Complete with business cards and website (check it out it is very pretty) I have also been unleashed upon the unsuspecting animation industry, as of yet I have no concrete offers for any work, its all ifs and buts but I am hoping the London screening of the gradation films will present some opportunities.
In the meantime, to keep myself busy, and off the dole, I am embarking on a couple of projects. The first of these is my own solo project about a duo of assassins. The whole assassin thing serves as a backdrop to the main story which focuses on one of the pair and his struggle with his sexuality and bipolar disorder. The idea that he starts of as a suave gun-toting homosexual and gradually becomes increasingly unpredictable as the bipolar takes hold and he falls head over heals with his accomplice, who happens to be a girl. So far I have just about got the design down for this hitman bloke, yet to be named.
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I have tried to work in a lot of the exaggeration I experimented with in life-drawing, so he is quite lanky, which I quite like. In the first set of sketches I was finally starting to get a look down, after a lot of trail and error. I i am hoping that the vertical lines on his body will make make him seen even taller. Most of the pink picture was done in Photoshop, the gun is a tad big and the bottom of the suet bothers me but if I use this concept in the final piece that can be changed.
I am toying with the idea of setting the whole thing in the 60's as the character was influenced quite a lot by Sean Connery's portrayal of James Bond and I have access to a lot of books with pictures of crazy WWII weapons in, the sort of thing which would have been available on the black market at the time. There was also quite a lot going on in the world at this time which I could weave into the story; Cuba, assassination of JFK, fugitive Nazis, the IRA, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, we won the world cup, paranoia over Russia and a world-wide Communist Conspiracy, all kinds of stuff. If I do do this he may get a bit of a 60's makeover, we shall see.