My new favourite illustrator

It's been quite a long while since I've posted here on my Uni research blog.
Well let's get straight to it.
I've recently become aware of Yuko Shimizu and her work is amazing. You can see the traditional manga influences and her textured brush strokes and colours are great.
Here's some examples of her work:

Paper Toys progress report 2

It's time for another paper toys progress report. Here's some  roughs for my paper characters.

Paper Toys progress report 1

My paper toy idea is a collection of LARPers (Live Action Role Play).

There will be their normal bodies/outfits/professions, then their LARP personalities/costumes will slide onto the model.

Here, is a shot of my first model that actually sort of works. Jeremy a disrespected CEO who becomes Gadfox the powerful bathrobe Wizard.  His hat is yet to be completed, as I'm rather bad at making cones to an accurate size.
The model works quite well, but I need more accuracy and the costume part needs adjusting by about 1mm.
I originally intended to have it with moving arms, but that proved rather difficult to construct and still allow for the costume parts.

Stacking

This new brief has got me thinking about toys obviously and I reminded myself of a game I played last summer called Stacking, where you play as a small russian doll, and you control other dolls by jumping inside them. You solve puzzles by stacking into the correct characters,as they each have special abilities.

Anyway, I liked the character design for it.

Momot Paper Toys

For our latests brief we've been asked to create a set of 5 paper toys, and this is some of what I've looked at today relating to this new brief.

Skiing

A selection of thumbnails for my latest project in which we were asked to produce a scale of 8 stages for a given theme. My theme was skiing and below is what I handed in, completed using Illustrator. I possibly could have painted and got a better quality and style.

Extreme Skiing

About a week ago I just happened to watch two documentaries on extreme skiing, Blizzard of Aaahhs and  Steep and for my new brief this week I am to create a scale of degrees for skiing. Anyway here's a clip from Blizzard of Aaahhs seeing as its relevant now.