Belated Earth Day Earthlings

Happy belated Earthday, earthlings! Here's a cup'o'doodle of a new project I'm working out right now!:) Everyone has a Family tree.

Also, this fall I'm moving onto a new adventure, making some dreams come true! 2013 has thrown me upside down, but it's pretty nice. 

(sorry if you've already seen this lol, it hadn't made it's way to blogger yet)

Bee-yolk

Me and my good friend Raquel saw our favourite, Bjork in Paris Last month.... She kind of blew my mind

Check out this video from the show I went to. She uses a lightning gun, tesla coil contraption to play the bass line...

She's doing her final shows in California next month and I encourage anyone to go, if only for the fact that David Attenborough narrates the concert.

P.s. (not my vid)

Swamp bottom

I only paint once in a blue moon, because I have no idea what the hell I'm doing, but figured it's time i sucked it up and started to learn how to do this thing. I think I can count the times I've done a rendered environment on one hand:S
Again, this is some development from a uni project I'm working on.

2013 Portfolio

So I spent the last few days completely reconstructing my portfolio, condensing, rescanning, tidying, nitty gritty erasing, nurturing and reformatting, but I now think I have a body of 2013 work. A portfolio is NEVER finished...BUT I think I can sit back and chill for the time being! The last year has been pretty crazy and I recently ended up immersing myself in so much work that I kind of burnt out, but I took a bit of time to come up to the surface and breath so I'm more pumped then ever to work my ass off! Never forget to take a bit of time for yourself, because no one else will do that for you.   James Woods 2013 Portfolio

Swamp womp wompppp

More of my swampy critter. He’s a bit frog-ier than I would like. I need to explore some more!:)

And a quick old lighting test I've had lying around!

Reviving the swampy

An old projet revival... I'm all over the place right now

Overshot

Happy Valentine's, MWAH X

500 Thanks

A post to say thank you so much for the 500 follows

I'm totally dumbfounded but sincerely and humbly grateful to have people interested in my work, so thanks:)!

I'm just getting into the first strokes of my newest and final university project and this is a sneak at a potential character in the works. I don't really have much else to say about it apart from the fact that the 'D' on the flag is the roman numeral for 500?

Also, you can check out my ramblings in a recent interview I did for the Animation Insider website! A super resource of artist experiences, in (or hoping to get into) the animation industry.

As per usual here are some instagrams of doodles and life drawings as of late. My username is 'Jamwooders' if you're interested in hitting me up!

Life and Movement

Some quickie life drawings from a recent session...

A year ago today, I was interning and animating my ass off (never worked so harddd) at Uli Meyer's amazing, mini, magic studio in London. Whilst there I was animating my first ever lip sync test of a character from one of the cereal commercials Uli's team had worked on... I haven't animated anything for months now and am starting to reallly miss it... There's something about working yourself into a nervous, dillusional wreck at the expense of  making your drawings come to life that gave me the biggest buzz... Maybe it's time I got back to it? 

Here are some of the keys... I can't believe how off model this guy got at points...

It feels kind of weird posting work that seems so 'old' to me now, but it's weirder that I've never really posted any animation on this blog, even though it's the reason why I want to get into this industry.

These Old Wrinkles

Some more Baba Yaga designs I managed to spruce up. This little old lady is a forest dwelling hag who lives in a hut built on chicken legs and rides around in a pimped out pestle and mortar. Cute, no?

Most of my current time is taken up with dissertation writing and turkey, so it took me a while to find the will to colour these. But here they are anyway =)! They also taught me how much I need to get to grips with colouring, because in all honesty, the line work spoke to me a lot more. Maybe I need to just strip it back, because these look a little burnt to me? Funnily, I actually like the bottom, black and white Baba Yagas the most. They're pretty simple and too the point. 

These characters are from the old folk tale, Vasila the beautiful. It's a classic fairy tale (pretty Cinderlla-ish actually), but it's been fun trying to come up with characters.

Here are some rough lines to boot,

As a side note, I have a tumblr and twitter if you're interested in my ramblings (links are under my 'shameless self promo' section on the right)