It's a Toilet, not a Trashcan - Don't flush weird stuff down the toilet!

As part of an effort to stop the public from flushing disinfectant wipes and other non-poop, pee, blood stuff, I created the concept for a series of ads for the Capital Regional District, along with the CRD Environmental Services department. These ads were shown as movie theatre posters & mirror stickers, traditional ads, web ads and YouTube pre-roll.

The creative inspiration for this ad was to play with the idea that people often like to draw with marker in public toilet stall, so the text here is illustrated in a marker style.

The base image was chosen after looking at hundreds of toilets on stock (I can tell you WAY too much about toilets now! For example, did you know that the curving pipe shape at the side of some toilets make some people uncomfortable?) and then applying the illustrations with Procreate on the iPad with an Apple Pencil. Later, the procreate images were traced in illustrator to turn them into vector images, so that we could work with infinite scalability but still keep that sketchy style.

Awesome actor Sean Tabares gave his voice to the pre-roll! He’s the best. IG @seantabares

I’m grateful the CRD gave me the creative room to play with different media, including this hand-animation using Procreate. This was part of an instagram story.

What it looks like to work in onion layers in Procreate animation mode (below).

Click to view my other professional works.

iNaturalist Biodiversity Challenge 2021

In 2021 I was I had the privilege of participating in the promotion of the Capital Regional Districts new exploration of using iNaturalist to encourage community awareness about biodiversity as part of the Environmental Protection department. This was also the first time that were able to use instagram to it’s full potential, by using not only instagram and Facebook, but instagram stories as well.

Note: This was part of my work as part of the capital regional district (the regional government in southern Vancouver Island). To view other corporate items, view my graphic design portfolio.

Trans Visibility Day animation

This year I’ve done more to educate myself about trans issues (not trying to pat myself on the back here!) I was inspired to make this little animation, especially because the butterfly metaphor can be apt. If you’re a trans or a parent of a trans kid in BC here is an informative website! lots of love, Jess.

Process: This animation was made purely in Procreate. The trail uses a “wild light” paint brush with half through, repeatedly crashed my iPad Pro. Who knew specialty brushes were so brain heavy??! This was my first time animating a butterfly, one good tip to remember is that butterflies don’t fly evenly, they do so sporadically, so it’s important to incorporate unevenness into your frames ie: don’t make every frame look the same, and make the butterfly stick in one position longer from time to time.

Animation - Character Rigging and Shower Guy!

Boy this winter has been long long looonggg. What have you been doing to keep busy? I’ve been working on learning and developing my motion design skills, and my biggest project so far was a water conservation animated YouTube ad, you can see a tiny clip of it in my Artist Blog 3 video, at time mark 8:44 sec.

How do you approach learning new skills? One of my favourite ways to learn a new skill is through a combination of Skillshare and Youtube. I tend to take a Skillshare class as my first base and then use YouTube to complement or troubleshoot since the response time on Skillshare isn’t very quick.

Here are some quick recommendations below:

Step 1: Into to After Effects and what you can use it for

Daniel Scott is a delightful, humorous, refreshing teacher and I thoroughly enjoyed his classes. Most teachers I’ve found are pretty good overall on Skillshare, but he’s two notches higher.

Skillshare Character Animation course by Fraser Davidson

Character Animation Creating Authentic Facial Expressions in Adobe After Effects

Professional Character Rigging & Design,

I used just a few parts of this course when I was trying to figure out how to change the face when moving the head side to side.

General Skillshare for After Effects

My big After Effects playlist on YouTube:

Character Rigging w/ Joysticks n Sliders

Bonus

How to create a cartoon water effect

Good quick tutorial if you ever attempt to move your file and everything breaks:

(The answer is go to “collect files” under dependencies first. Then, if you’re like me and compress files to move them, make sure you move them out of that compressed folder before you open them again, else everything will always seem broken.)

Bonus

Learning new things : Motion design in After Effects & advice on how to start

This winter I decided to take on something new by learning After Effects to dive more into Motion Design.

Those who have followed me for a while will know that I’ve done little animations before using Procreate to give some fun to what are otherwise static art pieces. (See my Magical Sunriver Map and Sassy cat examples.)

But After effects is a leap away from frame by frame animation which is very very very time consuming, and allows you to do certain things easier like camera panning. For example, when trying to show you different aspects of my magical map I needed to film my iPad and move it manually to different parts of my illustration. It was clumsy and I didn’t feel it was executed as well as it could be. So in after effects, you can achieve camera movements much more precisely. You can also capture different styles like flat vector animations easily and longer animations.

Inspiration + How am I learning?

To start I dove into Skillshare and Youtube (not sponsored, but you can see my playlist of interesting AE videos on my YT channel). One artist I was lead to which I absolutely love is SlimJim. Seeing his work inspires me to want to do some of my own, especially as some meshes with themes I like, such as travel, but putting my own interests of nature and biodiversity themes in there too. See my fave work from him below:

Is After Effects easy? No. Is it intuitive? Hell no. But not much worse than Illustrator. Once you grasp the concept of a simplified illustrator times the variable of time, it all starts to make sense.

I think this type of learning will especially appeal to feel like they are both right brain and left brain people. They love art but also like math and/or coding. Because there’s optional math and coding aspects to AE that will help you achieve the artistic vision you’re going after. (More on that another time.)

A simpler motion design - my first plant

Here is a little plant I made as a way of breaking down a much larger project into very small bite sized pieces. To do it I made the plant itself in Illustrator, made sure break each part that would move into different layers (each leaf w/ stem on a different layer) (ALWAYS NAMING MY LAYERS) and then importing it with layers intact into After Effects.

Then in After Effects I assigned a “Bend” effect to each leaf layer over time, telling each leaf which direction to bend in and for how long. For this animation I wanted each leaf to be a little unique from each other so they don’t all bend perfectly the same, making it a little more interesting.

I know, it’s spectacular. But I wanted to share with you my learning process so that it might inspire you to learn to. Artists don’t need to stick to one medium.

If you want to start in AE and already have a good base in Illustrator, I recommend a day or more of basic course exercises (my first was on skillshare) and then you can add random videos to support your learning.

For the above bend video, I used this class on YT:

Happy new year! May you have a very creative 2021.

Cheers,

Jess