Safer Silliness

So during the summer I was over in Dundee taking part in Dare to be Digital. In their "white space" computer area in the Abertay Dundee University, they have this really nice graph on the wall depicting a timeline of the video game industry. Some artistic clever folk, using posted notes, stuck an entire Mario level on the wall under this time line which gave me the idea to add something of my own. So I drew an A3 picture of Safer Sephiroth, the last boss from Final Fantasy VII and stuck it up a few days before I left.
Cut to January, over 5 months later. One of the guys from Dare who is still in the college tags me in 2 photos on Facebook that he took with his mobile showing that the picture has yet to be taken down. Needless to say, it made my day seeing these two pictures so here they are.

Click for un-cropped and slightly larger
Now, back to the film. I reckon I could get a few posts out of the amount of props I've modeled for this thing.

Cheers
Kev Ryan

MMXI

Ah, it is finally the new year. I've given up making very definitive clear resolutions as it's my belief that good things tend to happen when you're working away. So with that in mind, going to simply wish that I get more done this year as 21 posts meant for a fairly successful 2010. Also, another wish would be to Stumble Upon some of my own work, although that would mean using that toolbar again. Which wouldn't be the best of ideas in my final year of college.

Either way, 2 quick drawings to put up. Just some practice caricatures

Dara O'Briain - Hugh Dennis & Frankie Boyle

UPDATE: 9th January Didn't feel a need to make another blog post for this but I've drawn 3 more caricatures.

More comedians in the form of Andy Parsons, Russell Howard and Ross Noble.

Cheers and Happy New Year.
Kev Ryan

Merry...St Stephen's Day.

Curses, I was to actually post something up on Christmas Day (It's now 1 am as I'm typing this) but I was just so wrecked from the amount of food my Mam cooks. Ryan family Christmas dinners are just so much more then what I generally need to eat in my day to day life. Factor in a bit of alcohol and Christmas movies on telly and you're looking at a paralyzed Kev Ryan.
Nevertheless, I figured I'd post something up, so here's a render of Max*, the main character from the short film I'm currently working on for my graduate year. Naturally, so much is liable to change but sure I just thought I'd put up a quick render.


Also, I was looking through my photobucket account, and found a slide from the pitch for this short film that has what could be my first and final logo for the title text.


Either way, hope you had as Merry a Christmas as I did and are looking forward to 2011 as I am.

Cheers
Kev Ryan

*Yep, his name is so unimportant I just took the name of the program I'm using to make the film. Handy like!

CUBE

So my brother plays in a band called CUBE with two other awesome people. So I decided to draw a picture for them. Sometimes the execution for a possible caricature of somebody will come into my head and I'll just have to do it, regardless if they have asked or not. This is one of those situations.

Check them out and if you're in Dublin, go see them live!
Facebook
Myspace, with songs

Cheers
Kev Ryan

Bit of a Tidy up.

Just a quick update. I'm working away on a new short film for college which naturally has put everything else on hold. Aside form this, while I was looking other Blogger pages I noticed they had nice little navigation bars at the top. So I endeavored to put one up, thinking it was a really awkward process. Although it was only due to my own stupidity that I didn't realise it's actually a fairly easy feature to implement that was right in my face that I just had not bothered to explore. So in future I'm hoping to add a gallery page with all of my stuff up there in the navbar, so a would be viewer of this blog wont have to go through heaps of posts and my own ramblings.

Either way, hopefully I'll get updating this in the meantime with something, if not, then it just means I'm working.

Cheers

Kev

I Heart Sculpting

"Sculptris wants you to make 3D models. Download it and have a go! I'm sure you will enjoy."

So I was shown a program called Sculptris, which if you don't know, is a free sculpting application that this genius programmer called Tomas Pettersson (or DrPetter, as he's known online) created in his free time. He's now working for Pixologic, the makers of Zbrush, to either make the program better or just assimilate all the nice features it has into Zbrush. Nevertheless, I reccommend having a go of it, it's free and allows you to get the basics of 3D sculpting down. I've been having a go myself and have made the following. Hope you like them.
Click for slightly larger






Cheers
Kev Ryan

Ben Has a Hitlist.

So bitta backstory, another caricature picture. I had a few friends over one night for a few beers when one of the lads, Ben, started looking through my old sketchbook. So I got some fairly nice and supportive reviews of my work when he asks if I would ever draw a picture of himself. At this point I let him know that I actually had an image in mind, which I thought would have looked hilarious, that I was planning on drawing when I had some free time. To which he essentially replied "no, don't make me look stupid or something, just draw me normally". So I did, the only thing is he recently started playing guitar with these guys so I took the opportunity to draw a new picture of the band while keeping Ben's previous brief in mind-ish.


I'm really happy with how this picture turned out. Although I'm getting a bit concerned at the amount of 2D stuff I have up here. To that end I'm thinking that the college year, and working on this film should force me to get some nice 3D stuff up. Along with that I've started messing with Sculptris today and I'm thinking of doing some sort of daily sculpting with that as well.
I'll see how that goes.

Cheers
Kev Ryan

Culture: Response

So once again, at the start of a year of ADA, our course co-ordinator, and all-round fantastic individual Gareth Lee, set us a task. To go to something cultural and create a visual response. See my District 9 animation for last years response.
Prior to the task being set I met up in Dublin with the Two Dogs Team to see our friend's band play. I found out during the day that they were to play an outdoor gig, that "Reclaim the Streets" was on and that the band was playing as part of this. We all then found out that the outdoor venue had been changed to Central Bank and that the Irish Socialist Party had arranged the gig. During the gig a funny incident occurred when myself and Mark agreed to give somebody a hand unravelling a large banner. We were then left holding this banner when somebody photographed us for some unknown publication. This was my recollection of that incident, which was what to be my response to the "Cultural Event".
Click to see the full image

THIS IS WRONG HOWEVER
This is what I presented to the class, however it turned out that I had it wrong. It was not myself and Mark who were holding the banner, rather it was me and Claire. Mark was standing beside us thinking he got away without having to hold anything, when he was just handed a sign and told to "HOLD THAT" by a stern socialist. The picture below is a more accurate representation of the incident.
Again, click to see the full image

FIXED
All and all, it was a fun day and we joked about the incident for sometime after. Hypothetically wondering what our parents would think seeing us as the faces of Irish Socialism. A fun image to draw and subsequently fix.

Hope you enjoy it.
KevRyan

I guess we're not model material

I have a story to tell. This day 2 weeks ago a friend invited me and a few others to the opening of a new bar called "Number 6" in Smithfield. We were all dressed up and looking the business for the night having free drink, free food and a good time in what turned out to be a pretty awesome place.
Early into the night a photographer approached the group and asked if he could take a photo of us. We had no problem with this and we all followed him outside, with 2 particular people leading the group. When we got outside he took these 2 aside and set them up for a photo, leaving 4 of us out. As a joke I asked "So I suppose us dregs* will stay out of this one yeah?" to which he fairly coldly said "Yep" and proceeded to take some - probably fairly nice - photos. He assured us we'd be in "the next one" but he seemed to avoid us for the rest of the time he was there.
Now don't get me wrong, we didn't feel bad about this at all, in fact we joked about it for a good while after and have told the story to others since. However I felt I needed to illustrate the situation. As the image, and my own take on it. Were just too damn funny in my head.

Click, zoom and scroll from left to right.
Incidentally, feels like this picture has been cursed, so many hurdles and program mess-ups hindering progress on it. Should've been finished last weekend! Furthermore, making images 15000 pixels wide is...awkward.

Kev Ryan

Pizza Sambo

Bit of an explanation required here. Short version, a mock-up of a logo born from dinner time silliness and that hypothetical company conversation college students have.

Pizza Sambo
So basically when I was younger I went through a phase where whenever I had a what my parents called Salad*, a fry-up or anything else that we had bread or rolls with, I would make a sandwich of everything in the meal. Now of course this was fair enough with the fry-ups as it was just pretty much having a breakfast roll. But every time we had Pizza, I would rediscover the most amazing concoction ever. Simply, a slice of Pizza, in-between two slices of buttered bread. A Pizza Sandwich. Nobody could understand my apparent madness, but I was onto something. Either way, I always joked that I would use Pizza Sandwich/Sambo as a company/website name, and when 3 of us** in college had a "we should totally start our own animation company" conversation, I had an idea for the logo above.

Cheers
Kev Ryan

*They call it a salad, and that's fair enough in that we would have a whole heap of vegetables. However along with this we would have always Pizza and chips along with just tucking into the packets of sliced ham and cheese. However since I don't eat many vegetables, "Salad" just meant Pizza, chips and whatever else for dinner...which of course meant EPIC PIZZA-CHIP SAMBOS!

**The 3 in question can be seen in the caricature in my last post. Also, as I was working on it, the file-name for that image was PizzaSambo.psd