#character-commission

#character-commission

Pictoplasma is the world's leading conference on contemporary character-driven creativity, focusing on storytelling and how characters shape emotion, identity, and meaning.

Whenever you're working with an existing IP, there's always the question of how you're going to translate and adapt, right? Because it's not a one-to-one sort of interpretation.

Drawing on childhood memories, folk art, and nature, the London-based illustrator and model maker creates expressive sculptures and puppets that inhabit dreamlike realms. Invoking historical costumes and cartoonish and emotive faces, Johnston's otherworldly cast seems both familiar and strange, as if children's book protagonists have sprung to life or converged with a strange dream.

I love love, that's why his drawings often include figures, animals and even flowers hugging and kissing. Doesn't it feel good to be loved? Hot-dang, I know so - so my drawings express my love for love, especially for the ones we love.

Through the tiny window of short clips on Instagram and TikTok, Mary's world seems enchanting and vast. Bree's work exudes melancholic emotion and ethereal femininity, painting the surfaces of Mary's world in the vibrating style of stop-motion animation, dappled with sparkling light and computer-generated surfaces so convincing it feels like you could pose the model with your own hands. O'Donnell sat down with us to talk a bit about her process creating textures and her life's work making magic real.

There's a particular kind of panic that hits when you're facing a creative problem, and the well just feels... empty. Every idea seems stale. Every solution feels recycled. And the question creeps in: Have I finally used up all my good ideas? Maybe it's your third attempt at solving the same design problem, and every solution feels like a pale echo of something you've already tried. Or perhaps you've been churning out work for months, and suddenly the spark you used to rely on? Gone.

Each layered element is independent, all housed within one object on your timeline. Multiple elements can be combined into a Flipbook by using the multi-select function. This allows for users to shift, organise, and retime frames.

What design programs rarely prepare students for is how little agency designers often have once they enter professional practice. And this challenge doesn't disappear with experience. When my co-author and I toured our book Designing Tomorrow, the most common question we heard was not what designers should do differently - but how to drive positive change in the face of resistance.

In illustrator Chiara Xie 's work, everything is in motion. Rooted in a deep reverence for vitality, Chiara is fascinated by "the rhythm that flows through a scene", lingering like a suspended breath, and other times "surging as a vibrant, agile current of motion". It's not hard to know what she means: every illustration is filled with motion, arcs of light and air bouncing off every corner.

I'm a midweight designer looking to step into another job elsewhere but I keep hearing so many conflicting things about portfolio formats and I don't want to have to recreate three versions all on different platforms just to apply for a job. I can't find any solid advice on what agencies are looking to see regarding format and if sending a PDF makes you look dated.