Go Radiate is Melissa Culhane – artist – based in Donegal, Ireland

A Quack Too Far animation short

A fox settles down to sleep for the day, listening to the beautiful birdsong in the forest. However, a noisy duck moves in next door and won’t shut up. What does the fox have to do to get some peace?

A Quack Too Far was made during my BA (hons) Animation in Coláiste Dhúlaigh College of Further Education/University of Wolverhampton. I created the backgrounds in Adobe Illustrator and developed the characters in Photoshop. The animation was done in After Effects with the help of a Duik Rig for the fox. Final compositing was completed in Premiere Pro.

Keep Going, Little Snail

Keep Going, Little Snail, my new animated short, is now in production, with the generous support of The Arts Council of Ireland, Donegal County Council and Creative Ireland, and Westmeath County Council.

I have completed the pre-production stage and am now animating! I’m drawing and painting by hand and animating digitally in 2.5D space in After Effects (this means almost 3D – flat images that you can move around – a bit like a pop up book). I’m loving the textured effect I’m getting from the inks/markers/colouring pencil combination and learning loads as I develop the style. The project is expanding as it goes, and I’m really lucky to be able to run with it and let it grow (and take longer!!). I’ve started working from a shared office space in Letterkenny – CoLab – and already feel really supported by the creative community here in Donegal.

After I wrote the story and did the initial development, I gathered a dream team to collaborate with – Patrick Culhane worked with me for script and storyboard development, Matthew Jacobson is creating the soundtrack, and Dom Lawrence from Ear of The Dog is doing sound effects and sound design – the final film will be presented in Dolby Atmos spatial sound (!!!! – very excited about this!). But for now it’s just me, working away. Can’t wait to share it with the world when it’s finished!

Naturama and My Naturama Nature Journal out now

Number one best seller!

A dream project for me as a life long nature lover, Naturama and My Naturama Nature Journal were a joy to illustrate. I got to work on researching and drawing Irish wildlife throughout the seasons and I’m so happy with the result. The books were co created with the writer Michael Fewer and published by Gill Books (I was called Melissa Doran back then!) Naturama came out first and is a beautiful introduction to Irish wildlife, regardless of whether you live in the countryside or in the city, there’s lots of things to learn about and get you started as a nature enthusiast. It was so cool to see it become a number one bestseller (12,000 copies sold!!) and meet loads of wonderful children who were loving the book! My Naturama Nature Journal has projects for children to do outside and field guide notes sections to write and draw in. It gets everyone outside turning rocks upside down looking for worms :) Click here for more Naturama info….