Nickelodeon Pitch

Nickelodeon are hosting a competition where people can pitch character designs, story ideas, scripts etc. for a series of one minute shorts to be developed for their channel.

The deadline is the 30th of March and I thought that this would be a good live brief to undertake to flex my character design skills for children's television and have the chance to get my work looked at by a major children's television broadcaster. I am putting this small project ahead of all my other work for now as I believe it is the most important.

I am going to be developing ideas with a couple of colleagues of mine; James Hatley and Harry Slinger-Thompson.

Here is a small page of doodles to get me going. I had this idea of two characters that live by a pond, a frog and a fish.

Current illustrators.

Luke Pearson - Everything We Miss

Patrick McEown - Hairshirt

I have looked at some illustrators that are very up and coming at the moment. Luke Pearson and Patrick McEown have recently started having their graphic novels published and are both gaining great followings. What I love about Luke's work, is he is quite minimalist with colour, with the dark shadows and highlights making his images instantly more dramatic reflecting the dismal nature of the subject. Patrick's images however, are quite the opposite, he is not careful with his line at all, attacking the page with ferocious line strokes all over. He isn't afraid to warp the characters and imagery and I would love to incorporate some of this into my illustration. I think a nice marriage of the two styles would work wonders.

ZOMBIES!

I have been recently calling upon imagery from classic zombie b-movies to inspire my project. There is something about the bold reds and contrast in these films that has such character and impact. Not only do I want to incorporate a lot of the colour palette into my work but also reference the posing and staging of the monsters and people in this imagery. I collected these images from my book; 'An Encyclopaedia of Zombie Cinema' and from watching old Lucio Fulci flicks.