mat hains - Freelance Illustrator & Animator

Carcajou comics

2011-09-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a few side projects, one of them being the next chapter in Carcajou's adventures. They are published in the next issues of Tremplin Magazine. Here's the first 4 comics for kids in the second grade.

Haiti

2011-04-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

This illustration was for a cover of a booklet that will be found in the next issue of QUAD9. This story was about Canadian students trying to get founds to help Haiti. Here's my thumbnails/ideas and the final product. They went with the blue version.

Life Drawing and Sketches

2011-04-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

Carcajou comic + illustrations

2011-03-31T18:20:00.000-07:00

Here's a few illustrations I've done for a short story. The B&W versions are for the inside the booklet and the colored one is for the cover. You can also find the highlight of the last 4 adventures of Carcajou!

Bunch of illustrations

2011-01-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

For the past few months I've been keeping busy working on the show Fish Hooks, which has been an amazing experience. I'm learning a lot about snappy animation. You should all check out the show, its really funny.

I've also done a few illustrations and comics for different magazines. Here's a good chunk of my work.

Passion Pit Illustration

2010-06-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to do music related illustrations for awhile now. Since I listen to Passion Pit everyday, I decided to do a fan art/mock cover art for them. All the individual portraits are done in one line, which kept this illustration loose and fun. I didn't pay attention to proportions and embraced whatever errors I made. I did quite a few versions and here's my 2 favorites.

Life Drawing!

2010-06-24T16:16:00.000-07:00

Still exploring with different styles and mediums.

Draw draw draw

2010-06-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

More life drawing! I decided to add a little photoshop magic to it. I haven't played in photoshop in a while and I really missed it.

Markers, pens and highlighters!

2010-06-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

I did a little bit of life drawing last week at Sandy Hill. I played around with makers, pens, high lighters and I even did a pose with liquid paper on cardboard. The last one turned out a bit wonky but it was worth a try.

More to come!!

May

2010-05-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

About 6 weeks ago, I started working at Mercury Filmwork as an animator. We're working on some pretty amazing shows and it's been keeping me busy. I haven't stopped drawing and have a few illustration projects on the go. Here's a few things I did in May. They're mostly drawings from pictures to practice, a few are sketches that will be turned into finished illustrations, others are going to be full wall sized graffitis/paintings, there's also some life drawing and a T-Shirt I designed.Cheers.

Thomas part à la chasse aux tondeuses

2010-04-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a few illustrations I did for one of Andrée Poulin' stories published in Mon Mag a Moi. I tried to keep a constant color palette from one illustration to the other - Pink, beige and blue. Let me know what you think!

Jeunes Pilotes

2010-04-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

Here's an illustration I did for CFORP, it's for a short story written by Paul Prud'Homme, about a group of teens going in the wilderness of Alaska for their spring break. They only bring the essential; no mp3 players, cellphones or electronic games. I always love a good survivor storie, so it was fun project to work on.

Carcajou

2010-03-11T15:09:00.000-08:00

For close to a year now, I've been working on the mini serie Carcajou for Tremplin magazines. The comic bounced between two styles depending on if it was for 4th or 2nd graders. After 20 comics the adventure as come to an end. It was a great project and I'm glad I was part of it.

Here's the last 4 one-pagers for the 2nd graders and a few samples from the last 2 comics for the 4th graders.

Baseball illustration

2010-02-15T18:50:00.001-08:00

Here's the latest illustration I created for Mon Mag a Moi. I added the preliminary sketches I did to get to the final idea. The second sketch was my favorite but they wanted to depict the fun and teamwork aspect of baseball and less the competitive side. I'm still very happy with the shot that was chosen, I got to draw a bunch of different characters in dynamic poses.

By the way if you've never seen a baseball pitch in slow motion, youtube it. It looks painful.

S

2009-12-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

I did a couple of illustrations for Mon Mag a Moi. They are like games you see on the back of cereal boxes, the ones where you have to find errors. The theme was dessert, so I did them and sent them off to the client. Here's the kicker... the theme wasn't desserts but desert! So I had to do another set!! So, I saw the sun come up a few times this week and got to post a few more illustrations on this blog. Here's the 2 sets and a close up.

By the way, there's 7 errors!

Premier Jeux Interplanetairs

2009-12-11T11:50:00.000-08:00

These illustrations will be found in the magazine QUAD9 for a story about the galactic games of 2090, on Saturn. The athletes get infected by space dust and the doctors find out about a remedy from the Saturnians. It was nice to work on a story that touches current events: the H1N1 and the upcoming winter games.

I tried to keep the illustrations simple with a limited palette. They are on a beige background because I wanted to show you how I cut them. I can't wait to see them printed!

Kinou au Zoo

2009-12-04T21:07:00.000-08:00

Another project for CFORP, this time for the Mon Mag a Moi magazine. The story was about an alien kangaroo teleported to a zoo on earth and then getting himself in a little trouble. I had a lot of fun with the characters and colors for this one.

Minimag

2009-12-04T20:42:00.000-08:00

Here's a few illustrations I worked on last month for CFORP's new magazine, Minimag. They're going to publish at least 2 other issues that I hopefully will have the chance to work on. Later this year, all the stories and illustrations will be gathered into a huge book so teachers can read along with the kids. The illustrations really changed from the beginning to the end of the project. The characters and over feel needed to be ajusted quite a bit. Check out the first character sketches and the finished product!

Donnie Darko

2009-10-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween everyone. This month' sketchy business theme was Halloween. I decided to draw Donnie Darko... It's Halloween at the end of the film, so it fit the theme! Here's the full illustration and some sketches I did from screencaps of the film. None of them really look like Jake Gyllenhaal, but I wasn't trying to do a portrait or anything like that.

Carcajou 2.0

2009-10-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

The publisher of the science magazine I am working for decided to make a completely different mag aimed towards a younger audience. So they asked me to revamp my comic strip designs to be kid friendly. Here's the new designs and some visuals from the first and second issues, as well as the full 2 other comics.

Cover

2009-09-28T02:30:00.000-07:00

Heres a book cover I've been working on for CFORP. The story's called Berger du Soleil and it's about a bunch of kids and their teacher hiking through the hills of Syria and meeting a sheperd who uses the sun to tell time. Oh yeah, and coloring lines takes forever, I don't know how my buddies colored all their lines for their student animated film... troopers.

illustrations

2009-09-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

Illustrations for a short story that will appear in the magazine QUAD9. I'm going to do quite a few more illustrations in the next couple of weeks to beef up my portfolio; so stay tuned!!

More illustrations!

2009-08-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

These are the ones that I had to recolor. I spent quite a bit of time on these bad boys, and I think they turned out great! Let me know what you think.

Dog dectective

2009-08-10T21:57:00.000-07:00

More Mon Mag a Moi illustrations. The first one is in cover because it is for the cover.
1- Finding clues: gum, tire and dog tracks?!
2- Chased by insanely mean dogs.
3- Dallas Green finds clues as well.

Un bien drole de chien

2009-08-04T18:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a few illustrations I'm working on for a short story published in Mon Mag a Moi. I toned them the same way I did for my samurai comic, but turns out they have to be colored! I'll add the colors during the week and repost these bad boys when they're done... stay tuned!

Work

2009-08-04T18:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a few panels from a comic series I've been working on for the last few weeks. I took out the speech bubbles because they are a little distracting. The blades on top of his machine are glowing because they're spanking new. Both the full comics will be featured in the magazine Tremplin.

Life Drawing

2009-08-04T18:01:00.000-07:00

I try to get a good life drawing session whenever I have the time. Sandy Hill as been great for it so far. None of the models have disappointed me so far, which is just swell.

Interviews with Mythical Creatures

2009-08-04T17:31:00.001-07:00

July's theme for Sketchy Business was Mythology, I didn't have time to polish these, but the idea still gets across (I hope). I had quite a few other Myths that I wanted to interview. Big foot could of told us how he just isn't photogenic and really doesn't mean to take blurry pictures. A really chubby fairy could of told us about the social pressures of being a thin, graceful disney-esque fairy. I might still throw these on paper another day... But for now you have the Unicornboy, Faongirl and Mr Ogre.

Samurai!

2009-06-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

My Sketch Themes blog entry for June, the theme was Warrior.

Sketches

2009-06-29T17:17:00.000-07:00

Heres a few sketches I've done in the last week or so. The one on the top corner is an illustration I want to do as a fanart for the the band crystal castles. The rest are sketches for the Sketch Themes blog I joined up (check out the link "Sketchy Business"). My entry for this month's challenge is almost finished, I will upload it either tonight or tomorrow. The final drawing is the main character of a series of illustrations I am doing for the magazine Mon Mag a Moi.

My favourite korean family

2009-06-29T17:10:00.001-07:00

I did this caricature for my brother' wife's family. The ugly guy is my brother. I wanted to do it in a more painted style, but it ended up being too time consuming. I liked my cleaned up line in photoshop so I decided to keep it graphic. You can see the final product (that I printed on nice glossy photo paper) and the painted test version.

Sandy Hill Life Drawing

2009-06-29T17:05:00.002-07:00

I went to Sandy Hill for life drawing and its been awesome! The models are great and the other artists are incredible.

DEMOREEL

2009-05-05T21:52:00.000-07:00

Here's the highlights of the last three years.

Student Film

2009-04-29T18:27:00.000-07:00

This is the film I created for my last year of college.
enjoy.

Catch of the Day - Backgrounds

2009-04-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

These are a few Backgrounds from my student film I did for my third year in the animation program at Algonquin College.

Fine Tooning Pages

2009-04-17T17:45:00.000-07:00

These our going to be my 4 pages for our grad book Fine Tooning!

COLORS!

2009-03-21T12:51:00.001-07:00

Here's some colored pieces for my student film. I'm really happy with how the color scheme turned out. It should be awesome if I finish it... I mean WHEN I finish it! I also slapped some colors on my character rotations.

cheers.

Life Drawing

2009-02-26T17:03:00.001-08:00

We started using colored Nupastels for our life drawing. It adds a lot of life to shorter drawings but when we get to 30+ minutes it gets kinda muddy.

All of these drawings are of our beautiful model Ella Rose. Check out her site http://www.everythingella.com/

Sketch

2009-02-01T20:58:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to get lots of cool stuff for my Fine Tooning pages, so I'm drawing some sketches here and there. I have a few more ideas that I'd like to sketch out before the deadline.

DRETTE D'IN BOULE!!!

New batch!

2009-01-30T16:12:00.000-08:00

Here's a few illustrations for the mags QUAD9 and Mon Mag a Moi!

Sketches

2009-01-18T19:56:00.000-08:00

Old fart and young fox.

More Life Drawing

2008-12-20T12:47:00.000-08:00

Most of these were done in 20 or 30 minutes, except the gestures and the one drawing that is a 5 minutes. The one of the girl standing with her hands in her hair is probably my favorite life drawing so far.

More to come!

Illustrations

2008-12-20T12:20:00.001-08:00

Here's some of the illustrations/comic books I've been working on for the past view months. I slapped in some character designs and researches as well. For the comicstrip its only a few random panels that I liked, so don't try to make sense of it.

enjoy.

Caricature

2008-10-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

This was my wedding gift for my brother and his wife.

Character Pack!

2008-10-23T19:41:00.001-07:00

Posing, expressions and rotations! All for my short film.

Life Drawing

2008-10-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

Life drawing is really cool this year. We're working on big sheets of news paper with Conte. The first classes we're really hard but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. We've been doing drapery studies, here's what I've done in the past weeks (from 1 minutes gestures, 5mins, 10mins, 20mins and 30mins.)

Old stuff!

2008-09-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

Here is a couple of drawings a fished out of a big box in my closet. Most of it is from 2007, except for the "Mathieu Hains" logo that is from 2006 and the comic strip which is from 2003! The comic strip was drawn by my good friend Stephane Perrault and colored by myself.

Enjoy!

illustrations! xD

2008-09-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

Here's some illustrations I've worked on over the summer for "Mon mag a moi!" magazine!

Character Studies

2008-09-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

A bunch of sketches for my short film.

Characters!!!

2008-09-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a couple of character designs I did for a series of illustrations for a short story published in the magazine QUAD 9. I'll post the illustrations in a couple of days! The ones with 2 characters are the first ideas and the redesigns.

=(o.o)=

2008-08-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

I started planning a story about a bad ass raccoon for my independent film. I did a couple of studies and then some actual designs for the character. I ended up ditching the idea and go in a completely different direction. Heres my studies and designs.

And also a couple of character sketches for an illustration gig.

Michael Phelps

2008-08-20T14:57:00.001-07:00

hehe

Couple of expressions!

2008-07-14T15:01:00.000-07:00

I did the first sketch a while back, I looked at it and thought that the character was pretty good, but the drawing looked to stiff and boring. So I decided to take the same character and do a couple of expressions with it!

enjoy.

O__o Red Ninja!

2008-07-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

We got to animate a couple of scenes from our Red Ninja storyboard. I worked pretty hard on this one, I didn't have time to finish up the last scene but the movement is still there! I hope you like it.
Next year's second year students are lucky, they get brand new designs of the characters. Our storyboard teacher made the designs based on some Bruce Timm characters, they look so sweet and are going to be awesome to animate!

What are you looking at me for...

2008-07-07T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here's the first feature quality lip sync I've done.
What are you looking at me for!

No more weird pirate ...

2008-07-07T22:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a couple of animations using Harmony, one of most used program in the industry right now. We got brand new characters this year, no more weird pirates for us!

Walk cycle

Run cycle

Papyrus from ... Papyrus

2008-07-07T22:47:00.000-07:00

I did like 10 000 assignments with this character, we used him way too much. It's Papyrus from... Papyrus (I never heard of it either). In this assignment he is in a spacesuit instead of being the Egyptian nudist he is. So here we go, running away from camera in perspective! This was my final for the first semester of second year.

the head rotation

2008-07-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

I got to draw Goofy A LOT in second year! We did 2 animations of him, a storyboard and a posing assignment in Design; I now have a pretty good grasp of the character. Here's one of the animations: the head rotation. I got a good mark on that one :D

Headaches ...

2008-07-07T22:32:00.000-07:00

The dogwalk assignment was probably the one that gave me the most headaches. Animating an animal is a lot harder then I thought. It makes you respect a lot more the animators that worked on movies like Lion King and Bambi.

Red Ninja ...

2008-07-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

I had a blast in storyboard class, here's my last assignment : Red Ninja. There's a few errors here and there but I still think it turned out pretty good :D
I slapped in the intermission to separate the two biggest part of our assignment. The assignment was split into 4 parts: The beginning (introducing the mood, characters, etc), the action sequence, the conclusion and adding shading to a small section of the storyboard. I spent way too much time on the shading :P

I just figured out how to post videos so I'll be adding a lot of my animations later today or tomorrow.

Steal one of Area 51's ships and sing One is the Loneliest Number...

2008-06-25T19:24:00.001-07:00

Here's the backup story for my character:

The ship that my character was flying is an alien ship that was stored at Area 51. My character, Rosco, wasn't a test pilot or a scientist but a simple janitor. He got the job through his best friend, Tim. Tim and Rosco go way back, they used to go to high school together. They didn't really have anything in common: Tim was a straight A student with great aspiration of becoming an astronaut, while Rosco was a complete slacker who's only interest were to party and rock out (mostly air guitar). They only became friends because Rosco needed help with his grades and Tim needed help with the girls.

After acing high school for Tim and barely scrapping by for Rosco, they became room-mates during University. Tim was trying to get his bachelor in astronomy while Rosco was only there for the parties, which he often hosted. 4 years later Tim graduated with honors and got a job at Area 51 as a special astronomic scientist. After many months of begging, Tim finally put in a good word for Rosco which got him a job as a janitor.

Everything went well, Tim worked in the labs during the day and Rosco mopped the floors during night. They didn't see much of each other but Tim liked it that way, less distractions. One day Tim had to take one of his co-worker's shift, he needed to study the nocturnal activities of some of the smaller aliens. Tim didn't know much about alien activities but the other scientist assured him that he only needed to keep track of what they were doing and write it down on a notepad. The aliens didn't do much anyways; they mostly ran around and threw glowing feces at one another. Everything was well, until Rosco showed up at the door with a boom box and his other best friend, Jack Daniels. It took a little convincing but Tim finally got into it. It was like the old days, the two of them partying together. Rosco even got a few of the aliens out and they joined the party: singing and dancing the night away.

After about 7 hours, the party died down and the dust settled. The lab was a mess but Tim cleaned everything up... just like the old days. The scientists came in to start their day-shifts, they didn't seem to notice what happened during the night. Tim and Rosco would of had got away with the late night boozing; only if Rosco didn't wake up in his underwear cuddling one of the aliens, with a frowning security guard standing beside him.

Since only the two of them had the night shift, they both got escorted by the security guard to the Boss' office. The Boss asked for an explanations. Rosco had been fired a bunch of times in his life, he couldn't care less of what would happen, he would just get another job somewhere else with Tim. The job at Area 51 was incredibly important to Tim, so for the first time he betrayed Rosco and told the Boss that this incident was completely Rosco's fault. Rosco didn't say a word he just looked at his friend speechless.

Rosco was devastated, he just drowned his sorrow with cheap liquor. The only sensible thing left for him to do now, was to steal one of Area 51's ships and sing One is the Loneliest Number until he crashes into a nearby city.

That is the entire story of why my character is the pilot of a spaceship.
____________________________________________________________________

So that's pretty much the entire story behind my character. It was pretty funny to tell a shortened version in front of my class.

I had to design a pilot...

2008-06-25T19:10:00.001-07:00

During the second year of my program, I had to design a pilot for a spaceship I created (I'm not going to show you guys the spaceship because I hate perspective and it shows in my design :P). I needed to hand in: a character turnaround, a skeleton turnaround and a pose showing the character's personality.

Here's a bunch of sketches I did to get my character right. I made around 120 different heads for my character and these ones are my favorite.

The last thing we did...

2008-06-25T10:42:00.001-07:00

The last thing we did in Design Class was caricatures! During class we would do a bunch of caricatures of each other and our assignment was to make one of someone famous. The first image is caricatures of people in my class and the second one is the assignment I handed in.

Enjoy.

I could seriously mess someone up...

2008-06-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

I am doing a lot of sketches nowadays to get some ideas for my independent film that I'll be starting in Fall. This character definitively doesn't fit with any of those stories but I still think he is kinda cool. He's a kid in some sort of rebellion and uses a wrench as a weapon. Why a wrench? because every time I pick one up I always think that I could seriously mess someone up; if a robber breaks in my house, it would definitely be my weapon of choice.

I'll be posting more sketches, finished work from school and some animation (as soon as I get a good video converter).

Take care!