You live in the UK, you know what a pantomime is! A family comedy theatre performance, with audience participation, usually based on folk tales, with local / lower level celebrities in some parts. “Panto” for short. They show up during the Christmas season; Aladdin is currently running in Halifax, while Bradford’s Alhambra is going with Peter Pan.
Now that I’ve opened with ‘Panto season coincides with the Christmas season’, I’ll start the double bill with Pantoland’s Got Talent… which was performed in Spring.
Act One: Pantoland’s Got Talent
Pantoland’s Got Talent was a completely original play, the writing debut for a member of Shipley Little Theatre. It featured all the denizens of Pantoland putting on a talent show.
For an Illustrator / vector advocate, quite a lot of this was made in Photoshop for the effects… then layered back in to Illustrator.
Lauren is an editor by day, author by night. An old friend, she’s been co-writing one of my (eternally in development) comics. Lauren’s been compiling a collection of short stories with her friends and peers, which is about ready to self-publish. The cover art was already sorted – I was called in for the publisher’s logo. That final pro touch in the bottom corner, you know?
Being fascinated with history and archeology, she decided on a Celtic style. Plenty of research was done via Google Images (filtering out the Scottish football team of the same name), finding a surprising amount of ancient finely-carved nudity.
Click for the full uncropped image if you really want to see a bull’s, ahem, “bullocks”.
We agreed that a face / mask would be neat. Lauren liked the Lord of Glauberg statue… but the product needed to work on laymans like me. The Lord reminded me of Mugatu from Zoolander, so was vetoed.
Now THERE’S a comparison you didn’t expect to see today.
The winner of this round was a Celtic horned god of nature, known as… *checks spelling* …Cernunnos. That’s him at the top of this post, on the same artefact you can find that bull.
…said the March Hare to the girl wearing a pinafore. Lots done, and lots to do.
The Bradford University Society of Operettas and Musicals (BUSOM) hold their 24 Hour Show this month. They enter the New Bradford Playhouse on October 10th, learning that evening what musical they’ll be performing a scant 24 hours later. It’s exciting, it’s team-building, and it’s funny if the actors mess up due to sleep deprivation (in a charming way).
I need an un-lined notepad!
There’s only a handful of ways to do a logo for a 24 Hour Show, and they’ve all been done a dozen times over. Being original is hard, but worth having a crack at!
Regular collaborator John (he of Final Boss Fight) is always expanding his media network; the latest from his team is Nerd Night, a tabletop gaming podcast. Like comics are so much more than Superman, tabletop games are way more than Cluedo.
‘Nerd’ always makes me think of Homer shouting it in The Simpsons. Me and many of my friends are nerds, it’s fine. I’ve lived with several people who play tabletop games / card games / pen-and-paper RPGs, and they’ll often get a set out whenever groups come to visit – Last time it was a few rounds of the interesting but unpronouncable Hnefatafl, then watching them conquer Europe’s rail network in Ticket to Ride.
Hi. So, how are you keeping? Around exchanging time for money, i’ve been doing these odds and ends.
One picture, based on a scene from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was mothballed in 2009 after reasonable progress but unsatisfactory results. Now it’s being reworked – The characters have been re-drawn, while the background and border are next. Quick preview:
A Hungry Hungry Hippogriff.
I also have a new typography piece based on Minecraft, uploaded to DeviantArt here. A black background looks fine but boring, whereas dark green makes it all a bit muddy. It currently lives in anticipation of a better solution being cooked up.
An ongoing thing has been the branding for games-and-comics news site Final Boss Fight. It turns out i’ve mentioned this before, but now the site’s running properly and i’ve made additional images. I even helped out with the camera work / logistics at the Manchester MCM Expo, which was nice.
The earlier examples have at last been added to the Illustrations page, along with a pic from my Puffin Digital Prize entry (see this post).
The Indie image is based on Commander Video, fact fans.
The second tick-over is again Minecraft-related (play it, it’s fun): A texture pack.
The textures default at 16×16, so it teaches pixel art & “economising” at the best of times. In addition, the pack i’ve been updating is in the style of the original Game Boy handheld: This means working in 4 colours. Some of the textures are taken from Game Boy games – some are modified from the defaults – some are completely new. Anywho, it is called CraftBoy, and this is where it lives.
This is the default texture pack…
…and this is what CraftBoy does.
Finally, this site’s seen a slight header update, code fixes and item shuffling, as always.
