Hey everyone,
took a break from the net for a while, the patience is appreciated, etc

The year cometh to an end and so does ye olde sketchbook. so before the whole fling-out-the-old-bring-in-the-new I thought I'd get some closure and put up what remains of the few last pages because god knows can't leave this unresolved. I'd be a nervous wreck if I was always worried about some old sketchbook out to get its revenge. Don't want all that hanging above my head come the new year so for the sake of sanity:


First one's for Hinata Hyuga because it was her birthday on the 27th.
There is a lot of criticism when it comes to discussing her, but she's been a model of change and perseverance for me, brave enough to stand up for herself when it mattered. She was never meant to even be a ninja and look at her now.
Only thing I don't appreciate is (SPOILER ALERT) Neji sacrificing his life for her ahah could have done with him alive personally.

...and a whole lot of doodles featuring the brush pen

Me and my friend went ice skating, and there was this young kid with long hair, he was so good at skating it looked like he was just floating around with no effort while we were just trying our best not to fall on anyone or get our fingers sliced off.

There was a boy play8ing and climbing on a really cool tree near my mother's home in India











And here are some observational drawings of my cousins

Happy new year to all!

Hey peeps!
this would be my last post in England this year. which is not saying much as the next year is right around the corner, but it always feels like something immense is going to happen, going back to family and the return.
I'm tempted to put up two posts today, but there's still so much to pack, might keep it to one condensed post tonight and update during winter break.

Here's a couple of digital layout designs I've been trying. I've been inspired this time by an artist called Robert Dean, who illustrates a lot of marvelous things, but his layout designs are ambient and quirky and stand out to me, and I couldn't help but try my hand at it again.

I've based them on the places I'll be returning to this winter, the first the deserts in Dubai, and the second a hill in India roughly translated to Elephant Hill.

and a few doodles to keep you going...

When I was younger all I ever wanted to be was one of the boys, but was sent to an all girls school with my hair neatly sectioned, so I'll vent it out in creating a tomboyish character.


We're almost done, I was playing with ink and got a bit conceptual

....
and
I'll leave you guys tonight with a bad joke:

what did the otter say when he was fired?

ahaah! our friend's an optimist. sorry guys I'll think of an otter one

Goodnight and goodbye Bournemouth!

So I made a comic once..

But I won't put it up for a lot of reasons

here's snippets anyway:

speaking of family, here's a life line following a character as he ages from a baby to an old man. spoiler alert, he likes to keep his hair long
what's that got to do with family you ask? I'll..get back to that..someday

Have an ideal weekend.
here's my ideal weekend. mm blanket roll..

A house thing

It's my housemates' last year so here's an ode to them as character designs, and we'll be preserved all together forever.
Forever.

     
       
         also,
 


can't wait to get back to having cows rule the streets.
just keeping it classy.

till the next -

Dave McKeane Artist study

It's suggested that we work the way some chosen artists work to pick up their unique style and integrate it into selected work of our own. I've chosen the magnificent Dave McKean, with his beautifully grungy illustrated book The Savage.
He's quite versatile with his art styles, working with different media in a very atmospheric way.
He's also worked with Neil Gaiman on several occasions.

So here are some attempts at mimicking his wok in The Savage:

(beyond this is just reflection, feel free to skip)




As a reflection I think the point of the exercise is not to adopt their way of working forever and beyond, but mostly I find its useful to understand the actual difference between what you see and what you don't. Its the reason why we're encouraged to put our mind into the mind of the artist we want to mimic, so we're not tied down by our own limited way of holding the pen, line quality, distance between hips and ribcage etc.
I was thrown off by the sense of proportion in the characters because it was never usually accurate but expressive in its unrealistic nature. If I could change something it would be the way I approached the hair, the actual illustrations had wild crazy hair while mine looked too neat with all the straight lines. doing the scratchy shadows and exaggerated angles was fun though.
I might try to use this style in life drawing classes, but using inks graphically is right up my alley so I might want to use a different artist to try something more experimental for me.
It is probably inevitable we pick something up consciously or subconsciously from something we pay attention to detail so much and isn't that what we call progress? I was wondering if since we draw what we're accustomed to, perhaps we also become what we draw, incrementally letting elements seep into our lives and physical appearances.
So do we hold the power to change our lives subconsciously by drawing? In that case we better be careful what we manipulate.

Life drawink

Who's hungry?

We're working with a deceptive title today because the first thing I want to sneak in is just a Photoshop idea quickly done. It's based on nostalgic feelings of missing home cooked fish I guess.

Okay, now we can go through the life drawing part, but before that I'll point out I wanted to focus on the human muscle system for life drawing, so I've included some studies done the morning before life drawing session

 

This last guy was just a quick attempt to apply what I've understood from muscles into an action pose I thought of.

Finally, the actual life drawing session turned out really good and it was a good idea in retrospect to dedicate the morning to understanding the thing you want to study

These last two were from the same page, but the scanner was too small for the whole thing so they're in two parts.

 The thing I realized during the session, was that most of the books I looked at showed male anatomy and the models were female, and that was useful in the end because the difference was so much more evident.
The models changed poses too quick for me to give the whole anatomy enough detail, but I think I would prefer them this way, just enough detail not to get too messy.

For this last bit I'll just share some excerpts from Ye Sketchbooke:

These guys were all caricatured from a book on film, I forget the name, but they're all from movies. The one on the bottom was really interesting, it was from a "documentary" I think. He barely had a face and half his hair was wavy and the other side was like a wig.

This page was done on the way to London on the bus, it features the perfect pizza, a tree pie with eyes and wings and a quick Aizzah profile on the right.













This was just a recording of two instances in a day which could come together to tell a cool story.
The top part is a police man just carrying a small kid's heavy school bag through the way to uni like it was the last thing he wanted to do, but he did it all the way anyway. His security vest was tiny for him and it looked really uncomfortable.
The lower bit is when I was walking back from uni a beat down truck drove by with this torn up charred security vest hanging off its ladder.
So. Hopefully the two images are not related in real life but it was good for story development so I sketched it out.

   -FIN


and jake

Layout practice?

 

Morning, tigers!
gotcha, tigers are nocturnal.

Don't believe that either, they're crepuscular. Thanks internet, now I know.


Last week I thought I'd sit down and draw abandoned buildings for layout design ideas because it's not something I generally do. The first things usually to appear on a blank piece of paper in front of me are eyes, and if houses have eyes then it provokes an architectural questioning of logic and maybe design.
I'm trying to break that habit though and focus on creating something that means more than 'Look at this eye, its so pretty lets draw another one that looks like it, oh look its ruined now -lets draw another one', thus doodling eyes are left for high school text books/tables/chairs.
More serious stuff. Or more fun?

I was wondering if how when we draw characters we borrow from our own surroundings (friends faces, our own faces,etc) if we do that for layouts, perhaps borrow the prominent colours in our lives or the perspective we see things in the most?
All I know is I'm seeing a lot of fire in my work haha.

 

(skip stuff after picture to escape rambling)

When it got started its really catchy, something you can keep doing without being aware of time.
So this one I put in photoshop to play with and after a while I felt the urge to have it more personal, and while usually I don't name things or characters I draw, I'm going to call this one "home".
A small explanation might be that I've been asked this question a lot "where's home for you", and lately I don't know how to respond, because as a place, a building, nothing really feels emotionally connected enough. My family and I are travelers, and that instability of settlement probably taught me "home" as a place isn't really a requirement.
But I've lived in different buildings, gone to many schools and those buildings contain memories that are precious (not to mention, food), so I'm going to call that home instead.
So the house with no certain ground is burning, and the smoke gathers up the memories and my "home" lives around the house that burns forever maybe. ..Is that really a small explanation?
Well, things like this are hard to compress.

Peace!

Hello everyone, ..all pumped for Movember?

I got to use a Wacom tablet today at university, so I played a little.
and now I got a new toy on my very long wishlist haha

I'll leave you just with this today, I'm working on Maya recently so it's what I'm dedicating a bit of time on this week. On a side note, the design on the girls eye is based on Neil Gaiman's graphic novel, "Death".
Don't let the title put you off, its a lovely book.

Enjoy the month of facial hair.

Character Design project and then some

We had a character designer called Gillian Reed come in to talk to us abut character design and she gave us little exercises to do.
So for this project I chose to design an evil genius baby, maybe some part of me feels I can relate? at least to the evil part

So here are some of the rough character poses I came up with for the baby.
I gave him devilish ears and a diaper that's way too big for him. And a massive head.

Then we were asked to come up with the most important expressions for that character that described its personality, so I put down the 5 most relevant ones for him I could think of:

His face changed quite a bit by the end of the exercise but I think I prefer him this way. I'd like his ears to droop or straighten according to his expression. Gillian gave us the tip to try and draw expressions in the three quarter perspective view/

Okay, last but not least here's what my favorite thing to do as a kid was -
I don't know if anyone really does this, but it was just the most relaxing thing, to gently float on the water's edge and watch the clouds move with the sun on your face.
I could stay there for ages.

lately that pool hasn't been cleaned for ages
or it would still probably be my favorite thing to do

Hope you're all doing what you really like doing.

The one for the brother

It's my brothers birthday today, and I talked to him the first time in ages! Actually, I haven't seen him in almost a year, so this rendition of him as a zombie with flaming eyes may be slightly inaccurate.

H  appy birthday achacha, even if this one is blatantly for you, everything I've done so far is dedicated to you.
you'll always be my hero.
with or without green skin


love,


and if the question is, if he's a zombie, why is his shirt's white, you'll realize upon closer inspection that its slightly blue around the edges which must mean he's dead.
Also there is life in his eyes because he's not had his brains yet so he's hungry, thus the shirt is white, not blood smeared...yet
I'm just messing


or am I

This was the first life drawing session I attended for our new term,since last week I was living it up in London. If living it up means standing in a line so long it wrapped around a massive building twice. All for Neil Gaiman. All over again for Neil Gaiman.
Anyway
just to note, there were two female models and I alternated between the two, so you know what, for the sake of retrospect I'll arrange them so that the ones of the same models are together.

I don't really like this one,I've done Li Shang proud and made a man out of her.
all I wanted to do was make her alert, so I pushed her head way back and straightened her spine and killed her form. 

I've read in this book somewhere that when you want to draw to express, you should do it in curves.
I'm breaking a lot of rules. Most of my drawings unintentionally depend on straight broken lines.
Are straight lines by humans ever really straight? the more you zoom into a circle the more it appears to be made out of a lot of straight particles right?
Hmm, there is a science to it, the curve theory, but I think for now I'll just keep an open mind and try different things.

I like this one because together it gives the illusion of the model swinging on something. But next time I'll try to keep it less messy








 

The next ones are of the other model.

                                   

The model here was lying down and looked so comfortable I thought id draw her really relaxed with her hand barely grazing a box on the floor
She was lying down for an hour, so the next one was done during the same period

I sort of burst her head into flames in the end because it looked too warm for the model. But only in my imagination perhaps. Her head is still intact.


I'll end with this.
I am in love with the world. Not very sure its such a good thing because it often seems one sided. But that's not entirely true because there's so many things to marvel at and be grateful for, how harsh to expect everything you've ever wanted.
besides, if the world was personified, im sure that I'm not exactly all it wanted as well
Recently I've been listening to a lot of Icelandic music, and that awe the world is amplifies over.
When I moved here 2 years ago, I remember for the first couple of months waking up with a feeling of gratitude that I had the opportunity of waking up in a place so beautiful, so safe so blessed with people.
People of different kinds, people with different ambitions, reasons, lifestyles, we're all here, together and separate . We can bear so much and break down at so little. Something so glorious in remembering that. I'm going to make it a goal to do that everyday, like when I first got here.
This little outlet is probably just for me.Who reads to the end of this anyway

unrequited love for the win - ----