Manddy Wyckens
For our sixth week we looked at a range of artists who work at Studio AKA . Studio AKA is an animation studio producing television commercials, TV programmes and short films, the image on the right showcases just a handful of their work. Some animation studios, such as Studio Ghibli, have a consistent character style in most of their films, in Studio Ghibli's case their character's are normally in traditional 2D, and have soft, simple features to them. This repetitive style is what makes people familiar with Ghibli.
On the other side of the spectrum, Studio AKA have a broad range of styles, they use both 3D and 2D animation and currently don't have their own signature style, making their work not as easier to distinguish. However, in my opinion, I think having a broad range of styles is better, it open a lot more opportunities to experiment artistically.
I chose to research further into Studio AKA's animation director and illustrator, Manddy Wyckes. The reason I chose to research Wyckens was because I am familiar with her work on the Netflix animated show 'Carmen Sandiego', this show in particular is a source of inspiration for me when I illustrate characters. The gallery below showcases just a handful of her work.
Manddy Wyckens is a modern-day French director, art director and illustrator who is currently living in London. Looking at Wyckens' blog I'm able to see that Wyckens works typically with concept art, character art, and backgrounds on her jobs, however, in her portfolio she has done a variety of backgrounds. This was interesting to me because I struggle with backgrounds and environments, I find it more fun to create characters. However, when looking at Wyckens' environments, it made me realise that they can have personality, for example
the image on the right is a background from a film Wyckens worked on called 'The Longest Road'. The background showcases destroyed buildings, a destroyed statue of what we assume to be, a past monarchy, indicating that this is an abandoned/destroyed place. The only light in this is on the centre character (the only person in this environment). I really like this background, it makes an audience question what happened to everyone that HAD lived here at one time.
