It moves!

I have been working on an animated book trailer for a client recently. This gave me a good excuse to buy some new art pens and get drawing. But I was then faced with the realisation that I had to animate everything, which posed a whole new challenge in itself – but one which was soon solved, thanks to Photoshop's animation palette.

Although the effect I wanted was very simple (the "Parallax shift" effect), it was really exciting to suddenly see my piece of artwork come to life! And this got me thinking, why not look at animating some of my own artwork...

This kind of animation – at least the way I've done it – is reliant on your artwork being in layers, so that each object you wish to move is on a layer of its own. This was when I realised that some of my pieces were all painted on one layer, so there wasn't anything I could do. However, those were in the minority, as I usually save a layered version of a piece of digital artwork, should it ever need to be revisited.

So I went through my work and picked out the pieces I felt would work nicely, and set about having fun with them, and I'm really happy with the results. It's simply fascinating to see these scenes I'd spent hours working on, suddenly taking on a life of their own and becoming three dimensional!

So here it is, my SF&F art showreel – complete with my own music, which is a track called "Home", from my latest album, Panorama.