✷ oh, so you’ve heard of Blender? ✷
I’m just a little guy
“I’m just a little guy” was a self-guided project exploring how to translate my 2D shape language into 3D. as shown below, a rendered character stands proudly and slight angrily within a natural environment - I wanted to experiment with my loose, shape-centric characters and hopefully find a sweet spot for them within high-fidelity environments.
how could my use of flat shapes communicate with viewers in realistic environments - was this something I could continue to explore (possibly strengthen soft 3D modelling skills for future developments and personal works?) and learn from? - the concept itself illustrated a playful character composed of soft pebbles that are adorned by moss/lichen.
clown town
“clown town” is a collaboration project between Corey Montemango + Matt Johns
Corey and myself have been online friends for around a decade, connecting through a shared interest in art via social media, as we’ve grown as individuals art still connects us - we’ve bonded over a shared pursuit entering into our professional careers. Corey is an remarkably talented 3D artist and photographer and I myself lean more on the cusp on visual storyteller, concept artist and designer - between freelancing we’ve decided to collaborate on our very own blind box toy series.
clown town - branding mood board
as we begin to think about this project further, we wanted to establish a brand logo for clown town.
although Corey and myself are multidisciplined artists we aren’t the most competent graphic designers - below, I have compiled a moldboard of type examples and graphic elements that I believe aid in explaining the visual appeal of how we interpret the ethos of our “clown town” brand, soft and sharp shapes that can be boldly recognized in a two-tone palette. I really like this hyper-futurist/fantasy vibe, but ultimately we commissioned another artist (Guillermo Monje) to fill in the gaps and better contrast a brand logo with our blind box character designs.
palette pals character and colour exploration
Palette Pals are a series of drawings presented alongside my photography - brief moments in time that I take colour and mood references from. I have a sensory processing disorder and ADHD, so when I’m often out in public I find it difficult to concentrate - this series explores moments where I’ve captured compositional interest, colour palettes, form etc. I then take these photographs and start sketching characters and take swatches from the photographs to generate a colour palette that will then be used to render my character designs. this is second nature to my process at this point, finding ways to bridge analog/digital means of making is an enjoyable process and hope that others can see that making should be exploration and fun.
let me know which plonkton you are!!
meet the newly discovered microscopic species called plonkton - a experiment influenced by my love of shape language and character design. 16 characters to choose from, with short descriptions of each of them, what they do etc. this was a character n' narrative exercise that I set for myself after finishing up on contract work, a breather to get me back into iterating on shape and forms to implement into designing characters. this little world was fun to explore n’ I can see this going in different directions. I would really like to revisit this as a larger project further, maybe start playing with environment design and other aspects of world-building also.