Olivia Burns

Illustrator, animator, and artist of many kinds.

Graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in New Media from University of North Carolina at Asheville in 2025. Absolutely love to experiment with color and vibrance!Experienced with:
- Illustration
- 2D Animation
- 3D Animation
- Video editing/Motion graphics
- Character Design
- Game DesignProficient in:
- Procreate
- Autodesk Maya
- Clip Studio Paint
- Blender
- Adobe After Effects

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• Illustrations
• Animations
• Storyboards
• 3D Modeling
• Character Design
• Video Editing
• Game Design

Illustrations

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• Reel Extended Credits

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This piece was created in Procreate, featuring my original character Misty. I sketched the pose from scratch, wanting a sassy, active feeling in which she’s leaning forward. I made careful use of line weight so that the viewer’s focus was pulled to certain features. To further emphasize the liveliness of the drawing, I colored the piece with vibrant pinks and blues, using color theory to make unusual shades seem normal, like her bright pink skin. For the background, I wanted it to be simple yet fill in the empty space behind Misty, so I added some small scribbles, speech bubbles, and paw prints that filled out the rest of the page.

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To celebrate Hatsune Miku’s anniversary, I decided to redraw a previous piece of mine that I liked the concept of, but wasn’t completely happy with. I posed Miku with the intent to keep the original idea of her inviting the viewer to sing with her, and this time I added a microphone that she leans towards us. I used perspective to create the illusion of depth in the microphone, a visual indicator of that invitation from Miku. I colored this piece using a color shifting brush, taming the different shades I got with each line into one cohesive form that encourages the viewer to look closer and see each individual stroke. Overall, I wanted this piece to feel fun and exciting, with a composition that feels like Hatsune Miku is looking beyond the border of her canvas.

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This piece is of the character Jinx from Arcane, a product of my love and appreciation for such a fantastic show. I wanted to match Jinx’s manic energy and the scratchy, wild feeling in her theme song Get Jinxed. To do this, I posed Jinx very dynamically, having her paint graffiti beneath her, full of little details and easter eggs from Arcane itself. I scribbled color onto her, a messy mix of various shades of purple, pink, and blue that all come together when looking from a distance to create one cohesive color. I wanted this piece to be very vibrant and intense, so I used color theory to really make the pink and teal of Jinx pop, alongside her wide eyed, crazed expression.

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When Crabs Fly is an animated short that was created within a one month period. I handled every aspect of its production, beginning with conceptualizing it and forming that idea into a pitch to my peers. After pitching my idea, I created a storyboard that was then turned into an animatic to time each shot. The animatic was plugged into Rough Animator, where I did all of the animation on 2s at 24fps, and then flat colored every frame. I took the finished animation into After Effects, where I composited my shots with the background, added shadows, and incorporated in the sound design.

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A Star Adrift is a multimedia animation that consists of digital 2D animation, a stop motion paper puppet, and 3D animation. I wanted to tell a story about imposter syndrome and belonging through different art mediums, both by literally using different mediums and by emulating different mediums in a digital format. I storyboarded, created an animatic, animated, composited and added sound to the entire film using a mix of Procreate, Art Set 4, Autodesk Maya, Stop Motion Studio, and Adobe After Effects.

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The Box was a response to the prompt of showcasing three principles of animation: anticipation, exaggeration, and staging. I decided to create a short about someone who stumbles upon a box, but struggles to open it and see what’s inside. I animated this in Autodesk Maya using a model given to me by Christopher Oakley. I planned the shot composition in a way that clearly showed all points of interest while also adding a layer of suspense to each action, like the different camera angles for each attempt at opening the box. I also moved the camera in certain instances to add suspense, like zooming in on the pulling motion and falling down sharply when the character falls.

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This animation was created in response to the prompt to feature a character going through three different emotions. I keyframed the basic poses first using Rough Animator, depicting my character Reva accidentally ripping a drawing she was working on. Distraught, she brings the paper to Aspen, who consoles her by taping it back up. After fully animating and coloring this short, I took it into After Effects, where I added some subtle shadows, lights, and background details to composite everything together. I then added sound design to complete the piece.

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For You! is a short animated clip I made to practice bringing my character Laurel to life. I wanted to show her going through a simple action that could give anyone an impression of what her personality is like. Laurel is a very upbeat, generous person, who loves to learn and also has a hankering for apples. So, to express all of this, I animated Laurel grabbing an apple and offering it to the viewer with a smile. Her slug antennae wiggle in the process, a signifier of her pleasure to give this gift. I placed Laurel in a classroom, playing into the stereotype of students giving their teachers apples, and implying that she may be a teacher’s pet.

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pop musik! was animated in ToonSquid along with the song by M that gave the animation its namesake. First I began by drafting out each of the shots. I deliberately made each action follow a certain story depending on if it was the cat or the human. The cat slowly crawls up further on the table with each shot, while the human follows a journey of popping up from the ground, sneaking into a building, and then clicking a button that sends them falling back down to continue the loop. I first keyframed the movement with simple shapes, adding more detail after having that plotted out. Once I had the entire body animated, I added lip-sync to the lyrics. I then colored the finished linework, and moved to After Effects for the compositing.

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Crafty Clay is a stop motion short about a clay project that learns of its fate in the oven and decides to escape from its procrastinating creator. I sculpted the turtle out of polymer clay, keeping it unbaked so it was pliable enough for simple animation. I used Stop Motion Studio on the iPad to take my frames of animation, slowly adjusting the turtle with each shot to create the illusion of movement. I also recorded myself acting out a script that I wrote, where the creator of the clay turtle takes a call from her mother that pulls her away from her project. After gathering all of the film, I put it together in After Effects where I masked out certain undesirable parts of the stop motion, like my hand in certain frames.

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This animation was created in response to a challenge to animate a lip-synced short. I decided to use a comical clip from the streamer Jerma985 in which he was excited to find an onion ring in his fries, changing the man into a raccoon digging in the trash. I animated this in Rough Animator, first planning out the composition of each shot for maximum clarity, since the whole clip was only around 20 seconds long. Not only did I lip sync the raccoon to the quick words being said, but I also took advantage of other sounds, like the crinkling of the fry bag or the chewing noises, to enhance other actions made.

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Rainy Day Encounter is a short snippet of an unlikely interaction between Nirvana, an apathetic woman, and Reva, a lost preteen. It began as a storyboard for which I conceptualized and wrote dialogue, alongside recording the speaking lines myself. I created the artwork in Procreate, which involved solving composition issues to follow the 180 rule and some value blocking so the characters stood out from the setting. After creating all of the shots, I plugged them into After Effects where I timed them and moved some of the elements, such as sliding Nirvana to simulate walking. Finally, I animated a simple rain cycle and added ambient sound for atmosphere.

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This digital storyboard was created with the limitation of 8 shots with the goal of telling a cohesive, compelling story within this constraint. When a lone witch gets a knock at her door, she’s met by an injured kitten in need of aid. She takes in the cat and sifts through her collection of potions to heal the animal. However, she selected the wrong potion, and ended up turning the kitten into a frog. I devised all aspects of this storyboard, which included designing the characters, designing the world/backgrounds, posing the characters to tell a story without dialogue, and creating compositions to follow the 180 rule.

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Created as a sequel to my storyboard Wrong Potion, Face Your Fear is another storyboard featuring the frog and the witch. Wanting to turn the frog back into a kitten, the two go on a journey together to find the heart of the swamp, the first ingredient for an antidote. When the witch is dragged underwater by a swamp monster hoarding the heart, the frog has to overcome his cat-like fear of water and grab the heart, defeating the monster and saving his friend. My goal with this storyboard was to use composition, posing, and value blocking to tell a story that’s understandable without any dialogue.

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Akito Recreation is a 3-D model of a plushie of Akito Shinonome from the game Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage. This project was created in a challenge to model an object that I physically owned and to make it as 1:1 as possible to its original form. The model was created from scratch in Autodesk Maya, which included taking reference images, blocking out the basic shapes, and creating the topology in an efficient and clean manner. I also had to create all the textures, which involved UV mapping the mesh, drawing the textures in Procreate, and lighting my scene to be rendered.

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When challenged to create an original character from scratch to model and rig, I created Skipper, a shy sea slug who wants to make friends. I began with three concepts, Skipper, a jellyfish sailor, and a koi fish girl, and after pitching these three ideas to an audience I ended up choosing Skipper. I created a turnaround of Skipper for reference along with a lookbook for more details about his personality. I modeled him in Autodesk Maya, doing all of the blocking, modeling, UV mapping and texturing. After his model was complete, I rigged and weight painted him, using IK handles and joints for smooth deformation.

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Smoky Horizons is a VR game created in collaboration with games programmer Sheldon Marshall to fit the prompt of nature and sustainability in Western North Carolina. We decided to tackle the problem of forest fires in a game where you must rescue animals while keeping track of your own oxygen levels. I worked on the visual aspects of the game, including concept art that eventually became the color theme for the entire experience, creating the set design with furniture and foliage, and designing a logo for the game. Alongside the game itself, I created a video trailer for both documentation and for accessibility purposes. Smoky Horizons was featured in a panel and Q&A at the Asheville Art Museum, where Sheldon and I showcased our game and answered questions from the audience.

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This animation was made in ToonSquid as a challenge for me to take one of my character designs and create an accurate turnaround of them. I had never done an animated turnaround before this point, and I wanted to see what it was like to take all of the details on my character and view them in one consistent form, rather than many out of scale illustrations. I started by drawing a front, back, and both side views, making sure to draw guides off of certain features to keep them in line with one another. I then continued with the four basic ¾ views, using my judgement to place certain landmark features in the center of the other frames. After adding enough inbetweens to my satisfaction, I colored and added minimal shading to complete the piece.

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JET BLACK is a piece based on the song, Jet Black. The challenge I gave myself with this piece was perspective, especially with a non-humanoid character that I had never drawn before. I wanted this piece to have the feeling of "gearing up" and preparing for a race, with standing poses that didn't feel static, as if it was asking the viewer, "Are you ready?"

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FOCUS is a piece based off of the song Mesmerizer. One of Mesmerizer's most popular traits is that Kasane Teto, the red-haired character, is giving out silent signals for help throughout the song that are easily missed. I wanted to challenge myself to make my own easter egg in this way as well. While it may appear that Teto's making an "OK" signal with her hand, I designed the composition so that, along with the hair falling around her, it secretly spells out a cry for help: "SOS".

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Every few years, I like to redraw an old art piece to practice composition and to see how I have improved. Street View is the third iteration of this practice, and is a piece based in the world of Splatoon, a game by Nintendo. On my third attempt at visualizing this scene, I wanted to put a lot more focus into the background than previous versions. Instead of simply drawing a brick wall, I put more focus into more buildings in the background, and added graffiti behind the two characters to make the space feel lived in. I defined the area in front and behind of the focal point much more than the two previous drawings, which makes the composition more interesting as well.

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This short and sweet animation was based off of a trend where people animate to the song cubibibibism. It was animated in Autodesk Maya using a rig and model I created of my character design, Skipper. Most of the animation was entirely mine, aside from the three dances at the very end, which were taken from Mixamo's database. After rendering the animation in Maya, I composited it in Adobe After Effects, adding the background and extra drawn lines for more expression.

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