18 Oct 2009

Weekly Sketchbook Round-Up

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

The usual collection of images from my sketchbook this week, anatomy and facial studies, this week I have also been studying more dynamic poses than the usual glamour photography that I usually work from. Very interesting and usueful to see what the figure looks like when muscles are clenched and the model is exerting physical effort (as in the Stone Nudes studies).

16 Oct 2009

Nibru

Click to enlarge: My interpretation of the charcter, NIBRU

Over on the ConceptArt.org forums there is a thread which has had quite a lot of attention: NIBRU! The perosn who started the thread has a character called Nibru that he asks his friends to draw their own interpretation of. He posted a sketch and a few details of the character on the forum, and asked if anyone would be interested in doing a quick doodle of the character for him.

The response was incredible....

Instead of being met by howls of derision by the ConceptArt community over someone asking for 'free' work, everyone responded positively and posted their own versions of this character. Some were simply doodles, some were more elaborately finished paintings, some were accurate to the character description, some were humourous interpreations. Amongst the people posting their work in this thread were some of the premier concept artists working around the world, students, hobbyists, and even some people who had heard of the thread from Facebook and other places and just wanted to have a turn.

Here's mine ;)

11 Oct 2009

Faces, Figures and Free Running

My usual weekly update. This week I have been drawing a lot of faces from the newspapers, trying to work on achieving a likeness. Again, this exercise is underataken with my upcoming comic project in mind, where I will need to maintain consistent distinct likenesses of several different characters across multiple pages.


And as well as the ususal figure studies from Suicide Girls and vasrious other sites on the internet, I have also started to work my way through 'Creative Illustration' by Andrew Loomis. This is a very interesting book that has laready started to effect the way that I approach compostion and design in my artwork, as I beleive is evidencedc in my IF entry this week 'Flying', which I have included my sketchbook work for in this post.

Click to enlarge: Drawing faces from newspapers and the internet to try and practice maintaining likenesses.
Click to enlarge: This is the thumbnail development from my skethcbook for this week's IF post, FLYING.
Click to enlarge: More of my regular figure drawin studies.
Click to enlarge: A lot of Loomis' book is theory for reading, but he also includes many thumbnails/illustrated examples wi=hich I have been working from.

Illustration Friday: "Flying"

Click to enlarge

Parkour is the closest thing I have ever seen to a human flying.

7 Oct 2009

Painting Steps



Click to enlarge


rage life study painting steps


Pencils from photo ref, painted up without ref. I was just doing some sketching from Suicide Girls, and really got into this pose. I decided to splash some colour onto it in potatoshop and got carried away again. I wwas working on multiple layers so did a quick GIF as a sort of steps animation.

6 Oct 2009

Illustration Friday: "Germs"

This week's entry is an animation, please watch it on the embedded Youtube player below. ;)


...and here's some supplemental material, the images that I used to create the animation.





Click to enlarge



This week for Illustration Friday I took my inspiration from the 1971 Robert Wise movie The Andromeda Strain, based on the novel by Michael Crichton. It's the ultimate movie about Germs, the story concerns a super virus that hitches a ride from outer space to the Earth when it becomes lodged in a satellite that then crashes. A team of world class scientists try to analyse and contain the virus in a state of the art laboratory, but the super virus - code named The Andromeda Strain - defies modern science.

This animation is of when the Andromeda virus reproduces out of control and overwhelms the computer monitoring it, resulting in the computer crashing and displaying ther code '601' to indicate it can't process the deluge of information that it's being fed by the alien virus.

I didnt refer to the original film for refernce when I designed the visual displays, equipment or the lab, but I worked from memory trying to give it the same features but with a darker feel.

5 Oct 2009

Weekly SketchDump








Click to enlarge

Not a huge dump this week. My new shifts leave me with an hour less every morning to work in, and my lunchtimes are occupied with immensely difficult/boring/necessary task of thumbaniling my next comic, so I havent got a great deal to post this week. With any luck I shall soon adapt to my new shift rotation, and will be able to pick up the pace a little in the mornings so I can get through more studies everyday.

Along with the usual poses and figure drawing, I have also included a painted sketch I did last night of myself wearing rubber gloves and breathing through a harmonica. This is something I do from time to time to let off steam. Sorrel and I were both sketching last night when this activity came up in coversation, we both quickly sketched it out as we were speaking. I painted mine and blogged it. I'm surprosed Sorrel can remember this at all- she usually represses the memory of things like this.

30 Sept 2009

Art-Actuate: "Carnival"

Click to enlarge


My entry for this month's Art-Actuate sketchgroup challenge, Carnival. I decided to do a painting of a Pagan Festival, and drawing on months of research and pesonal experince I can say with not inconsiderable authority that all pagan festivals involve the burning of a policeman. In a big Wicker man.

I also include here the original line art, for your consideration. You can see the doodle of the policeman inside the wicker man, something which I eventually dropped from the final painting.

Click to enlarge


Weekly Sketchbook Update





Click to enlarge

Not much to update this week, as well as having a stinky rotten cold since Thursday last week I have started my new shifts at my dayjob which leaves me with less time in the mornings to do my studies in. But the consolation is that the extra hour everyday is built up and I get a week off every 7 weeks. The amount of work I can get done in a whole week off is gonna be more than I can get done in that hours a day, so it should work out ok. I just have to make sure I get up earlier during the week.

20 Sept 2009

Illustration Friday: "Infinite"

Click to enlarge


One of my personal favourites, the Eat-As-Much-As-You-Like-Buffet! But imagine if someone eventually offered an Infinite Buffet!! Imagine how big you'd get.... imagine how harrowing it would be for your loved ones to have to watch you eat yourself into oblivion... imagine how exhausting it would be on the chefs!

infinite buffet

An animated version, which I quickly produced to demonstrate the conveyor belt style table the FatMan is sat at. Stripped bones and mangled napkins glide out just as fast as the chefs can get the juicy, succulent food into his diabolical maw. But he can't stop now; if he eats infinte servings, he eats for FREE!! :D


The original pencils, presented here as an extra portion for your delectation.

Weekly SketchDump











Click to enlarge

This has been a busy week, and I have had to work weird hours that have disturbed my daily drawing regimen. Yet here is another splurge of the bits fit to print from my sketchbook this week. To start with, the stuff from my white A4 sketchbook is daily figure studies, with a few faces and bums thrown in for interest. The small brown sketchbook sketches are tonal studies done in black and white charcoal, and the yellow moleskine sketches were all dones yesterday when Sorrel and I went to the Birmingham Museum of Art and spent the day strolling around. We were both most impressed by Jacob Epstein's sculpture of Lucifer, and we bothed sketched it from different angles.

13 Sept 2009

Weekly Update!






Click to enlarge


I have finally figured out what I was doing wrong when I uploaded more than one image onto my blog, so now I can blog my week's sketchbookery in one single post. Should make it slightly more accessible and easier to make comments. As ever, any feedback is greatly appreciated, good bad or indifferent it's all serves a purpose.


In this week's update you will find the usual mix of observational drawing from Suicide Girls and from the daily newspaper. Also there is the page of doodles from when I watched Unforgiven last week, which includes the original pencils for last week's Illustration Friday submission. There are also a few sketches of motorcycle riders, prep work for a project I am helping my brother John with. I am still loving my bigger sketchbook, is nice to have an A4 page to draw a single pose on, I can really get my fingers into it and get smudging.


Oh, I nearly forgot....!







Click to enlarge


Some sketches I have done this week on midtone paper with normal pencils and a white charcoal pencil. This is something I have wanted to try for a long while now, and it has proven to be much harder than I expected. Part of the difficulty is purely technical, that the white charcoal will not draw on top of the 2B pencil, so my practice is being constrained by the process in certain respects. When I next do some of these sketches, I shall try using a soft black charcoal pencil for the dark lines, and see if the two different charcoal pencils are easier companions than charcoal and graphite.