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.