolated the other images, copied it several times and positioned them where I wanted and deformed them to mach their respective building.

Then, I started adding the white strings using the line tool (though one of them, the uneven one, is a photo).

The top of the building seemed empty so I  added a ‘support’ since some of said buldings were taller – apartement buildings – though i added it to one story’s too, so the houses could connect to the ones further away.

Then i added the grey, black and black and white strings – the two-toned strings were made by clicking on a filling option that had a degrade-.

And this is the end result of my project:

It could be better ,but i’m fairly happy with it. This was a hard project to make since I had no prior photoshop knowledge and the professor was on leave but working with what I had it didn’t turn out that bad. Again, I could have watched tutorials and I was going to, but I kind of lost myself while playing around with the program. I learned about the program because of it too.

If I had to do it now, i probaly would have added some people (represented by dolls, probally) to make it feel more lively but at the time it slipped my mind – probaly because this is one of the cities where the people weren’t made a big deal, or featured a lot.

I learned and had fun, in the end.

See you next time .

Daniel Rodrigues

Daniel Rodrigues is a portuguese photographer. He was born in Compiègne, France, in 1987.However, Daniel lives in Riba de Ave, Portugal, ever since he was 10 years old and he has a portuguese citizenship.

He became a professional photographer after his passing through the “Instituto Português de Fotografia” [Portuguese Institute of Photography] in 2010 and his subsequent intership in the portuguese newspaper “Correio da Manhã”.

In the last few years, besides doing some personal projects and freelance work,  he worked with the Global Media Group, where he daily made some photos for a few portuguese magazines and journals, like “O jogo”, “Jornal de Notícias”, “Diário de Notícias” and “Notícias Magazine”.

Currently, he is solely doing freelance work. He has won several awards for his work ,like, for exemple, in 2017 he won First Place in IbericoAmerican Photographer of The Year; in 2015 the First Place on the category of Non-Traditional Photojournalism Publishing and the category of  Environment (nature, wildlife), both from NPPA.

His photos, besides being featured in the portuguese journals I have mentioned before, have also been featured in magazines and journals such as “The New York Times”,”  Al Jazeera”, “The Wall Street Journal” and the “Washingtom Post” as well as Tv Stations such as  CNN and BBC.

His portefolio consists of both monochrome and colored pictures and here are a few of them that I found interesting.

Find him and his work here —-> https://www.danielrodriguesphoto.com/

Steve Mccurry

Steve Mccurry is an American photojournalist born on February 24, 1950 in Pennsylvania. He attended Penn State University where he originally planned to study cinematography and filmmaking, but ended up getting a degree in theater arts and graduating in 1974. He became interested in photography when he started taking pictures for the Penn State newspaper The Daily Collegian. After working at Today’s Post in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania for two years, he left for India to freelance. It was here that McCurry learned to watch and wait on life. “If you wait,” he realized, “people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.”

He’s best known for his photograph, “Afghan Girl” that originally appeared in National Geographic magazine. [ the one with green eyes below]

_PBS2709, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India, 2007, INDIA-10720. Boy in mid-flight. At the foot of the vast Mehrangarh Fort, one can find the Blue City, a small tightly knit maze of houses located towards the north of Jodhpur. In one of the narrow alleyways a boy flees McCurry’s camera. Balancing three intersecting planes of colour – one of which is covered in stark red handprints – the image pulsates with energy as a young boy dashes through the narrow alleyways. At the foot of the vast Mehrangarh Fort, one can find the Blue City, a small tightly knit maze of houses located towards the north of Jodhpur. Balancing three intersecting planes of colour – one of which is covered in stark red handprints – the image pulsates with energy as a young boy dashes through the narrow alleyways. Magnum Photos_NYC94317, MCS2007002G0703/10720 Phaidon, Iconic Image, Final Book_Iconic, page 6. Unguarded Moment_Book Iconic_Book final print_MACRO final print_Genoa final print_Sao Paulo India_Book Stern Portfolio_Book retouched_Sonny Fabbri 02/25/2015

You can find him here –> https://www.facebook.com/stevemccurrystudios and here –> http://stevemccurry.com/galleries

Afonso Cruz

Afonso Cruz is a portuguese illustrator ,writer , musician and director of animated films. He was born in Figueira da Foz in the year 1971 and currently he lives in Alentejo, Portugal.

He studied at António Arroio Secondary School – in Lisbon-, at the University of Fine Arts in Lisbon and the Superior Institute of Plastic Arts in Madeira.He wrote his first in 2008 and since then has won several awards.

As an illustrator he has published several illustrations in the periodic press, namely for the magazine “Rua Sésamo”, in school textbooks, storyboards and publicity. He illustrated about three dozen children’s books with texts written by José Jorge Letria, António Manuel Couto Viana, Alice Vieira and António Mota. among others.

He has illustrated thirty children’s books since 2007, all of which show the density and expressiveness of his chromatic techniques and figures, and which are nearly always marked by a caricatural sense of humour. He is the author of four works of adult fiction, and also of a novella aimed at older children, Os Livros que Devoraram o Meu Pai [The Books that Ate my Father], which won the 2009 Maria Rosa Colaço Prize. However, it is with A Contradição Humana [The Human Contradiction], a picture book that brings together the originality of his visual conception with a text of his own authorship, that Afonso Cruz has achieved greatest recognition: in 2011, he was awarded the Portuguese Society of Authors/RTP Prize and received a special mention at the National Illustration Awards, in addition to being selected for the White Ravens Catalogue and the List of Honour of the IBBY – International Board on Books for Young People.

You can find a little more info about him here,along with 24 more portuguese illustrators  –> http://www.portugalbologna2012.com/Os-25-ilustradoresThe-25-ilustrators

Yoshitaka Amano (天野 喜孝 )

Yoshitaka Amano ( 天野 喜孝 ) is an fantasy illustrator and animation character designer. He was born in 1952 in a small town at the foot of mount Fuji in Shizuoka, Japan. As a child, he reveled in making unbroken loops of drawings on the huge paper rolls that his brother brought home from his job at a paper factory. “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t making drawings,” he recalls. While visiting a friend in Tokyo in 1967, he boldly took his paintings to the animation studio Tatsunoko Productions, creators of Space Ace and Mach Go Go Go. His talent was instantly recognized, and at the age of 15, his family reluctantly moved him to a company dormitory in the capital city. After a year of training, Amano took part in designing characters for many of Tatsunoko’s greatest cartoons, including Gatchaman (released in the US as G-Force and Battle of the Planets), Hutch the Honeybee, and Cashaan: Robot Hunter.

Yet after fifteen years with the animation studio, Amano began to grow restless. He tendered his resignation at the age of 30, exchanging his established career for the precarious life of a freelancer that he still lives by today, sucessfuly.

 

Yoshitaka Amano incorporates a breadth of influences into his illustrative mixed-media paintings. Amano’s work fuses the fine arts with pop culture and design, also integrating European Art Nouveau style and traditional Japanese brushwork. His fantasy scenes are detailed and delicate illustrations of imaginative narratives, often including villains, armored heroes, and monsters. Their energetic poses and saturated colors are akin to the comic book aesthetic of manga and anime, revealing the lingering influence of his early work as an animator.

Video Creation

Video Creation is something I find very interesting and difficult. There are many types of video creation : the videos uploaded by youtubers, like Dan and Phil, are very different from m.e.p’s and short animations;vlogs and gameplays, both videos are very distint from the other. It’s a difference that’s hard to explain and way easier to show but at the end of the day we must remember that all of them require a lot of work. All you have to do is go on video sharing platforms ,like youtube.