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Final display for assessment

Here’s my final display for the end of year assessment including work from The World Building In Animation brief and my contributions to the group project for the Re-Invention in Storytelling brief.

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Final Mini Me Animation for World Building in Animation Brief

Yesterday I finished editing my mini me animation. I used Adobe photoshop to remove the green screens, Adobe Animate for the animation, and Adobe Media Encoder for the audio. I spent an excruciatingly long amount of time editing this because I struggled a lot with Adobe Animate however I think the struggle was worth it in the end because I’m very happy with how this turned out and I feel more confident using Adobe software now. The background and mini me were my attempts at replicating children’s book illustrator Shirley Hughes style.

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Final Pitch for Nursery Rhyme Project - 11/4/25

My group decided that we were going to make a PowerPoint presentation for our final pitch. We included very little writing in the PowerPoint so that we could have the chance to explain each section ourselves. We assigned roles of what we would talk about the day before, it was my job to talk about the rural town I designed known as The Creek, the colour pallete for the rural town, and the reasoning for props such as the street lights in the rich city The Hill. I had fun working on this group project over the course of 3 weeks. It was a good opportunity to work as a group and I think we worked very well together!

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Mini Me Project - Preparation for editing

Yesterday once I had finished working on my mini me, I had to photograph my mini me and all the mouth shapes I’d made infront of a green screen. The purpose of this was to allow me to remove the background of the green screen in editing and put in the background I made weeks ago of the park in an attempt to replicate Shirley Hughes style.

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Mini Me Project

It was recommended to me yesterday by a tutor that I should stick some orange paper to the back of my mini me because the pipe cleaners I had used to make the hair left a lot of blank spaces. These blank spaces could cause problems when editing as I need to photograph my mini me infront of a green screen which means that the green would show up in all the spaces inbetween the hair.

Before adding the orange paper, I decided to go back over my mini me’s hair in brown, black, and grey markers to emphasis the sketchiness I was trying to create within the hair. I think the hair looks better now that it’s less vibrant and it fits into Shirley Hughes style more than it had before.

Once I stuck the orange paper to the back of my mini me I used my phone camera to see how it’d look and I’m very happy with the result. I hope this will make the edit process much less complicated when I get to editing on Thursday.

Before the orange paper (left) and after adding orange paper (right)

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Mini Me project - mouth shapes

Once I finished making my mini me yesterday I moved onto making the mouth shapes I’d need for my chosen sentence “Sorry, I fell asleep.” I had to record myself saying this sentence in another room with a blanket over my head to prevent the audio from echoing.

I ended up with 11 mouth shapes for my mini me’s sentence. I’m excited to edit these onto my mini me soon as the final task of this project.

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Mini Me project

Today I began to paint my mini me with gouache paint. Once the first layer of paint dried I added a second layer of gouache to the shirt to try capture the sketchy appearance that Shirley Hughes gives to clothes. After observing her illustrations I’ve learned that she creates this sketchy appearance by using messy strokes of different tones from the main colour of the clothing. The main colour of my mini me’s shirt is red so I added some messy dark red brush strokes and some orange and yellow to make the shirt less plain looking.

Once I finished painting my mini me I added facial features in the style of Shirley Hughes. I tried to make a rounded nose similar to the reference I was using of a Shirley Hughes character facing the camera. The nose looks longer than I anticipated however I’m still happy with the piece.

(Examples of the Shirley Hughes work mentioned in this post)

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Mini Me Project

Once I had the base of the mini me done, I moved onto making the hair. I used fuzzy pipe cleaners for the hair so I could bend them to create the waves of my hair. This was a very tedious process as I had to curl every pipe cleaner one by one.

Once I had the hair on the sides done I had to fill in the space at the top of the head. After many failed attempts at making hair for the top of the head I decided to wrap fuzzy pipe cleaners around a small section of the cardboard from kitchen roll and slide it into the space. I plan to go over the hair with some different coloured markers to give the hair the sketchy look that’s featured in Shirley Hughes illustrations (examples below).

Thankfully this method worked out so the base of my mini me is officially done. My next aim is to make mouth shapes for my chosen sentence and to paint the mini me so it’ll resemble Shirley Hughes illustrations.

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Mini Me Project

Today I started to make a mini me that would be in the style of my chosen Illustrator, Shirley Hughes, who’s style I studied a few weeks ago.

My main goal for today was to make the base, I’ll stylise it to match Shirley Hughes work when I paint over it tomorrow.

I started off with trying to make a support structure for the head because I was planning on surrounding it paper to get a smooth surface for the face but it didn’t work out as the shape wouldn’t hold.

After this attempt failed I tried to make the head again, this time from card paper with cardboard support on the inside. Thankfully this way worked out as the head kept its shape. Once I had this part of the head made I tore out paper from my sketchbook to cover the space where the face and back of the head. The sketchbook paper is much softer than card which made it easier to stick down the paper where the spaces were since it was more flexible.

After finishing the structure for the head I began working on the shoulders/chest. I made this by cutting out a piece of cardboard then making two cardboard arches for each shoulder with a strip of cardboard connecting them together for support. I covered this structure in brown paper tape because it seemed less complicated than working with card paper or regular paper and trying to make it fit. I think it was less complicated however pieces of tape kept peeling so it took a while to make the structure secure.

Once the body was done I made a neck out of the cardboard from kitchen roll to connect the body to the head. I also covered over the head and neck with brown paper tape to match the body. I’m going to paint over this anyway so I wasn’t too concerned about all the tape strips being visible. I was more concerned about the tape peeling off but eventually I had it securely stuck down in the important areas such as the front where the face will be. I also added a rounded nose which is seen in Shirley Hughes illustrations when a character is facing the viewer. I’m going to display it clearer once I add colour to the piece.

(Example of Shirley Hughes character facing the viewer/camera)

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Final Preparations for Pitch

Yesterday my group and I focused on preparing for our pitch. We decided to make some paper puppets to make our pitch more visually interesting and entertaining without being unprofessional. Emily made the drawings of Jack and Jill and Kinga made the drawing of the warehouse robot. Then I cut out the front side of Jill.

Afterwards we decided that our pitch would be presented in the form of a PowerPoint. Our last bit of preparation was deciding who would discuss what so we each assigned ourselves roles about what we’d discuss in the pitch.

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Fota Wildlife Trip

On April 8th the AMD 2025 class went on a trip to Fota Wildlife to observe the animals and do some drawings of them. I really enjoyed this trip because it was basically a whole day of walking around out in the sun just drawing animals. I made quick drawings of certain animals I saw when I was walking around, some of my drawings like the rhino may have been done a little too quickly but I still enjoyed myself.

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Mastershots

Yesterday my group and I made some mastershots. We did this by combing all 5 of our drawings together across the 3 mastershots in small cutouts like a collage. I think these turned out very well as it was cool to see our art mixing together. I drew the yellow street light in the first master shot as props like the water pump, rural town build board and guns aren’t present in the city shots in our storyboard.

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On Monday 7th of April my group and I finalised our designs from last week. My task was to finish designing the props. The first prop I designed were guns for the robots which I based off random toy water guns and a gun from Logan’s run.

(My design)

I chose to make the guns blue to match the colour pallete we decided on for the warehouse as a group. The guns aren’t featured too much in the story so I made two for some slight variation but overall I think the second design is best.

Once I showed the group my designs and we were all happy with it, I moved onto touching up my design of the street lights in our storyboard that dispense water. I had made a rough version of what the street lights would look like in different parts of the cities that have different colour palettes but the design felt kinda bland to me.

(Rough version of street lights)

I was inspired by my group member Ciara yesterday when she rounded out the bottom of a street light in a background she was drawing for a master shot of the city. I replicated this design just to show what we’ve settled on as our final design for this prop.

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Updated rural background designs

Since my group and I cut out colours from marker swatch cards to make up our colour pallete, I decided to switch mediums and use markers rather than the colouring pencils I had previously been using. I think using the same medium helped tie the rural backgrounds and rich city backgrounds together nicely as they look more consistent with each other despite the contrast of their colour palettes. I am much happier with my new rural designs as having a set colour pallete to follow made it much easier for me to make each background flow into the next and make them seem like they are from the same environment.

Originally my reason for using colouring pencils was to give the rural city a sketchy style to make it seem more run down. Once I started using markers I strayed away from this idea and I think it was for the best as my backgrounds look much clearer in my opinion. However I still tried to make the dried grass look a little sketchy as I liked how the sketchy dried grass came out in my previous design.

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Colour palletes for our locations

Today my group and I came up with some colour palettes for the main locations in our story, the rural city, rich city, and the warehouse. We wanted the rich city to be vibrant and colourful while the rural city is dull and dreary. As for the warehouse, we decided that we’re going to scatter hints of blue all across the city as a way to show that everything ties in to the water warehouse. I think sitting down and coming up with a colour pallete for these locations was very helpful as I had been struggling with the rural background designs up until this week because I felt that I was making them too vibrant for such a dreary place. My plan is to redo all my rural backgrounds in the new colour palette to see how consistent it looks.

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Rural background designs - Barren Landscape attempt

Yesterday I decided to attempt the barren landscape Jack and Jill are seen walking through in my groups storyboard as they exit their town and make their way to the rich city. My group and I decided that Jack and Jill are going to leave their town at dusk so it’ll be night by the time they arrive at the rich city which will make the colours pop. I’m unhappy with how this came out as I think I made it way too vibrant for a barren landscape. I tried to save time by using alcohol markers as a base then scribbling over them in colouring pencils to give it the sketchy look. Using the markers is definitely what resulted in the landscape looking so vibrant however I do like how the sand in the foreground looks by using this technique. I’m going to recreate this design and dull down the vibrancy of the landscape. Overall I’m happy that I attempted designing this landscape as I was able to use this to identify what I’ve done wrong and how it could possibly improve.

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Rural background designs - Cabin on the outskirts of town

Once I had finished drawing my design of the rural town, I decided to draw a cabin Jack and Jill walk past in our storyboard as they get closer to exiting their town. For this cabin design I looked at pictures of wooden cabins and 1970s rural cabins. I combined the images together to create this design as I referenced the second image for the shape of the cabin and merged the balconies of the 1st and 3rd picture to make a new one.

Overall I’m happier with the cabin design than I am with my rural town design.