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These pictures illustrate a book I wrote called Sugar. I used a lot of different effects to add warmth and depth including halos for the sunlight, ray-traced reflections and shadows, and subsurface scattering. I also used Blender to mock-up the page layouts you see here.
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If The Coterie was ever finished it would have a prologue, and this is one of the pictures that would illustrate it. It is in black and white because this part of the story happened long, long ago. This picture won me a prize at a local exhibition.
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I used to love dinosaurs as a child, so I thought I would do some dinosaur pictures. The Stegosaurus is the most recent picture in the series, but the Brachiosaurus is still my favourite.
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These pictures are inspired by an idea my friend had for a picture book about opening birthday presents. They are designed to fill a single page.
I wanted these pictures to look a little different from my other recent work. I used a lot of ambient lighting to give a soft appearance to my character.
Tutorial Simple Skin using Material Settings and Ramp Shading
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These are pictures of non-threatening monsters designed to go across the double page of a picture book.
I used toon shaders again, but with softer shading between the diffuse and specular shaders. One new thing I tried was using Blender's motion blur to give the impression of movement - on Spooky Spire I animated the leaves to move past the camera to make them look more like they are being blown in the wind.
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With this series I was working on illustrations suitable for black and white printing in paperbacks.
I decided to use textures for the facial features to make it easier to change the characters' expressions. These images were rendered using Blender's toon shaders and ray shadows, with some post-processing to smooth the shadow edges and add effects.
Tutorial Positioning Image Textures using Empties
Tutorial Toon Shading
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I began this series in September 2003 after reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights. The book is so beautifully descriptive that I had a clear picture of what everything looked like before I began. Pullman's own lovely illustrations, the inch square, black and white ink drawings that begin each chapter, were useful starting points - I wanted to be sympathetic to these.
I really wanted to create illustrations that would live up to Philip Pullman's excellent imagery, and I used every technique I knew to make them. These pictures took longer to produce than I would have liked although the time I spent, working out how to achieve the various effects, was definitely worthwhile.
Tutorial Creating Fur using UV Texture Mapping
Tutorial Texturing Skin using Vertex Painting and Repeating Image Textures
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This illustration is designed to go across a double page of a picture book, with the title and first verse of the poem on the right hand page. Here, I was particularly concentrating on the layout, and in getting fine detail into the textures.
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These illustrations were produced between October 2001 and August 2003 for a book I was writing called The Coterie. The first picture, The Three Witches, is intended to be the cover of the book. The title and author would go at the bottom.
I used everything I could to bring these pictures to life, and I think their strength lies in the design of the characters and the attention to details like the designs on the T-shirts.
In May 2005 I worked on these pictures again, touching up bits of the models that I thought could be improved and making the colours brighter. Mostly, I wanted to render them again using Blender's ambient lighting, which wasn't available at the time of making the original renders.
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