Our Friends
Brown Bag artist Phil McDarby opens his first solo exhibition next Wednesday 18 April at 6:30-8pm, at the Copper House Gallery (off Synge Street), Dublin.
Titled ‘Into The Greenwood Deep’, the exhibition includes many of Phil’s beautiful artworks featuring a magical woodland populated by benevolent dragons and mythical spirits.
Click on all images to enlarge
] Read ArticleWorking as Animation Director on Doc McStuffins has been a real treat! It’s such a fun and energetic show, not to mention beautiful-looking. By the way, excuse me for being so positive but I honestly can’t describe the production of this show any other way!
We had such a great team on this show – firstly, Chris Nee, the creator of the show who is a a great comic writer. Director...
] Read ArticleBACKGROUND DESIGN - SETTING THE SCENE!
Progress has been going very well on ‘Bird Food’ and lots of animation has started coming through. We are all getting very excited by it.
I have talked about the living characters in previous posts but there is another character that is inanimate but still very important: The Set.
Sets and Locations are really important to the story and...
] Read ArticleOkay, so I used the title to try to get a pun in there nice and early and failed miserably. Pretty much exposed* my lack of imagination. So, yeah, off to a great start…
Pushing on regardless, and with little or no regard for your sanity or any kind of clarity, I’m going to muddle through an explanation of the photos I have posted below.
Recently, Brown Bag very kindly offered to run an...
] Read ArticleCHARACTER DESIGN - RATS OF THE SKY!
The Pigeon designs for ‘Bird Food’ were always going to be difficult.
We wanted to create something that stood out as being original, but as there have been so many animated version of our feathered friends it was always going to be a challenge.
The first thing that you should always look at when designing a character that is based on an existing...
] Read ArticleCHARACTER DESIGN - THE CREATION OF MAN!
Apologies for the lack of making-of posts recently but as you will read we have been very busy and lots of things have been checked off our extensive to-do list…
In the last post we saw how the Man’s design was being redesigned for the better by Nicky Phelan. Well now we can reveal the final version of the man!
Here he is in lovely 2D...

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CHARACTER DESIGN - THE EVOLUTION OF MAN!
Just like a script is never complete on the first draft, the same goes for the character designs. To get to the final version you will always do designs and redesigns until you are happy with them.
The starting point of designing the character is always to read the script. This will give you all of the clues you need to start going about...
] Read ArticleWhat is a texture artist and what is texturing?
Texture Artists are essentially individuals that paint using software like Photoshop to create textures. Texturing is the process of painting colour and depth onto digitally-generated 3D models’ skin or surface.
Textures are usually 2D images called maps overlaid onto a polygon mesh. The Texture Artist receives work on a 3D polygon model...
] Read ArticleThe day usually starts off around 7.30am (what can I say, I’m a morning person!). It gives me a chance to catch up with all the odds and ends and emails i really should have read and replied to the day before. Most people in Brown Bag know that if they need something from me they should come find me and give me a friendly poke with a sharp stick.
Then I will spend half an hour or...
] Read Article8:30am. I arrive in to the studio early as I live in the countryside (Clane, to be precise) and the next bus will have me in late. There’s Derek, our 2d concepts artist, also in early to learn 3d in his spare time. I’ll just hide behind my monitor so I don’t get a torrent of questions about the model he’s working on! Sign into our timesheet software and I’m ready for the day.
8:32am....
] Read Article

