Advent day 4: Bat Craig

As per request, here is a picture of Craig loading up his Batmobile with Bat Stuff.

Not pictured: Batmobile.

Day 3, hahaha... Meg and Mog

With each day I fall further and further behind....

This is my friend Meghan. She likes cats and doesn't afraid of anything.

Day 2 (late) Liam

So at present my theme is "Bog standard portraits of friends in odd, but not particularly interesting, poses". Today's pic is my pal Liam, who is a good egg. He's not been out for fowar days. I left in a couple of test sketches at the top.

I got a new pen today and it is gorgeous. Weird how things like that make all the difference when it comes to how professional a drawing looks, huh?

Day 1? Rolo

So lots of people I know are doing the whole drawing a day advent thing, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon. I'm aware today is not day 1 of anything. I did start this drawing on the 1st though. I also put a question mark because there's a good chance this'll fall through like a DIY staircase. We'll see I suppose.

I don't really have a theme. This one's just a straight up portrait of the GF. Her response when I showed it to her was, "Who is it? Oh really? I couldn't tell. What's wrong with my hands?" Thanks, Rolo x

Spook Fighters

Went to see Ghostbusters last night. Then stayed up super late drawing this. Inevitable really...

Procrastination

I mean, uh... working on my caricatures... because... it'll be useful, yeah... Useful...

Certainly would be a handy skill for commission based stuff or what have you. I dunno, just something I wanted to work on. I was also trying to think more about colour theory and shading but I'm not sure how successful that was either... Dissertation still squats uncomfortably on my shoulders whispering terrible things in my ear. Yet to reach 7000 words but I'm pretty sure I have shed 7000 tears. That's close, right?

Guess who.

Slice of Life Drawing

Tried something a little different in the second half of life drawing today and attempted to caricature the life model. Once I explained what I was doing to our tutor, Reinhard, he was fine with it. I'm fairly pleased with the results, and if nothing else it was lots of fun.

Leaf Drawing

I don't really want to saturate my blog with my frankly rather mediocre life drawing. Been trying to push myself with it since Christmas though and I thought I'd put up one or two of the highlights. I did have a huge hiatus from about April through to September due to not being at uni, but I'm getting back into the swing I think.

These first two are from before the summer. The first one is copic markers, I'm not sure how long the poses were. The second one is just col-erase pencil and took 20 mins each.

The coloured chalk one here is from last week and was a fifteen minute job. The charcoal ones at the bottom were done today and were also fifteen minutes each

By the way, if you're feeling particularly good about yourself and need a swift kick in the self confidence, feast your peepers on this guy's life drawing. Jeeso... http://benlo0.blogspot.com/

MOVES LIKE JAGGER

It was my mum's birthday on Wednesday, so I drew her a picture of Mick Jagger dancing. Because that's what mums like, right?

THE TEACHINGS! THE TEACHINGS!

Wakka, you crazy conservative...

I really need to get back into the habit of shading my drawings... This was just a quick sketch though. Wakka's hands are the bane of my existence.

Getting ready for Winter...

Ned Stark is ready for Winter, are you?

God damn I love Game of Thrones.

You know that feeling...

When you start something that's supposed to be a quick silly doodle, then two hours later you're adjusting the colour levels and fiddling with the saturation and wondering what happened?

Yeah...

This picture stemmed from a Facebook conversation about Mark Haldane's oddly cropped profile photo and what might be happening in the rest of the picture.

It'll never last...

Three days, three blog posts. I seem to go through spurts of uploading loads of stuff all at once then having nothing for months. I think at the moment it's primarily a procrastination thing. I've got a dissertation to write, commissions to work on, storyboards I said I'd draft about for our 4th year film. Lots of daunting things basically, so instead I busy myself colouring doodles or, in this case, a postcard idea for D-con that didn't quite make it.

Interestingly, while I was trying to fettle some settings to make the picture less dark I accidentally inverted my shadow layer which, with the tiniest amount of tweaking, yielded this.

I quite like how it looks like there's two light sources now, one electric and one natural. I just wish I could take credit for it...

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Super Nanny!

Had a meeting with the rest of my team and ended up watching whatever Jo Frost's latest program is called while we had some dinner. For some reason one of the idents before the advert break had a toy helicopter in it and some how we came to the conclusion that this must therefor be Jo Frost's' method of transport.

So I drew this...

Sketch dumps

What follows is a collection of pencil farts plucked fresh from my sketch book. Actually some aren't very fresh at all, some are weeks old... You've got the day I decided to draw dragons, some messing around with ideas on drawing faces (mostly plagiarised), some observational drawing, some people I saw around Dundee and Edinburgh drawn from memory later, a couple of passing in-jokes now immortalised and a smidgen of Phoenix Wright fan art. Hope it makes up for ridiculous hiatus.

Dr Who-Now?

This is a commission Piece for a friend who asked me to draw a picture of her mum with the tenth Doctor for her birthday. I need to work on my caricatures I think, had a bit of a struggle with this one.

Disserstractions

I thought this was funny when I started drawing it, but I think that writing my dissertation for pretty much twelve hours straight has addled my brain.

Open the door, Get on the floor, Everybody lay the Smack Down

This is a painting I did for my friend Ryan for his birthday, acrylic on canvas. I actually started it last year for his 21st but ran out of time. Then when I came back to it this year I discovered that I only had about 4 hours of work left to do on it. Gutted.

Doesn't matter anyway, Ryan seemed to like it and I know a few folks in the studio were interested in seeing the final product, so here it is. The wrestler is supposed to be Ryan himself. The dinosaur is no-one I know personally.

Something that... isn't... uni work...?

Apparently I'm still occasionally capable of drawing things just for the sake of drawing them. It's very liberating and I really wish I did it more often, but usually it makes me feel guilty...

Rachel's been preparing work for her portfolio over the past week or two and today she decided to do some painting. She had a nice reference picture she'd found on the internet of a girl sitting in an autumnal forest and since I was sitting next to her (Rachel, not the girl in the forest) I found myself sketching the girl's face. It turned into me trying to work the copic markers and this is the final result. I've tweaked it in Photoshop slightly because I think when I scanned it the colours came out kinda faded, but then again it might just be my laptop screen. Let me know if it's too bright, or any other criticisms really. Really need to improve.

Also need to update this blog more often...

Faces in places. Mostly on this page of my sketchbook...

Spent most of yesterday mindlessly doodling faces and I've been told it should be on the blog, so here it is! Apologies for how long it's been since last post D:

Late AGAIN!

Okay, I really need to get on top of this blog thing. Apologies for yet another late post and for yet another half hearted contribution. I've been a little snowed under, same as last week, and it's putting personal work on the back burner. Blah blah blah, heard it before, okay here's some more life drawing.

This week I decided to delve into the world of colour. As I said in a previous post, being able to use colour is a skill I feel I am quite severely lacking in and I've been meaning to start experimenting for some time. First two pages here were ten minute poses. The last page was twenty five minute poses.






I'll try and get something more interesting up soon.

Failpost No1

I was super busy and totally caught up doing stuff for the Flying Duchess fourth year film, and as a result I've done very little personal work. I was also away in Glasgow for the weekend and didn't manage to get anything uploaded here, so here's a late post. Have some life drawing. It's not much. I'm sorry.

To quote the ghost, 'Sorry I'm Late'

Been working primarily on some basic preproduction stuff for my degree film this week, and as a result I find myself slightly lacking in the personal blog type work. I can, however, offer up these paltry doodles. Firstly we have this sketch I did in the pub. The man on the left started off very loosely based on a man sitting nearby. I quite like the way it turned out. The guy on the left is just your average mad professor stereotype...



I also have this rough doodle I did with my D-con stuff in mind. I was just trying to get the Cowboy Bebop cast down in a style I felt more comfortable with, any images I end up making prints of will hopefully have a lot more direction and scenario.



Anyway, that's all for now. Enjoy it.

Sofa, so good.

That's what I'd name my couch shop, if I owned one, which I don't.

Been drawing a lot this week. It's quite nice to have some time off to draw whatever creeps into my head. I had a wee think about what aspects of my drawing I need to work on and came to the conclusion that I need to work on pretty much everything. Where better to start than the bottom, eh? Anyway, this week I've been venturing into the world of shading, a skill I'm severely lacking in. I tend to shade badly, which spiralled into my hardly ever shading at all, and that's not really helped if I'm honest.



Started off with Big Boss and Kamina up the top (I was thinking about what D-Con stuff) then my own ugly mug and then a few other friendly faces of my own creation.



Dunno who this guy is, some kind of bounty hunter maybe? I was trying to branch into some other areas of weakness and experiment with costume design and camera angles.

Anyway, that's your lot for now. I'm thinking about trying out some digital colouring on the second picture at some point but at current I don't have the software running. Keep your eyes peeled and all constructive criticism is more than welcome.

New year mark 2: Newer year

This blog was started as part of my New Year's resolutions last year. I think it's pretty safe to say that I failed miserably on all accounts there... I'm going to give it another go though. Nothing too specific this time, I'm keeping it simple.

I will update this blog at least once every week I possibly can.

Now I'm aware that most of the people who follow this blog are the same people I see in the studio every day, so I'm relying on you lot. If it gets to Thursday or Friday and I haven't updated yet, just come over and punch me in the face... Or tell me to post a blog... Or something... You get the idea, get me telt.

Anyway, to start us off I've got something a little different. My little sister had to do a self portrait from a mirror as part of her Standard Grade Art and it got me thinking. I only ever seem to draw with pencil these days and it's always cartoons as well. So here's an oil pastel self portrait, drawn from a mirror.

Talk about oily skin, eh? The proportions are off, I seem to have subconsciously prettied myself up a little... The whole thing is a bit rough in general and I haven't used oil pastel for absolute donkeys. Also the paper I used has some weird relief lettering on it which I didn't notice til it was bleeding through my picture... Ach weil, see you next week.