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World War II soldiers drawn in my sketchbook with my new Namiki Falcon drawing pen (fine nib).

Above is a cutout animation character called ‘Chaz’ for the opening tile sequence that I am animating for the independent film, ‘Cooler’. I am also animating several animated sequences within the film.

This model sheet shows my cutout character design process and includes my initial character design hand drawn on paper with pencil, pen and ink, the cutout body bits colored and textured in Photoshop and the final character rig assembled in After Effects. I’ve also included screen shots of the cutout character in Photoshop (with the live action character reference) and the rigged character in After Effects.

‘Cooler’ is directed by Silas Howard and Ernesto Foronda.
‘Cooler’ on IMDB

Sketchbook drawings (pen and ink) colored, textured and composited in Photoshop.

This is the illustration, entitled ‘Tribute,’ that I created for the cover of MungBeing Magazine. The illustration was for Issue #31 for the theme of tribute. Hand drawn, colored in Photoshop and composited in After Effects.

If you’d like a free iPhone/iPod Touch sized wallpaper, you can download a wallpaper of this illustration here: http://www.gilestimms.com/wallpapers.html

Thanks to Mark Givens, editor of MungBeing :)

Angie and I are getting married on July 22nd, 2010 :)

The above is the comic book styled wedding invitation that I made and had printed through lulu. Hand drawn and colored in Photoshop. The illustrations for the mini comic book invitation were inspired by the work of one of my favorite illustrators, Nate Williams.

If you’d like an actual printed book of the invitation you can buy a copy on lulu: Wedding Invitation – Giles and Angie.

ROBOT Love – Here’s a robot design I made for a character concept as part of a music video treatment. Hand drawn, edited in photoshop, built in 3D (2.5D) and rendered in After Effects.

Below is the pen and ink, original drawing showing the character design of the robot bits.
Fairly simple :)

Faerie and baby color comp illustration for a freelance animation project. Hand drawn on paper and colored in Photoshop.

My entry for Illustration Friday, ‘Fast.’ Created in Photoshop and After Effects.

Detail

Detail

I approached the design of the illustration as though I were going to animate it. I drew the cut-out character, props and scenery on paper in pencil, and then pen and ink – archer, bow, arrow, tree etc. Once scanned into the computer I colored and textured the drawings in Photoshop and then imported all the cut-outs into After Effects where I set up 2 scenes; one of the archer in the forest, the other of the arrows. Once the scenes were complete I rendered them out and brought them back into Photoshop to create the final comic-styled illustration.

I thought I’d explain the design process for my characters from my animated music video, ‘Dead All Along.’

In the image above you can see the original character design drawing, top left. All the characters for ‘Dead All Along’ started on paper, first as blue pencil drawings, then as pen and ink. I scanned the drawing into photoshop and tweaked the levels so that I the texture of the paper is visible – I really wanted to make the ‘Dead All Along’ world seem as if it was a paper world, almost as though an Edward Gorey inspired book had come to life.

Once in Photoshop, I ‘cut out’ each part of the character so that it can be animated in a cut-out animation style within After Effects. This character didn’t have to animate too much so it only has 9 separate bits, including 2 heads for the blink (eye open, eye closed). You can see the separate body bits in the bottom right of the above image. I cut and separate the body bits using the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop creating a loose outline of the body part.

For coloring, I like to color in Photoshop. I use Photoshop because I can easily combine textures with the original character drawing and also because I like to be able to experiment with color ideas. I typically use textures in my coloring process and the characters for ‘Dead All Along’ were also colored with a lot of textures. I keep a texture library of textures on my computer that are scans and photographs of textures, patterns etc. One of my favorite set of textures is a book of origami paper that I scanned in – I used several of these origami papers to color and texture the characters in ‘Dead All Along.’ I’m also fond of the Maxon collection of comic patterns, and I have several of these scanned that I use. Below you can see a screen-shot of my texture library (top), a screen-shot of the textures and layers of the coloring process in Photoshop (middle), and a sample of the texture palette I used for the bird (and yes, that is a wallpaper pattern from the 1970′s :)