Jessica Wainwright

19 July 2013

Life Drawing at The Tobacco Factory and Some Exciting News!

I've only gone and got myself an interview for the Character Animation course at Aarmdan I was talking about a couple of posts ago! How exciting! I'm also completely crapping myself as the interview is supposed to be 45 minutes long and I just don't know what to expect.

If anyone has any nuggets of advice of what I should take or what I cant expect, I beg you: please divulge!

In the meantime, here are some of my drawings from Monday's life drawing session:

01 July 2013

Life Drawing at the Tobacco Factory

Tonight I finally went along to the Tobacco Factory's Life Drawing session. I've been meaning to go for ages, but it's the 1st and 3rd Monday of every month and other things were keeping me busy so I made sure to dedicate this evening, plan nothing, even swapped my shift at work so I could have the day off rather than work until 9pm so I could attend.

Here are my drawings:

5 minute pose with a contour drawing

5 minute pose

40 minute pose

45 minute pose

I was quite surprised at how well my eyes told my brain to tell my pencil what to do! There were a couple of dodgy feet and hands here and there, but over all I'm pleased with what I came away with tonight. I am especially fond of the back muscles in the last drawing.

Also, on my way home I went to Tesco to have a rummage through the bargain shelf and was so excited to find a pomegranate for 25p! Then someone outside the shop asked if I had change for some food, which I don't hence the bargain shelf rummaging, so I gave her my pomegranate instead... I'm such a fool!

20 June 2013

New Showreel

This week I've had a little break from Bristol to come to stay at my parents house up north. I've spent most of my time hanging out with this little dude:

But I've also had some time to work on getting myself a career and have found a 3 month Certificate in Character Animation course at Aardman Studios through the NFTS which sounds like my idea of heaven and would be an amazing opportunity to improve my technical ability. I've been working on my application and today I finished my showreel which can be viewed here:

Animation Showreel, June 2013 from Jessica Wainwright on Vimeo.

I would love to specialise purely in stop motion animation, but after exporting my showreel I realised I definitely haven't had enough practise, which is why I believe the course will do me the world of good. During university, the first year and a half was dedicated to character performance in hand drawn animation, which was great for learning movement, timing, squash and stretch, but my characters would always unintentionally morph and I would get bogged down trying to keep the shape, loosing the fun of the animation itself. In my second year, we had 5 weeks of stop motion practise with Rhodri Lovett and I found it so refreshing just focusing on movement and found the art of lip syncing especially captivating so from there have been working predominantly in stop motion.

Eeeep!! I hope I'm accepted onto the course so I can get animating again. I'm so excited I cannot even possibly begin to imagine how amazing this would be!

17 June 2013

Three quick doodles:

Follow me on Instagram: @jeswaino

18 April 2013

Last night I went along to the Show Me The Animation, Animation Night with Peter Lord at The Cube Cinema. It was a 'behind the scenes' type presentation (always hugely fascinating) of Aardman's latest feature film, The Pirates, in which Pete discussed everything from the storytelling, script writing, character making, set designing, animating and CGI-ing.

Peter Lord explaining the mechanisms in Captain Pirate

Four out of hundreds of Captain Pirate's mouth shapes

Whilst there, I bumped into Joseph Wallace, who graduated from Newport the year after me, and we had a good old catch up. I have been waiting a year and a half to see Joe's graduation film, The Man Who Was Afraid of Falling and he finally released it online a few days ago. I always enjoy obviously handmade aesthetics and I come away from this film with a completely non-obtrusive, feel good interpretation.

Joe Wallace // Peter Lord

These kind of events always give me a good shake up and I come away buzzing and itching to animate. It's also a really easy way to meet other animators, swap stories and contact cards. I feel well an truly feel out of the loop right now, so I will be keeping an eager eye out for future events.

Dan Emmerson // Ben Mitchell // Joseph Wallace // Kat Michaelides

15 October 2012

As annoying as it is to find Christmas stuff in shops before Halloween, if you're looking for a unique, personal and lovely gift for someone for the festive period, please check out the sewing side of my creative abilities here.

springjingle@rocketmail.com // www.springjinglecrafts.blogspot.com

06 August 2012

Last weekend I took a trip to Bristol and whilst there, visited the museum with my sketch book to draw some taxidermy. It feels like I hardly every draw since leaving uni so it was lovely to just sit in the quiet and put pencil to paper. These are some of my favourites:

Ocellated Turkey (Meleagris ocellata) // Swinhoe's Pheasent (Lophura swinhoii) // American Darter (Anhinga anhinga)

Domestic Fowl (Gallus gallus) // Golden Pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus)

Indian Peacock (Pavo cristatus)