Rusty The Robot

Meet Rusty The Robot....

Yes, for those of you who saw the university Character Animation project I posted up here earlier in the year, you'll know that my odd fascination with designs incorporating battered robot characters continues!! This steampunk inspired illustration looks at the juxtaposition between machines and nature, with a slight nods in the direction of both Pixar's 'Wall-E' and 2004 film 'I,Robot'.

Rusty is my first attempt at character illustration using the techniques I learnt from some Photoshop tutorials, including the Turf Text tutorial (see previous post), that I have been working through. This is obviously a first attempt and very rough and ready. I could spend a lot of time to polish it up, but it was really just a trial to see if I could apply the tutorial info to my own concept.

Playing about with Photoshop...

Photoshop is the swiss army knife of graphics apps. Not only has it become a verb in regards to digital photo editing but it can also produce graphics, animations and probably more stuff I haven't even found yet. You know when a piece of software has an entire range of magazine publications dedicated too it and a section in Foyles that this is the thing to learn, the thing to have on your resume, the monster that needs to be reckoned with.
So, with that all in mind, thats what I've been doing! I have gone to war with Photoshop to see if I can learn the ways of the force and become a Jedi Master... or at least an Adobe Credited Expert (ACE)!

Today I stumbled on a tutorial about making turf text and, in my quest for knowledge, I followed it and produced this....

Howling Wolf - 2D Animation

This is my attempt at hand drawn 2D animation.
 

Though the wolf was initially hadn drawn, I then used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to create them in to a graphic style and animate them. Despite the fact that this was a time consuming way to animate, especially drawning the wolfs walk cycle, I absolutely loved creating animation this way.

The writing, by the way, is Greek myth of King Lycaon from which the term 'Lycanthrope' derives. The word means wolf-man and has come to mean werewolf. I've put the text in latin in the animation but if you want to know the story check it out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycaon_(Arcadia