Nurses through the ages

I made a flyer/leaflet a few weeks ago, looking at nurses through the ages. My design for the leaflet was unfortunately reconsidered at the last minute, and the company went for a photographic approach instead. But I quite enjoyed drawing the characters for this mini project, and researching all the different uniforms, so here we go ...!


I would have loved to have drawn nurses from even further back in time (or from different countries), but alas, it wasn't applicable for this leaflet!

Here were my initial ideas for the design of this leaflet...


My favourite idea was the busiest one with all sorts of characters and objects appearing in the centre! I always prefer the more ambitious ideas I think of - and considering the turnaround that was required on this project; it was probably a good thing the company went for one of the more simpler ideas! Phew!

Thank you letters

A short while ago I was excited to be working on a set of illustrations for the LCH's 2013 Annual Report; unfortunately a decision was made to go with a different look for this years report. So I thought what should I do with all these illustrations I worked on? Why yap about them on the Nafftastic blog of course!

Originally, the Annual Report had the theme of a Thank You letter, and my illustrations were to sit alongside this theme. As you can see, these illustrations are really heavily influenced by Janet Ahlberg. Janet Ahlberg had a lovely, innocent style which she used to convey equally innocent and sweet characters. I particularly love The Jolly Christmas Postman, I used to love opening up all the letters when I was a kid, my favourite was Little Red Riding Hood's letter to the Wolf - I think because it was so colourful!


I experimented for a while with doing hand drawn illustrations and then recreating the same illustrations in vector, trying to see which looked more effective. Whilst I love watercolour paint and the texture/quality that can be achieved, I was leaning more towards vector illustration just due to the ease this would mean when designing the report - being able to resize without losing any quality is a pretty handy thing!
So heres a few examples of hand drawn vs vector!



(In this last one I attempted to draw the line work in Illustrator and add textures scavenged from Google to recreate the watercolour effect).

It was also suggested that I look into drawing some sequential imagery such as a flying paper plane, or a teddy bear using crutches - as it was planned to have a little flipbook element on the corners of the pages of the report.
First I just looked at how a bear could walk...



Walking Teddy from Nafftastic on Vimeo.

I then tried a more polished version of the bear using crutches.



Bear on some crutches from Nafftastic on Vimeo.
(I really enjoyed making these - I haven't animated anything in while so it was good fun)!

Finally, I mocked up some possible front covers for the report. These were a pleasure to think up as well; I was given the freedom to go as busy as I liked - I love illustrations with lots of things going on!


So there we go! I'm disappointed not to be working on this project any more, but despite this I really enjoyed the development stages and being able to tinker with some animation again.

Lunchtime

Just something stupid I drew after seeing several strange incidents during my lunch one time. Apologies for the very poor scan quality.

CLAMP gushing

I've been meaning to gush about my manga collection on this blog for some time, but I'm only just getting round to it, so prepare yourself for some cutesy manga pics because this post will have A LOT of them!

My interest in anime and manga and such first began when I started watching Dragonball Z on Cartoon Network many a year ago. As my older sister really liked it, I inevitably got dragged into it as well. Despite watching quite masculine anime's, such as Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing, when it came to manga, one of the first ones I ever bought was a very girly (shojo) manga callled Cardcaptor Sakura!
I think the Americanised TV series entitled 'Cardcaptors' was out on the telly at the time, but the beautiful artwork in the manga just blew the dubbed animated series out of the water! (Although I eventually bought a few episodes of the original Japanese version, and found these to be very sweet!)



But yes, this was the start of my love of manga and consequently the all-girl drawing team, CLAMP (the creators of numerous manga titles including Cardcaptor Sakura)!
I love their decorative drawing style (bursts of flowers occurring behind characters on every other page), attention to detail on characters clothing, ability to go from serious to light-hearted, and their sweet and engaging storylines.
Cardcaptor Sakura is my favourite manga that they did...


But I do have others! Such as Chobits (2001-2002)...

This was a bit more of a raunchy affair (in some parts) from the CLAMP girls and all together more grown up and thoughtful than their other works, with the storyline attempting to tackle the complex problem of "love" between human and machine (not as pervy as it sounds)! I particularly like the change in inking style compared to that used in CCS - the lines have more fluidity about them which gives the artwork a sense of spontaneity... and I likes me some of that!

And theres Angelic Layer (1999-2001)...

This story was more aimed at children, hence it had a lot more comedic scenarios in it than in most CLAMP novels I've read - I enjoyed how the style of drawing would completely change depending on the tone of the scene.

And there is Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles (2003-2009)...

This is probably CLAMP's most epic manga series, the story completed after a whopping 28 novels! (I'm ashamed to say I didn't even make it to 10)! But still, I was pretty darn excited about this series as we said hello again to characters from a variety of CLAMP's other works (the CLAMP universe); the two main characters being Sakura and Syoran Li from CCS (I was a rather massive fangirl of the pairing back in the day...and still kind of am...they're just so darn cute)!
And what made it more interesting was that this series was drawn alongside another manga series, in which the two stories would ocassionally join togther - encouraging a reader to buy both sets of manga to get the most out of the two stories. Thats clever marketing, I tell ya! xxxHolic (2003-2011) was about a mystical alcohol-loving lady and a young man solving all sorts of spooky and unnatural happenings in the area. It was pretty good, but again I was not loyal to the series and stopped reading after a few books... I'm sorry!


And oh, there are so many other CLAMP works too! But they're just a few of the mangas I enjoyed in my youth, here are a couple of others I liked too: Fushigi Yuugi, Marmalade Boy, Dragonball, Magic Knight Rayearth, Imadoki, Love Hina (oh, thats such a funny manga! I'd totally forgotten how much me and my sister used to love it)! So there we go. Self-indulgent manga waffles complete. I think I may have to go back and take a gander at some of those books again.