Book Illustrations

For the book 100 nieuwe Taalspelen by Paul Rooyackers I made new illustrations and did the cover design.
I started out with the cover design for the book:





















I used Photoshop to make quick sketches and place the titles to get a general idea of the Cover. The author wanted another approach. A more rusty, vintage look with old books, paper notes and fountain pens.

So I started over and used a lot of photographs to composite a new cover. Fortunately, I have a lot of old books and an old Victorian Writing Desk. I took pictures of my writing desk and books and made some sketches and made this cover in Photoshop.
After that I made a cover spread with the Victorianwriting desk as a background:

Unfortunately the publisher did not like this design
He thought it was to dark for the targeted readers, so I had to come up with a new cover.
So I stripped away all the written notes and old scriptures and made an illustration in TV Paint
This is actually a great Animation Software for 2D animation, but I love the sketch and ink abilities of the program. In Photoshop I composited all the new elements and made the final Cover Design.
























The illustrations in for the inside of the book I drew entirely in TV Paint.








Since 3 years I try and draw, paint and animate everything digital. It is much faster and you are more flexible.

I also had to make Titles for the different chapters of the book:

Reading along with Miffy

I have worked on the small movie Reading along with Miffy together with Director John Croezen. It is a movie of 15 minutes, which will be released worldwide for broadcast.

We had to make the animation with the original drawings of the creator of Miffy, Dick Bruna.
We used Flash and Anime Studio Pro and used a cut-out technique, to stay true to the original illustrations. All the animation was later composited with After Effects.
The premiere of the movie was in Mozambique. The movie is part of a project to help collect money for third world countries. With the money they will built new libraries.

The movie is based on the book "Reading along with Miffy" Miffy is created by Dutch illustrator Dick Bruna. Miffy is very popular in Holland. The style is similar to Hello Kitty, but Miffy was created in 1955 long before Hello Kitty. It is no wonder that Miffy is very popular in Japan.

Animation for two Children Books

Voor Dutch Broadcast KRO Television I animated two childrenstories.

-Brave Bitsy and the Bear, a book by Angela McAllister and Tiphanie Beeke:

Excerpts from the movie Brave Bitsy and the Bear

I animated this movie in Anime Studio Pro. The original scans from the
beautiful illustrations by Tiphanie Beeke were cut-out in Photoshop and
imported into Anime Studio Pro. Since the book had 32 original
illustrations, I had to composite new backgrounds from these illustrations.
We were not allowed to draw new material and had to stay in style
of the illustrator.

- Balotje gaat op vakantie by Yvonne Jagtenberg

Together with John Croezen I animated the Dutch
Children Book Balotje gaat op vakantie.
We used the same technique and everything was
animated in Anime Studio Pro.
For the project 5 Children Books were animated,
all in different styles.

Bumper for Dutch Television

For the popular Dutch talkshow De Wereld Draait Door I created a bumper for Fokke&Sukke.
Fokke&Sukke is the most popular cartoon in Holland of the creators John Reid, Geleijnse & Van Tol. For the program Jean-Marc van Tol draws a different cartoon a day. This item needed a bumper. Van Tol asked me to make a bumper.

He provided me the keydrawing.


The TV Studio gave me a soundclip of 5 seconds everything needed to be animated to.
I imported everything in Flash and animated the characters.
In Photoshop I painted the background. And composited everything in TV Paint.

Flash Animations for National Geographic

For the online magazine of National Geographic Junior I created several Flash animations based on the characters of Dutch Comic Artist Mars Gremmen. The animations were used in the online magazine of NGJ. Gremmen drew the characters and delivered them to me in Jpeg-format.
I imported all his Jpegs in Flash (Flash8) and then made them into vectors.

Here is the drawing of Mars Gremmen:

And here's the final animation:

Character Design for Game

For an online game I had to design some new characters and make feedback animations.
For the feedback they needed three different characters. A WaterWolf, an Energy Eater. and a hedgehog. I designed the characters directly in Flash, because they needed to be animated later.



For the actual story of the game I designed the two leadcharacters. A Girl and a boy. The characters were all designed in Flash in such a way that the game company could import them and adjust them into their game.




For the site I also made a trailer of the game:



The music is by composer Herman Witkam.

First Blog for Creative Cave Animation

Hello, This is my first blog on Creative Cave Animation.
This is a blog in which I will tell the progress of animations I am working on at the moment.
You can visit my site at www.creativecave.com

Greetz,
Stefan de Groot