Think you can throw your pencils away now that you have a micro? Ink again Earthlet! Brilliant.

You can see it and other maniacal MODOK’s here…

He is a serious nerd, writhing invisibly with power from some relatively cheap technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the vast Imperium of Awesomeness for whom a thousand lines of code are written every day. Yet even in his reclusive state, the illustrator continues his eternal search for commissions.

Vast armies paste stickers carrying His name on uncounted town centre wheelie bins. Greatest amongst his drawings are the Adeptus Astartes, bio-engineered super-warriors scanned, coloured and randomised using The Space Marine System…

Please note: These pictures are completely unofficial and in no way endorsed by Games Workshop Limited. I made this system purely for fun!

Ok, so now we’ve got some images on planes we want to animate them. We can do this already by adjusting the origin/registration point of each plane and keying some rotations like this…

…but arms that don’t bend aren’t very interesting! Setting up an arm out of two planes is an option, and one which might look good for a robot, but we want to deform the mesh and make the arm bend properly. For this we need to subdivide the plane a bit. Rather than use the subdivide button, which will subdivide both the length and width we want to use “Loop Cut and Slide” which is available using the shortcut of CTRL+R.

If you try and move the cut you will move the texture and we don’t want that… so you have to stick them in the middle and if that’s not where you want it you have to add another cut.

On this arm I don’t want the cut in the middle. I want to align it with the little elbow. So, I add an extra two cuts in. Luckily one of the cuts aligns nicely with the elbow. If this doesn’t work out straight away you can always adjust the texture so that it does. In my experience you need more than one cut to make an arm bend nicely.

Now we want to add an armature to control the movement and bend the arm. So, go to Add > Armature > Single Bone.

Arrange this bone so that it starts at the top (shoulder) part of the arm and ends where the elbow is. Then press tab to enter edit mode, select the elbow point and press E to extrude another bone. We want two bones – an Upper Arm bone and a Lower Arm bone.

Now we need to add some vertex groups so the armature knows which vertices to move with which bone. Open the Object Data tab, find Vertex Groups and click the plus (+) button. Assign the vertices by the LwrArm bone with the same name and make sure you click “assign”. Do the same with “UppArm” – So, now we have two bones called UppArm and LwrArm and two Vertex Groups (with the correct vertices assigned) with the same names.

To make this work all we need to do is parent the mesh to the armature. So, select the plane, select the armature and press CTRL+P and choose Armature Deform.

Because we’ve already named the vertex groups this should all work fine. So, hit CTRL and TAB to enter pose mode, select the LwrArm bone and rotate (press R). The mesh should deform nicely like this;

The only trouble is the arm doesn’t look very good unless the plane has a Subdivision Surface modifier. Go ahead and add one. I usually set both view and render to 3. Sometimes you have to watch out that the rounding of the plane doesn’t cut off any of your graphics. This one is a little close to the fingers. To stop that from happening I can add another cut a bit further up.

And here we have a perfectly deforming 2D arm.

Of course, you don’t just have to have two bones in an arm. Sometimes I like to have a character with a bendy arm. For this I usually make an IK chain and control the chain with a single bone, like this;

With these types of arms you have to place them behind the “body” plane. But what if you want to bend them in front? I usually make another copy of the arm which I bring in front of the body and then delete the upper/shoulder part, like this;

This will render well with an orthographic camera but not so well if you’re using a perspective one… unless the distance between the planes is very small.

Another way to bend planes is using curves and lattices. I used a curve on my Deki animation when I needed to make a plant grow. Here’s the plant…

And here’s the full animation;

…and there we go. That’s pretty much how I bend pictures and make animations. Enjoy!

Deki empower people living in poverty to create sustainable livelihoods by providing access to microloans and they were keen to see if we could explain this process using animation.

We came up with something which hopefully ticks all the boxes and encourages people to invest a small amount of money. Just a tenner could go a long way to helping a lot of different people and you can always claim it back at the end. Quite frankly it’s a brilliant idea!

Vashti Seth, Deki CEO, said “We are really pleased with the animation that Ian created for us. Ian came up with the concept by himself and kept us informed with his progress at all times. The animation explains what www.deki.org.uk does in a simple and informative, yet witty manner. We have had many positive comments and use it in all our presentations, as well as on the website – thank you Ian”.

And that’s not all… Deki held a re-launch event in October and showed the animation to a few people including their new patron… who just so happened to be none other than animation ultra mega-don Nick Park! I managed to grab a quick picture before Nick’s radioactive energy set-fire to the sofa – just look at it glow!

I mostly use Blender. Blender is an open source program capable of much awesomeness. If you’re completely new to Blender then you may want to go through some other tutorials first as this one will assume you’ve at least had a dabble and can do a few basics.

Here’s some links if you’re just starting out; Blender Tutorials / 47 Amazing Blender Tutorials / BlenderNation / Blender Artists

The core of my animation work is the humble plane. I map images onto planes and then animate the planes. Easy.

What we aim to do is stack up a few planes with a few body parts on so that we can animate them into a moving character, like this;

Since planes start life as a square and most of my drawings are not we need to prepare a plane so that we can render it with a transparent background. We don’t actually want to see the plane, only the image on it. Here’s how I do it…

EDIT: As a consequence of writing this tutorial I received a very helpful tip (see comments below) that shows how you can automate this process. Once you have your images ready, for a character I usually have a head, body, arm, leg, mouth and eyebrows, you can import them as planes using an add-on.

To enable the add-on go to File > User Preferences and select the Addons tab.

Click on import-Export in the left menu and then choose Import images as planes.

Put a check in the box in the top right next to the funny man.

Close the User Preferences Window.

Then choose File > Import > Images as Planes

If you are importing several images then put a check in All in directory.

Change the extension drop-down if necessary.

Then, for images like mine with a transparent background put checks in Shadeless, Use alpha and Premultiply.

Put one more check in Use image dimensions if you want to keep them the same size.

Then click Import Images as Planes… BOOM!

All your images are ready to roll. You just have to assemble them to make the character, like this;

Here is the manual set-up method which explains what’s happening…

Open Blender and delete everything.

Add > Mesh > Plane

I normally spin the plane around so I can see it face-on in front view.

Tab to enter edit mode (ensure all vertices are selected) then press U (on the keyboard) and choose unwrap.

Change from 3D view to UV/Image Editor or split the screen and open both.

Image > Open Image (or alt O)

Find your image and open it.

Now flick back to 3D view or don’t if you’ve split the view.

Switch Viewport Shading to textured and you should see a plane with your image on. Perfect!

This is what we want to view but now we also need to get it to render.

With the plane selected open the materials tab and click new.

The transparency on your plane will probably have gone black or white (or both!) but don’t worry we’ll sort that out later.

Now open the textures tab and click new on that too. You can name them if you like but if you’re lazy (like me) then you probably won’t bother. :-/

(In texture tab) Change type to image or movie.

Under the image panel click open.

Find your image and open it.

Put a check in premultiply (to get a nice anti-aliased edge) and another in show alpha under the preview panel.

Also, while in the texture tab, put a check in Alpha under influence.

Now go back to the material tab.

Change the preview type to flat.

In the shading panel put a check in the shadeless box (You don’t have to do this and can get some nice results by lighting the planes manually but shadeless is the quickest to set-up and render).

Put a check in transparency and set alpha to 0.

One last thing before you should render. The dimensions of the plane need to match the dimensions of the texture so exit edit mode and in object mode press N to bring up the transform properties. Set them to be the same.

Add a camera and line it up so it points at the plane and render!

This is all good… the only thing we need to do now is get the plane looking like it did in 3D view when we first loaded it (with the transparent background actually being transparent instead of black/white).

At the top change Blender Render to Blender Game. You will now have a new set of features in the material tab called Game Settings.

Find the Alpha Blend drop down and change Opaque to Alpha Blend.

The transparency should come back so that now you can stack planes up and view and render the same things.

This is the first tutorial I’ve ever done about anything so comments and criticism are welcome. Before writing I had a poke around on-line but couldn’t find anything the same. I found a few silent videos and one in Spanish so hopefully this is a clear step-by-step approach to producing 2D animation with the mighty Blender. Next time we’ll look at rigging the character and bending the planes. Good luck!

Communications and Marketing Manager for NHS Bristol, Lawrie Jones, said; “We gave Ian a blank canvas, outlined to him our problem and asked him to come up with something ‘creative’. Ian attacked the problem from a unique and innovative perspective, creating a piece of work that was witty, challenging and effective. Working with Ian has been pain-free and we will definitely use him for future campaigns.”

If you’ve not heard of Moo then they’re a printing company who offer a unique technology called “printfinity” – Which lets you print a different image on every item in a pack. You can print business cards, postcards, greetings cars and stickers.

Conjuring up 50 different images for a pack of stickers can be quite a challenge, until now. The Super Moo Sticker System does all the hard work for you… creating a completely unique Super Hero sticker in a single click.

This system also generates names but sometimes a name like “The Yellow Spirit” won’t match a hero with a purple costume so I’ve included an option to change that… or hide the name completely. You can also over-type it with a name of your choosing.

Note: The resolution is quite high so if your screen isn’t big enough to cope you’ll have to use your browser settings and zoom out a bit or scroll to see it all.

How to defeat crime…

• Generate some stickers
• Print them with Moo
• Stick them in some dodgy areas
• The awesome power of the stickers will scare criminals away – helping to reduce crime and clean up your neighbourhood!

Alternatively, you could buy some ready-made…

Ideally I’d like to become a super hero myself but I doubt very much if I could strike fear into the lawless without some serious weaponry… and, sadly, I’m not as wealthy as Bruce Wayne.

Instead I’ve devised a system to help would-be heroes come-up with appropriate costumes and names. Have a go – make a hero now… (requires Flash, a-ha Savior of the Universe)

Note: The resolution is quite high so if your screen isn’t big enough to cope you’ll have to use your browser settings and zoom out a bit or scroll to see it all.

Giclée Super Prints

To celebrate the release of the super system I’m selling off 10 limited edition A2 Super prints at the super special price of £35 for a limited time only. Since that price is clearly criminal it won’t stay that low for long. So don’t delay, order today…

Here’s some images. Enjoy!

Bristol City Council’s Tom Southerby said; “This fantastic animation helps inform young moped/scooter riders on the issues they face at junctions in a humourous and informative way. Ian’s work is always great at getting our key messages across to young riders and I would highly recommend his work for others targeting this age group”.