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for Illustration Friday

red head

yellow bill

red shoes

play

imagined and projected

Master of Arts

I passed. I'm now Berbank Green BSc(HONS) MA... or is it the other way about?

Plain

For Illustration Friday.

Saul Bass inspired

More work inspired by Saul Bass, this time a little more obvious.

Merry Christmas

To all.
even those who hate Christmas,
i'm not so partial to it myself.

Effie and the ideas (book)

This is the book I've been working on for the Masters project. I'm not going to post the images for a good long while yet.

Sun and Moon

inspired by Saul Bass' amazing children's book

wander

the last bee

Skinny Caterpillar

This is obviously inspired by Eric Carl's wonderful book.

Giraffe

Searcher

This was inspired by Oliver Jeffer's cover of his new book "The Way Back Home". I'm a big fan of Oliver Jeffers.

Aztec Gods

Portrait

If you have to guess who this is, I need a lot more practice.

Wolfie Book

Some kinda encounter

Summer girl

For Art Competition

The brief : Neighbor

Apple

spout

branches

squeal

Another 1000 words

For no reason, Superman appears

Drew the buildings first, then it just seemed to need Superman.

The chicken wasn't impressed.

Extras

Busy on my Masters Project, but here are some images done sneakily on the side:


The image above is partly inspired by a friend who found out terrible things that happen to people (mostly locals, not tourists) in the Maldives

An octopus for Gabriel.



don't ask.

Wolfie

On the look out for a few more red riding hoods.

A break from the goats

Gruff version zillion

Not quite black and white anymore...





This Blog used to have just the B+W image below.

Random Robot

Visual vocabulary muckabouts.

gruff gruff gruff

Where is this going? If anywhere...

Gruff overload

Since the last intrepid adventure, our hero has been to tackle the yoga monster after his hard-drive side kick had spluttered to a stop after emitting an alarming noise. He returns with an almost identical first picture (but no sky, did you notice? My, what imagination this guy has!) and a 'sparse' second picture. Call the president.

(edit: Added three more mouth watering images, yeehawww)

Billy Goats Gruff version 3 the spaghetti western

This is a mix of charcoal pen and then Illustrator for the colours. Billy goats is now a Western... sort of. I think I prefer the lines of the previous version, but this has more life to it. The next thing to do is find a way to combine the best elements of both somehow. Dash garn it.

Genius

It all turns up at once:

There is this incredible animation
and I found that because my uncle had told me about this amazing short film which was nominated for an Oscar, have a look at the trailer.
I've also found Anime Studio which I'm playing with before the trial runs out...

Billy Goats Gruff version 2

Another go at Billy goats gruff. I did the whole sequence, but the writing wasn't all that good. Here is another go using rhyme. I've also redone the goat a bit. Each Gruff will be different eventually.

And this is the same image with overlayed textures and other fancyshmancy.

Which is 'better'...

Billy Goats Gruff

I passed my first semester. Hoorah. I now have 6(+) weeks to do my diploma project which is to be aimed at a particular age group of human larvae. I don't really go along with this whole 'pitch it to an audience' thing. If it's good, people will buy it is what I like to believe, although people don't seem to be buying Shaun Tan's work. What's wrong with all of you? His new book "The Arrival" is out now and it's amazing.

Above is a a sort of rough for the first page of BGG, just to see how things fit on the page. It may end up looking something like this or completely different, I haven't decided yet. You may notice that I've adapted the text a little.

One Legged Nightmare

I've just been looking at the work of one of the guys about to finish the masters course, Simon Wild. I love his work, take a look (It's nothing like the drawing below so don't be put off by it). Some of his influences are obvious but somehow he's made it his own. Below is a quick doodle to get into the spirit of play Simon seems to achieve so easily.


Still imaginary life.


Reduced palette, desaturated, overlapping. The bird King

Red

This is for a competition on a website that invites people to draw something on a different theme every week. Have a look and join in here

More Geek Art

More experimentation.

Blending layers and cloud drawing experiment

First crack at drawing a sky. I got lots of ideas from here.

Photoshop experiment

The Ladder Sequence

One of the sequences for my module. Mixture of pen, pencil, acrylic ink and gouache. I stopped doing green backrounds after the first few as white seemed to look much better.

Pencil work

A drawing from my second set of sequential images. All pencil work.

evil plants

10 minutes in photoshop.

Random Illustration

Quite abstract, had fun doing it.

Deviant Art

I've been looking at some images from deviant art (this one in particular) and this happened. The background was fun to do.

And yet another

Some sort of ancient stone in a hamlet.

Bash them out

Another one, did this as soon as I posted the last one, so less than 30 minutes. Why can't I do this with real art materials?

Geek art

Mixing colours is a pain, and certainly not easy or cheap to play with if you're trying to learn how they work. I'm gettin more and more frustrated with real painting and so rather than stop drawing I've caved in and started playing on the computer again. I tried ArtRage 2 for a while but just couldn't get anything I liked. Having not painted in Photoshop for months, I thought I'd give it another go. I set the brush mode to multiply and airbrushed this out in about 30 minutes.Yes, it is 'geek art', as a certain tutor would say, but it's fast and so much more fun to play with. When I start next semester I'm going to get back into painting digitally, although I also want to learn 'proper' painting too.

Experimental

I painted the first of my sequential images, and it's terrible, a big lump of brown mess. So it's back to flour mill pappy. Here are some sketches to see what I can come up with. Pretty random, not concerned with quality, just pure experimentation, see if I can loosen up enough to do something useful.

Acrylic Ink, hold the soda

I've got into using acrylic inks with a brush rather than with the aquash pen. The great thing about them is that they are so easy to mix as the bottles come with a handy dropper. So 3 drops sepia mixed with 5 drops scarlet and you get a pleasant old fashioned red. Below is the sort of thing I'm now racing to do for the Sequential Image project. I have my sequence sketched out on acrylic friendly paper, I now need to get the palette right and get painting.

More character designs

Still not happy with my drawings/character for this module and time is running out. Here are some more alternatives I've been trying.

More from the sequence

This top one is probably the one I dislike least so far. I'm starting to like it more and more, but I think this is because I'm getting used to it and being lazy. The composition is ok, the drawing certainly is not.

Another one from the sequence.


A painting using my old technique (chinagraph pencil - blue, arcylic inks and aquapen), which I'm determined not to use, at least not for this module. I'm also avoiding using the computer for now as I'll rely on it too much. I might have to do a bit for the final pieces though.

Too much reverting going on

I'm putting together ideas and establishing ways of getting this ladder idea done. This top image is the first in a short sequence after fiddling with character design (see below). This is acrylic ink using an aquabrush + pencil.

Character sketches for 'Frank Normal' the victim/anti-hero of the ladder idea.
World design using my old way of drawing but using new techniques. If I followed through with this it would have been pointless doing the course, I need to push myself to do different things, far more than I am at the moment.

The Ladder

This is an idea for my Sequential Image module. The top image is the most recent, the bottom one is where it all grew from, the middle stuff is (all) the steps between. The most recent look a bit washed out compared to the originals. I also had a great chat with David Hughes on Wednesday who seemed quite pleased with my progress (still a long way from being good mind), most of which I wouldn't have made without James Mayhew's help. In fact all the tutors on my course are pretty damn good, the complete opposite of my experience as an undergradute.


Two test framescharacter and scene test which somehow warped in the lower image into something I liked much more.
Trying to develop a characvter for the sequence


Playing around with composition and trying to nail down a subject.

More life drawing

Both of these were done using Acrylic ink and the Pentel Water brush.

Acrylic Ink

After my outing with James last Monday I've been looking into different inks to use in the Aquash Water Brush. I was using the Rowney Drawing Ink, but the shellac in it was bunging up the brush. so then I tried Dr. Ph. Martin's concentrated water colour which was much more friendly. I got this in blue though as the big black pot was expensive and I didn't really like the results. So then I got FW Acrylic Artists Ink (black) and it's great. The aquash brush seems to have an airtight seal so the brush never dries out and the ink worked well with the brush. Below is a drawing done using the FW ink and a Faber-Castell artist pen then fiddled about with a bit in photoshop.


Here I just started drawing to see what would happen. All done with an art pen.

Draw or die

This week has been fairly eventful drawy wise. On Friday I went to see Scarlett and Faith's new addition "Tynan". The little bugger is a handsome chap, much more handsome than my clumsy penmanship can capture unfortunately (sorry Tynan). NB: He's not a conjoined twin, I just drew him twice on the same page.

The weekend was eaten up doing film work. On Monday, the talented James Mayhew, who teaches on my course, and myself wandered the streets of cambridge sketching and righting wrongs. I'll have to use the Uni scanner to scan them in as my scanner is too small, so I'll post them up another time. It was a fun and useful outing, even though I'm not terribly impressed with my results. James got me to use some new drawing materials which led on to:

Brush and Ink work. On Monday I tried this for the first time and the results were sketchy to say the least, but something seemed to interest me about it. Today we had life drawing and I mostly used the clever 'water in the handle' brushes and some indian ink.



This one below I did with one dip, meaning I dipped the brush into the ink once and didn't put anymore on after that. I think this is my favourite. I might even go as far as to say I like this.

This one underneath was made using a fat Derwent 8B thing James lent me. I quite like this, it's like my other 8B I've talked about before but much fatter.

Fiddle

My first collage image. This is an interpretation of a fragment of Radiohead's 'Sail to the moon'. The stars are shiny Christmas wrapping cut outs. I used paper cut-outs, pen and ink, conte pastels and graphitone.


A row of houses using sepia pencil and conte pastels.

There's a light in here somewhere

More life drawing. Life drawing is always rewarding to do, even if the results aren't rewarding to look at. I've gone at these in different ways:

The first I scratched out in pen and then went over roughly using the graphitone.

This one I used the same pen and graphitone but tried to be more economical with line and tone.


Dipped ink using a flat edged pen.


I still don't feel like I've found a way to capture what I see in a way I like yet. I found an illustration book in the 2nd year BA Illustration student's room the other day and found a few inspirational images that go someway towards where I want to be. And a girl in my class, Biddy, showed me some work by a French artist called Nicolas De Crecy, who has worked with Sylvain Chomet, and that's been very useful. I still feel like I'm in the dark looking for that light switch though.

Outside the Circus

We had a little field trip to the circus and this is one of the drawings I made. Probably the best technical drawing I've done but very dead.

Costume Life Drawing

This was all using the Graphitone 8B pencil again. I drew it very lightly and then boosted the contrast in photoshop.

Various

This was my second attempt at watercolour work and predated the picturehouse painting. I think this is the least rubbish watercolour I've done. Probably because it was new and I enjoyed it more.


Some toys (borrowed from Jon and Erica) drawn in line.


One of the life drawing students drawn in charcoal. It's very messy I know, but I'm trying different ways of capturing form.

Cambridge Arts Picture House

I haven't posted for a while because I've not really felt inspired to blog. The images here are from about two weeks ago. Eva Nowak (a former house mate and quite talented filmmaker) was kind enough to let me wander the cinema.

First one here is a watercolour of the kiosk area. A great friend of mine was once eaten by the Ben&Jeery's Ice Cream machine here.


Roger (thanks Erica!) the top projectionist fellow, drawn from memory in Ink and then quickly 'toned' using photoshop.


Inside the projection room it's quite long, snug and loud. This was done in charcoal and then restored using photoshop (I haven't fixed it on the paper yet)

Tone

My focus for this week is on tone, atmosphere, environments and capturing people playing. Quite a list. Plus I have to get 'toys' in there somewhow. To practice I've done two drawings using the Derwent watersoluble GRAPHtone pen which I'm liking a lot. These don't have toys in, I'm focusing on getting fast at doing environments with tone. I think these took about an hour each.

Toys

Beginning the Toy project, I started with a little red wind up toy and ended with a pastel redering of a Gloomy Bear on my bedroom floor. The pictures going down are reverse chronological, so the top one here is the latest.


Using oils for the second time , here are the red wind-up toy bear and the blue soft toy rabbit. Unfortunately I ruined the painting a bit when I scanned it, but not very badly.


The blue rabbit done in pastels. This took about 2 hours I think as each hair was drawn to match the direction of hair on the actual toy. I should really have put a background in for this to make it look more complete.

A pastel study of the red bear composed as a lose narrative.


Early colour test of the bear using pastels and crayons.


Trying out different ways to get down the form in an interesting way. Pen, crayon, pencil, pastel.


A sketch of a display in forbidden planet.

Oh Pollocks

This week has been fairly busy. After one of my tutors, James Mayhew, astutely observed that my work didn't show much enthusiasm and that I was trying to be a good student of art rather than letting myself go and just doing what felt natural (I'm paraphrasing, he was much more eloquent than this), I've had to rethink my project. I thought toys would be fun, but they didn't sound like a serious thing to do. I was still in my 'good student' mind set. Then the next day I happened to see a 2nd year MA student's work and it really impressed me. Coincidentaly, he'd chosen toys when he's done the module I'm doing. On Saturday I went to Pollocks Toy museum which is near Goodge Street Station in London.

I was there about 3 hours and I don't feel like I got much done in that time. Below is probably the best drawing I did there, which happened to be the first too. It's not so easy to see, but the Robot was fun to do. It was reflective silver, I'm not sure if it looks that way in the drawing or not.

Then I went to Hamleys and drew kids. I don't recommend that any men with beards do this on their own, you'll get some very suspicious looks from parents. After that I met with Wayne and we went to the Tate and some great art shops and saw 'The King' at the NFT.

Sunday was at the Zoo. Again the first drawing is the only one I'll post, the others got worse and worse. Not sure if this was flagging enthusiasm or just being tired, I'd been walking almost constantly for 14 hours on Saturday.

Costumes and nudes

On Monday we get a taught life drawing class all day from 10am to 5pm (with one hour break). It's very good. However, this Monday the model didn't turn up in the morning so we had volunteers from the class to pose. Below is one of the students from two angles. We had three models and drew each from different angles. Then we had to use our imagination and draw them in new positions and/or from different angles. A good excercise.

In the afternoon a girl turned up who had never modelled before. Carlos (the tutor) got her to wear a dress from about 1850 or so, lots of frills. This was done with brush pen and a pencil for lighter shading.


This morning was unsupervised life drawing where a model comes in and organises the class her(or him)self, although we can suggest poses if we want. I tried a few different ways to draw her this time. I think all of these were 5 minute poses... maybe the last one was longer.

Charcoal


Contti pastel and brush pen.

Two Contti pastels and brush pen (what a difference!)


Brush pen.

Busy

Lots of life drawing and a few other bits since my last post. I filled up about a sketch book full of drawings. Here are some excerpts.

This girl was asleep on a chair in a bookshop. It would be difficult to draw her asleep if I went and asked her if it was OK first, so I did this without permission.


A guy looking reading a book. Exciting stuff isn't it.


I went to London Zoo on Sunday with Emily (a part time student also on the course). We didn't have much time there (due mainly to train problems and a terrible bus service) so these had to be rushed a little.


Quick sktches of a giraffe. They move around a lot, or at least the did when I was there.


Zebra's were slightly less flighty.


The Ring Tailed Lemurs were full of character, despite being locked away in a fairly small cage.


The Meerkats seemed most happy probably becase their space was large enough for them to run around in. And they ran a lot, they didn't stay still for more than a split second.

Rescue

Suddenly, I feel like I'm starting to get a feel for colour. Still lots to learn obviously, but I like the tones in this one. Maybe the yellow is too bright?


Slightly more abstract. I prefer the composition of this one though.

Play

I found some lovley work on deviantart from wetnosebaby and tried out the style for myself. Her work is better (and original) so check it out.


Quick 2 colour sketch. I was going for something else but didn't like the character much so did this instead.


No idea where this came from.

Developing a mood

I can't just do observation work, I'll go mad. The other side of my coursework is 'Experimentation', so hopefully this will fit into that and also tie into my project themes. Here I've tried to get a mood across and also tried to find colours that work well together.

Use Ink

My tutor (Hannah) saw last weeks work (not pictured here, very bad work) and recommended I just use pen and ink. I haven't got the right pen yet, so instead I've been using the brush pen which I hope has the same effect she wanted. She suggested it so that I develop more confidence in my line work, so something permanent and unremovable would force me to make bolder strokes.

This is Terror - the cat - sleeping on my bed.


Bella the bass.


Messy art stuff on a little chest of draws.

'Brush' pens

A fellow student (I think it was Biddy?) recommended trying out these new brush pens. They say on the side they are made by Tomboy ABT. I bought an N51 (dark-medium grey) and a 250 (lightish green). I didn't like the 250 so I later bought a 062 (Yellow), but I didn't have it for these sketches. I also bought some Pastel paper with assorted colour paper sheets.

At lunch I quickly knocked these up, both views from a little square near the building I'm studying.



I tried to get a good perspective on this one, but messed up a bit and lost the feeling I wanted to get across.


The brush pen is great though, I'd recommend any artist to go out and buy one and give it a go.

Life Drawing

Today I attended the free life drawing session at the ARU and it was really good. The model was very organised, picked her own poses and set the time. We sat and drew. Having a time limit was very useful as I didn't have time to think and I think this benefited my drawing considerably. The room was packed (about 12-16 of us) but the model said there's rarely more than 3 or 4.

This one below was done using a sepia drawing dark sketching pencil. 30 minute pose.

5 minutes, cool gey Pro Marker pen


10 minutes (I think) Cool grey marker again (contrast has been boosted in photoshop, it's not as black as this)


5mins sepia.


10 mins marker.


10mins marker.

Another comparison

I've been doing some more experimental art for another web site and wasn't indending to put any on this one. However, I think it might be useful to show what I've been up to. I painted this image in Art Rage 2 in about 10-30 minutes. I wasn't keeping track of time, but it was a lot of fun as it wasn't serious and I got to play with the mixing of paints and so on.


Then my mum came over (she teaches art) and I asked her to show me how I might get the same picture done in acrylic. I tried to match it as close as possible to get a good comparison of methods.

The acrylic painting had all sorts of problems.

First of all, the black outlines were put in last, which I didn't like as I had nothing to base my background on. I could have put the black outline in first, but it would have soon disappeared under the paint. In AR2 I simply put the black outlines on the top layer and painted on the layer below.

Secondly: Matching the colour took a very long time indeed, and it was still off by quite a way. We used quite a lot of paint too and it was hard to judge how much to mix.

Third: Even using acrylics it took quite a while for the last layer to dry so that the next layer could be put on. In AR2, you can select quick dry paint if you want, or just jump to another layer.

Fourth: Mixing real paint on the canvas seemed to much harder than in AR2, although my experience of oils I remember being better than acrylics.

Fifth: No Undo. If I made a mistake in AR2, I can easily go back. No such luck in the real world.

Sixth: The colours just aren't as punchy.

Plus, with AR2 I have all the brushes I need just a gesture away, in real life, I only have a few.

In all the acrylic + Marker pen painting took around 4 hours compared with 10-30 minutes in AR2.

So my second comparison still makes me think AR2 is the better tool for the job. Unfortunately it's very slow on my machine at resolutions much bigger than screen resolution, I'm hoping this will be fixed in the new version coming out soon.

Ink and Crayon

More messing about.

More Illustrationy based stuff

Playing around with Black and white, charcoal and ink. Very sketchy.

The Snowmen

I've been doing a few paintings to muck about with and somehow this happened, a completely different style to what I was doing at the time. This painting has something like 12 layers in Art Rage 2.

Expanding visual vocabulary

I recently bought a book by oliver jeffers called "The Incredible Book eating Boy" and I just love it. This guy and Shaun Tan are now my favourite children's book illustrators. Since the last post I've been doing more fiddling in Art Rage 2 and done several sketches, most of which I've been too lazy to scan in yet, but I will. Here are some recent works, quite messy but there's something about them that appeals.


The cat I've drawn a few times now. If I can get the look of it right I might do a short story based on it. The previous story has hit a problem in that I can't work out a good way to illustrate a cat eating the sun. I can think of lots of bad ways, nothing seems right.

Also had a chat with Paschal and Ian at work. I need to work on colour and construction, and also composition. I got a brief perspective lesson too.

More Concept Cats

Some more concept cats done in AR2. I'm still playing around with a story and a style. I quite like leaving the sketchy black outline in.

Acrylic - Art Rage 2 comparison

I did the Acrylic first so this might not be a very fair comparison, however, you can easily see that the precision and colour choice and composition is much worse in the acrylic.


The Art Rage 2 painting is much more vibrant, controlled and slightly better composed. I've still got a lot to learn about colour obviously, but it seems to me it's quite cohesive. The ground colour is a bit sickly.


The Art Rage Painting took about the same time to do, didn't use up lots of expensive paint, has better colours, was much easier to use, and had a more versatile tool kit. I don't think there was anything I could do in acrylic I couldn't do in Art Rage 2 but lots of things I could do in AR2 that I couldn't do with the acrylics. Maybe once I get better at painting I'll change my view on that.

Not from life

I'm still enjoying playing with Art Rage 2. I've bought some acrylics and have been learning how to use them and the other day my mum came over and taught me a few a tricks (she's an art teacher). I bought a wonderful book by Ashely Wood which is full of sketches and paintings he'd done and we tried to copy one of the illustrations, which wasn't easy. I'm still useless at painting and find Art Rage 2 much easier to get things done with. Below is a quick 30 second painting done in it. I don't know why I gave her such a large belly.

Here are some sketches I've been doing trying to find a style I like.

I painted these characters in acrylic and hated the results. I just couldn't get colours I liked or any precision with the brush, so I did it again in art Rage 2.

From the Park

More sketches of people in the park. I'm doing these fast as I seem to be better either quick sketching without thinking or taking lots of time, anywhere in between is usually a disaster.


This one is the same as above but done in 10 seconds.

This fellow I drew starting with the negative space between his arm and torso. I'm still never really sure where to start. Normally I start with the head.


Three girls sitting in the park. The left one is the same girl drawn at different times.


An old couple on the bench. Just trying to draw shadow on this one and avoiding doing outlines as much as possible.


A few studies of a guy reading on a bench, a young girl and an old guy sitting on the bench. The bottom left one is my favourite here as it's almost all just shadow drawing, but I'm not sure it'll be obvious what the drawing is of.

More practice

More drawing today, this time Jon came over and we set up a still life to draw. In case it's not obvious, this is a drawing of a Volvic bottle of water, and apple a cap and a knife on a white cloth
.

Two strange creatures. I messed up the second one, I shouldn't have started shading it.

A Portrait

Today I met a lovely dentist girl in Jesus Green called Karla and she let me draw her while she read "Kafka on the Shore". Finally, a drawing that resembles the subject!

At Tim's house

Today I went to Tim Mews' house and sketched his new dog Sophie...


A sketch of a photo of Apple (Happy Birthday for tomorrow Apple)...


A portrait of Apple who sat very still for a long time (and who is much prettier than this makes her out to be!)...


And a metal tortoise.

Evangeline Lilly

I've just seen a bit of Billy Connolly's Worlld Tour of England, Ireland and Wales where he sat for an artist and it showed the progress in stages as the artist painted him. It was interesting - although I wasn't keen on the finished product - and so I thought I'd give it a go. Here is my attempt at the lovely Evangeline Lilly from the T.V. series Lost.

And there's more

My eye up close. Paschal recommended I do a study of the eye. I think it was helpful, but I need to do a lot more. I need a model, drawing my own eye isn't a lot of fun.


Concept mice. For some reason the image of these fellows popped into my mind and I had to draw them.


quick sketches of an old guy waiting at the Round Church in Cambridge. Mostly unfinished as he kept moving.


Rubbish pictures of the cat 'Terror'. Terror has a lot of character and I haven't captured any of it.


A pocket opener. I did this to sort out scale and angles. It's quite close to the real thin in proportions.

More sketches

Bit of a gap while I've been doing work, sorrting out tenants and such. All the pencil/charcoal drawings I'm trying to do fast at the moment as I need to increase the speed of my drawing and get less tied down to detail. My focus at the moment is on geting relative sizes and angles correct.

Here's the latest batch:
A church tower, it got quite smudged, charcoal gets everywhere.


A guy on the train. I drew him on my way to London for a meeting. the top sketch was far to tall/narrow so I started again.


Some keys I drew while at Scarlett and Faith's house. I tried to draw a matchbox before this but it was very difficult. I kept getting the proportiona and angles wrong because there was a shortage of references. The keys were much easier.


A boy in the park.


A lamp in my room.


A few more to come...

A bit of a Mix

Today I've decided to mix up what I do on this blog a bit. I'm going to post more work done from my imagination, mainly because I think the blog will be a bit boring if it's all line drawing for weeks on end.

This first picture (painted in Art Rage 2) I did a while back. It's based on a better sketch I've done which I should post later for comparison.


This one was the beginnings of an idea I had for a children's book but quickly realised ray guns probably aren't a sensible thing to show as things to be played with. The ray gun was going to have positive effects on people and things. I don't really like the drawing of the ray gun itself, it's too red and obvious, but I do like the buttercups and it was fun to paint them.


A sketch from Yesterday of a bit of Kings Parade.

A woman on a bench again from yesterday. The annoying thing about people is they keep moving when you try to draw them. I have about 5 sketches I couldn't finish because the subject moved around. Next time I go out I'll bring some electrical tape.


A flower. Drawn a few days ago. I don't really like this drawing which is why I didn't put it up before, but now I feel that not putting up is cheating somehow.


Another monster made in art Rage 2. this time I was looking at getting a good mix of colours. I have no colour theory knowledge at all so I'm not sure what I could do to make this better.

At the advise of Paschal (a lead animator at IdeaWorks3D) I'm going to do some eye studies soon so I can build up confidence and competence at doing portraits.

Concept Cats

Today I broke from the program a bit to draw up some concept sketches for a story I have in mind. The first drawings are me struggling to find a style and direction for a cat character. The ones below seemed to be heading towards Satoshi Kitamura san's work (although obviously no where near as good) so I stopped - and drew a tentacle monster at the bottom of the page.


This is another approach I quite like at the moment as it doesn't remind me of anyone else's style, at least not strongly.

The story requires the cat to eat the Sun. I'm not sure how to do this at the moment, so the cat may turn into a monster at some point.

People in the Park

More sketching in Jesus Green. The first is a young mum, her kids were playing nearby but were moving too much to draw.

A couple sitting talking on the grass.


Charcoal is great to draw with. The same drawings done with an HB pencil would look much worse. I've also noticed that, as far as I can see, one key to drawing is to keep the level of detail consistent. If the detail is focused in any area it greatly unbalances the picture. I found the same thing to be true in games design.

Quick Sketches

Today I went to Boarders and bought Martin Salisbury's book 'Illustrating Children's Books' after reading a load of it again and sketching some art from it. Below are sketches from the wonderful book 'Beegu', a bad sketch of a student book called "Fantastic Fire Fluff Monster" and a sketch of a sketch.


Then I went to the park and drew a terrible picture of Erica.


And a better picture of Jon.


Then we went to a pub and all tried drawing the condiment rack in 3 minutes.

That's all for today.

Last of the old

This was done on the 13th August 06. Again a self portrait.

I only look that unhappy because I still don't like my drawings. Hopefully this will change over the next year.

More practice

You can barely see these, I might clean them up and post them again later. This top one is a picture of a potted cactus.

Below is the first drawing I've ever done of a building. This is a view from Kings Parade in Cambridge.
Another self portrait. I really need to find a more interesting model.


A collection of charcoal sketches of people in cambridge.

Another self portrait. The book says this is good practice, I'd honestly prefer to draw someone else.


That brings me to 10.08.06

In the Beginning

I began reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain on the 27th of July 06 and started doing the excercises. I started with trying a self portrait.


Awful. And then followed the book, producing these:

This first one is the classic 2faces/candle holder image, and on the same page a drawing of my left hand.

This one is a copy of Pablo Picasso's 'Portrait of Igor Stravinsky' which I drew upside-down so that I focused on relationships of lines rather than see the object as it is and allow my brain to do shortcuts.

This a chair in my kitchen. I've never drawn a chair before because it never seemed very interesting. Using the book though I was able to see the chair as a collection of shapes and negative spaces which made it quite interesting to draw - if not interesting to look at.

A copy of John singer Sargent's 'Mme. Pierre Gautreau'.


That's most of the sketches from starting to read the book until 02.08.06

The First Art Rage Paintings

Here is the first Art Rage 2 painting. Really just a wash test and playing with colour a bit.
This next one is a copy of a picture I found on the internet. I was inspired to try painting a building after finding Chris Applehans website and looking at his city study. Although all of his work is wonderful.

I should mention that the MA is being run by Martin Salisbury and I heartily recommend his book if you are interested in children's book illustration. It's a good read, well laid out and obviously beautifully illustrated.

My inspiration to do this course has come mainly from Shaun Tan whose incredible books hooked me in, and also Alice Apple, an incredible friend who encouraged me to try something new. Thanks to both of you (whatever the outcome)

Beginning a Masters in Children's Book Illustration

In September I will begin an MA in Children's Book Illustration at the ARU in Cambrige.
I'm 31, I can only draw to novice ability and the course is probably going to ruin me financially.

Why am I doing this? Well I've worked in the games industry as a designer for more than 8 years now and like many veterans before me, I'm a bit fed up with most of the nonsense that happens in the industry so I thought I'd try something completely different while I still can. I should point out that I quite like the company I'm currently working for (Ideaworks3D) and a few of the other companies I've worked for, but I'm bored with doing ports, conversions, and by the numbers original ideas. I'm also fed up with the long hours, no social life and being surrounded by men all day, smart and interesting as they are. I still love games, but I think it'll take the Nintendo Wii to give it another breath of fresh air. When that happens, An MA in Children's Book Illustration should come in very handy. I'm hoping to do some part-time work with Ideaworks3D to keep me in tea and buscuits and also because they are starting to do games I find interesting, we'll see if I can juggle both.

So this blog is to chart my progress or otherwise over a year of learning to draw - and, with any luck, eventually draw well.

Once I have my scanner sorted out I'll scan in my early attempts to draw. I'm starting pretty much from scratch and have just finished reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I've also bought Art Rage 2 to get my head around painting technique without it costing me a fortune in brushes,paints,canvas...