Artist Research

After reviewing previous advertisement campaigns we realised that a particular style or artist is chosen to spearhead such commercials, after doing some research I found a current example of such a marketing ploy. The bupa adverts have recently launched a series of short commercials using the creative influences and designs of Director Grant Orchard.

Regardless of its context this advert has a lasting impact upon the viewers mind because of its choice of bold, simple colours and its simplistic character designs. Squares, circles, triangles etc, these are the simple shapes that are animated to comic effect, its lack of detail allows for some playful animation and its financial strengths is that it seems very easy to produce. These are some of the principles we are hoping to incorporate into own designs.For some inspiration in regards to character designs I turned to some of my favourite illustrators for their iconic art style.

Quentin Blake is best known for his Roal Dahl illustrations which often look very loose, incorperates washed colour schemes and full of exaggerated anatomy.

These are some of the qualities that I hope to add into the design process, I particularly feel that alot of the principles of Animation can be seen throughout his artwork. The anatomy is used and manipulated for comic effect, the colour schemes are simplistic and even when crowded still carry a coherent feeling and, most importantly, the designs of the characters themselves are easy to duplicate when animating.

When studying Quentin Blake's illustrations I have picked out some things I shall include into my character designs. Eyes, in animation, can be a source of real frustration to an animator if focused too heavily upon e.g a particular scene can demand a specific amount of emotive language just from the eyes, but what I love about these drawings is the simplicity of the eyes, in some cases mere black dots, and how they can be used to save a huge amount of work and still work effectively in an animation.

Oliver Jeffers is another illustrator who shares some similarities to Quentin Blake in terms of their artistic styles but Jeffers caught my eye for a very different reason.

To break away from the mundane backgrounds often found in ullustrations, Oliver Jeffers instead used his backgrounds within the context of his stories. In his story 'The Incredible Book Eating Boy' it follows a boy who develops a strange eating habit of consuming books, throughout the story the illustrations appear to be created on various book surfaces ranging from hardback book covers to maths paper and then scanned in as the finshed image. This adds a wonderful layer to both the illustrations and the story and that sort of creative fun could be applied to our advert.