Star Wars Christmas Cards - In the Making

I have been toiling away the past few weeks on a set of new sci-fi cards that I want to introduce to my Etsy shop this winter (as well as a few other products), and I've finally nearly finished them! Here are a few Work In Progress shots - see if you can guess what world famous sci-fi film they're based from...

Sketching stage:

Experimentation stage:

Final style stage:

Computing Animations (storyboarding)

A few months ago, in the old Splinter Design, I storyboarded a small number of animations to be featured on the BBC Bitesize website. These animations aim to teach children learning at Key Stage 2 the basic principles of computer science.
I worked with Splinter's Head of Digital to storyboard 5 animations, each featuring a fun animal character with no clue about computer science! The viewer gets to watch the animals go through various "learning journeys" to try and learn more about the subject.
Here are a few shots of my storyboarding - this was a different way of storyboarding for me, as I just drew one large illustration which the camera panned down as the animation progressed. It was a fun way to do it for a change and definitely helped us focus on achieving a smooth flow to each animation!

And heres a little summary showreel I cobbled together for all of the animations:

BBC Computing Animations from Splinter Design on Vimeo.

So there we go, I really enjoyed working on these, as they were so different from storyboards I have worked on before.

Florida

Righto, this is just a bit of a photo splurge post, just to forewarn you all!
I may have mentioned in a previous blog post that I was fortunate enough to be invited on a trip to the old US of A, to no other than Disney World, Florida! Woah, all by childhood dreams coming true! What would my 7-year old self say now?

I really enjoyed my trip (my first time to America too)!, and I sampled lots of tasty food and saw some awesome stuff. So here is a a very small snippet of the things I saw and stuffed my face with whilst I was there!

These pancakes came with bacon, scrambled egg, hash browns and maple syrup. And it was as delicious as it looks, I tell ya.

I shook Uncle Sam's hand and I came out as a Socialite. I disagree with Uncle Sam there.

The floats in the Disney parades were pretty darn impressive, I imagine its so much fun being involved in the concept work for these things and then seeing it get made! I'd like to do that job!

This was probably my second favourite float for the film, Brave.

But then obviously the Maleficent Dragon is my favourite. Giant puppets always get my vote!

Diagon Alley! Wheee! This was amazing to see. Loved it.

I loved these shoe ornaments representing some of the lead female characters from Disney films. I wish I had bought one. They were so cool!

They even had villainess shoes!

Again. Delicious.

So there we go, photo splurge over! Back to regular business in the next blog post! Ahhh I could eat those pancakes right now.

Horseshoe Falls App

A few months ago I got to make a stylised hand drawn map for a new app called Horseshoe Falls.
Made at Splinter Design, the superb slickness of the app was brought together by the awesome skills of Curtis and Baz!
The app is designed for families who want to explore the Horseshoe Falls area (located in Wales) and learn more about its wildlife and history.

Overall I'm pretty happy with style of my map. It has that cosey hand-drawn aesthetic but its also clear and concise. Anyway, here it is:

So if you're planning a trip to the Horseshoe area, you can download the Horseshoe Falls app and learn some handy tidbits whilst taking your walk around!

Nafftastic bakes

Just a quick post to say I recently opened a tumblr dedicated to all the bakey things that I do in my spare time.
I currently have a goal to make a doughnut to match all of the characters from the epic show, Twin Peaks and then put the recipes in a little zine to sell! So if any of this sounds interesting to you, you can mosey on over to my new Nafftastic bakes tumblr to find out more!