alexis truscott dean-jones

demoiselle

2012-01-15T00:06:00.000-08:00

figs

2012-01-04T05:58:00.000-08:00

Cards for me ma and pa, Tash and Liv and Liam.

And here are some australasian figbirds and lovely fairy wrens! And a bit of fanart of the Temeraire series, which is a good fun read - a British heavyweight dragon, the Regal Copper, and a Chinese Lung Yu, bred for long-distance flight.

Hope you are extremely well!

galarghz

2011-08-17T23:28:00.000-07:00

european and indochinese magpies

2011-08-11T01:34:00.000-07:00

2011-08-05T04:01:00.000-07:00

Red panda, bat, some guy, smew(a bird with cool hair and cool name..), lorikeets, otters, NZ short-tailed bat, and.. some dags. The one in brown is my sooky little pup, Phoebe.

ARKive - Chinese giant salamander video - Andrias davidianus - 06

not the lovecraft monster

2011-04-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

dhole! flash tiger! some things! and a markhor!

Have a great day!!!!!!!

horses? horses.

2011-04-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

On the weekend I found this super cheap book of good stock horse photos, so I've been trying to figure them out! Next weekend I'm going looking for some live horses to draw! I don't know anybody who owns one(do you perhaps?), so I suppose I'll head out to the local equestrian club, and hit up some road-side paddocks out Brookfield way!

And because they're great, here are some things by Théodore Géricault and Rosa Bonheur! I love those big Shires and Pecherons.

2010-06-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

PHEW

Semester one of third year complete, we're now into our 'holiday'! Really it's just a few weeks when we're excused from classes in order to get down to actually making our films, but hey, we need that!

In the first week of holiday I got the chance to work on an educational film about intensive farming - which involved designing a character and 2 minutes of lipsync. Time cuts and misunderstandings made it a pretty stressful experience, but I got a lot out of the project! (Not least the lipsync practise, which I definitely needed..) And the client was very happy, which is always good!!

I am taking a break now before starting film work - up top is a bird I drew today to relax. He's drinking a turkish coffee. His eyebrows grow naturally into fist shapes.

..You know that feeling you get upon finishing a project that, knowing what you NOW know, you could've completed the same project in a smaller timeframe and to a higher quality?

It's a bit disheartening when you're looking back on something, with no time left to change it, wishing you'd done it better -
BUT -
I suppose it's actually a very positive thing, because it means you're learning!!

So!

If I ever DON'T feel like that, THEN I'll start to freak out!

uni hohohohohoh uni

2010-05-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

add a dab of lavender to milk; leave town with an orange, then pretend you're laughing at it!

In-progress stuff for our producing subject! We're pitching a television show for 8 to 13-year-olds set 70 years after the events of The Island of Doctor Moreau!

aieeeee!

2010-04-18T14:15:00.000-07:00

Hello! Quick post, nothing too substantial, sorry. Year is busy and excellent so far, looking to get busier and excellent-er!
Had a cold for about a month, got a new tire for my poor, vandalised bike, ate delicious pie, caught some kookaburras, made new friends, had a brilliant time at Bluesfest, broke my bed, got some essays in on time, and am making a film with Ashleigh Beevers and Sara Fonseca!!!

Got a delightful book of Muybridge's animal motion photographs from the library, and started animating a horse - turns out, I'm pretty crap at drawing horses! So I thought I'd do a study of one of the photographs. It's not quite right yet.
(pikachu's in there because I realised that one of the reasons it looked off was that the horse was having his head pulled unnaturally back by his rider. Have chosen a jockeyless image for the next one.)

This is a WIP,

Aaand some (oldish) concepts for the third-year film! OHOHO. We're nearly done the (3rd-ish draft) animatic and starting to quail at some of the shots we've set for ourselves but WE CAN DO IT AND WE WILL DO IT.

BACK TO WORK

Take care!!!

since when..

2010-01-31T23:15:00.001-08:00

Hello internet! How are you?? I am well.

I haven't really touched my tablet all holiday, partly because my present job involves staring at a computer screen for the better part of the week; also because I doubt there'll be much time for real-media in the coming year.. I've been doing a lot of sketchbook drawing, some of which I might post next time. Also working slowly on a big acrylic painting.

For now, here's a birthday card and some dragons I had to get out of my system. Our scanner has been behaving badly, so they look a little off. Oh well.
I'd forgotten how much I love coloured pencils! And I got some watercolours for christmas, so I started messing around with those, too. It has been a busy holiday, but I am pleased that I've saved some money, and I can't wait to get back to uni...

..And because I really enjoyed making this too, here is my sand animation from 2nd year at QCA. With a bit of questionable stop-mo tacked on at the beginning, heh. I was really happy with this when I first made it - now, inevitably, I look at it and see all the bad bits - but it just makes me want to do more of this sort of thing. :D

fox-mo from alexis dean-jones on Vimeo.

Anyway, whoever happens to be reading this, I hope you're well, and enjoying life, and things!

Until next time!!!

ouch

2009-10-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

A bat...

And a sunburn victim...

2009-07-24T22:36:00.000-07:00

2009-06-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

These are illustrations done for a friend, who is publishing a book on flower essences.

They're a bit pale here - in the final versions, I darkened most of them a tad, and evened out the balance of dark and light.

Taking commissions in the last few weeks of uni semester is a silly thing to do. Hohoh. But I think I learnt some important things about organisation. Foremostly; 'organisation is important'.

Another important lesson obliquely related to this semester; if you have coeliac disease, don't get a job in a bakery!

Until next time..!

2009-06-03T17:56:00.000-07:00

some interesting peoples:

http://mailysvallade.blogspot.com - I really like the textures and shapes she plays with. One of the films she worked on - Garuda (an opening for Annecy '08) has really nice things going on with shifting light and colour.

http://alexisliddell.blogspot.com - also worked on Garuda, and I love the concept art done for it, but check out her short FX film. Cool lighting and snappy movement. Snappy like a.. Snappy dresser. Does anybody say that anymore? Hm.

http://grigorylozinsky.blogspot.com/ - some lovely landscape studies, and lots of observational stuff. Go digging in his earlier posts for some cool 2D/3D animation and layout drawings.

http://marnette.canalblog.com/ - nice colours, but I especially like the gestures and shapes in her figures.

http://www.tgconceptart.blogspot.com/ - interesting studies in rendering differently textured objects; candles, metal pots, stone, bags, etc.

http://www.louromano.blogspot.com/ - you've probably been here before - but check out the concepts and colour scripts for UP. And the animation tests! Changing light and so on. Very cool. But, er, don't do it yet if you don't want to be spoiled for the storyline.

I'll post more later, when I start going through my 'check this person out' list. Sometime after assessment. Hoho. Er.

2009-05-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

A loose interpretation of Quetzalcoatl, in Flash. From, er, a few months ago. Despite my computer's apparent flallergy (or 'flash allergy') I think I will probably animate this guy doing something or other at some stage. I am looking forward to uni holidays for the promise of free time, in which I'll be able to work on personal stuff. :D Oh sweet, delicious, free time. Ah. Back to that essay, then...

2009-05-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

south bank, yo.

enthusiasm

2009-05-07T06:38:00.000-07:00

One more thing before I get down to some serious going-to-bed; a design for a card competition.

aves, aves, aves

2009-05-07T05:21:00.000-07:00

Well gosh, long time no anything. Sorry!

I will therefore cut to the chase. Here is my last Jorinda and Jorindel post; a handful of the completed concepts. Next time, ehm, something else! :D Hooray!

colour and light

2009-04-03T01:04:00.000-07:00

I have a bad habit of getting lazy and messy when I colour digitally, which is passable for studies but not so nice in bigger pictures. It takes longer to paint with traditional principles, but I think it's well worth it for the depth and liveliness that I find missing in my hastily coloured digital stuff.
This picture is an example of me trying to apply that - I painted it in photoshop in the same way I paint with acrylics, and I need to fix some things, but I like the way it's going.

I have an idea in the back of my head about a sort of dystopic lizard society in a desert, and so far the way the story pans out is a little morbid and lacking in details, so I'm going to keep thinking about that.. But I thought I would start posting a few ideas about colour and lighting and go from there. I've actually got more recent stuff than what's below here, but it's saved on a computer at my parents' place.
..Which is a bit weird, come to think of it, because there's no tablet or graphics program on that computer. Why are they there?! A mystery for the ages. I'll post them when I get them. :)

2009-03-27T17:25:00.000-07:00

more shaman - going for a creepy toady look. Not keen on the guy on the left, I like the guy on the right, will probably add a massive thing of feathers behind his head. Yeah.

2009-03-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

Jorinda - thinking about poses and movement...

...and Jorindel - just heads

2009-03-23T19:03:00.001-07:00

a couple of colour-testing thumbnails;

2009-03-22T23:23:00.000-07:00

some of the fruits of a Jorinda and Jorindel brainstorming session;

the Shaman

the pixie's lair with MILLIONS OF BIRDCAGES, plus some parrots and Quetzalcoatl

Jorinda

2009-03-16T19:14:00.000-07:00

Howdy!
Welcome to my blog! This will be used primarily to publish concept art for the next brilliant ABS production; Jorinda and Jorindel, based on the Grimm Brothers story of the same name. I'll also put up some observational work, lifedrawing and anything else I want feedback on.

ABS is a team made up of myself, Brad Nielsen and Sara Fonseca. We're set to take over the world in a few years' time, but until then, we are second-year students of Animation at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

The original Grimm Brothers tale was fairly mild and straightforward -
Boy and girl go into the forest,
fairy turns girl into bird,
boy goes off to cry,
boy dreams about a magical flower that fixes everything,
boy finds flower, rescues girl, defeats fairy, etc, the end.

We've adapted it into a much darker story, set in a mesoamerican tribe around the year 1500. I'll post up the adapted story later, but here are some of the first thoughts I had about the fairy and how she operates. See you later! :D

The fairy transforms girls into birds - we think she should do this in a very graphic and gory way

toying with the idea that the fairy - here in jaguar form - is taken bowls of chocolate as tribute

2009-03-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

art dump for posterity