sketches

Felt like painting tonight so I opened up Painter and had a play.


An environment, trying to practice that though I should really work from some reference. Hm, I like it enough.


edit: Painter is weird with the color profiles it assigns so the colors look a little too saturated here but oh well. 

Getting Published

Around 2:00 AM and with not many hours before the Isis had to go to print we realized there was no illustration for an article on getting published. So, I went off and had a poke around some old sketches I'd never used and found a rough version of this guy, which I combined with an old photo I had and messed around for awhile. In a couple hours I had this piece, it's a bit rough but I think it works.

River Isis

A very quick painting used as the background for an article on the river Isis. Quite boring, the colors are different than in real life.

Hot Chip

A couple illos making up a double page spread for an interview with Hot Chip. The idea behind this piece is that they are playing some tasty notes and having a really good time.

Zooplankton

I made this image yesterday for an article on zooplankton. Originally I wanted to go for something more bold and graphic, as I'm trying to push my style more in that direction, but really I was just too fond of the image of all those cute little critters floating around. It was almost too cute in the original colors so I made them a bit more subdued. Also the sort of realism of the lens surrounding them and the out-of-focus stuff in the background helps.

When I put the page together I plan to add a crumpled paper texture and the title in a big blocky font I have in mind.

Ink and Paint

So recently there was a photography competition at Lincoln College, and encouraged by Josephine and without enough time to come up with a new idea, I decided to try some more experiments with dropping white paint into glass containers of inky water. She insisted that though the theme was portrait I could really enter anything, so I collected the materials and went to it. This process depends a lot on luck and careful refining, meaning I had to keep trying over and over again and reassembling the whole set up. After one night's work I decided to stop; taking one good image is much harder than using pieces of several as I had in the past, and I was increasingly unsure whether my piece would be accepted by the judge. It seems I was right, I saw her disqualify a great image because the figure wasn't looking towards the camera enough (and hence wasn't a portrait). In any case, here's one photo I was pretty happy with, lacking a bit of photoshop tweaking.


And here's an old Abecedarian comic where I had used the technique last time:

Think Tanks

This illustration (once again for the last ISIS issue) began life in a hurry when we realized we were short a full-page image and the deadline was looming. I basically took the first idea I had and went with it, ending up with a sort of finished looking thing in a couple hours. When I went back to it though my skin crawled – the colors were absolutely god awful, and the quick photoshop brush I had used looked terrible. I slowly tweaked the image over the remaining time, and the result is that the image looks a bit too painterly, not strong or graphic enough to fit the magazine. Oh well, it's a reminder that an hour planning will save countless later.

Here we are, with those horrid colors:


Some tweaking, the colors are less jarring:



The colors are pretty much fixed:


Prettying up the brushwork in Painter 9, and Josephine came up with the orange/red background solution as I thought they were clashing too much before:

Colours

The prompt for this illustration was... colours. That sounded like fun but with so much freedom it was difficult settling on one direction, so I just messed about until I didn't know where to take the image any further. The end result is a bit too 'coming-atcha!', not very stylish or tasteful. The thing is I now I have all these good ideas! Oh well it could have worked.


Two example of the many many sketches trying to figure this out:

Richard Hillary

An illustration from the same issue of ISIS. The article was about this RAF pilot who got burnt up and had to go to a special military hospital that experimented in early plastic surgery. A bit grim, but I managed to make the people not look too gruesome. Quite a simple image, I like how the various elements are composed (particularly the RAF roundel) and the colors work fine. In the final version I painted in a title, but I'm not too fond of it.

ISIS Magazine Cover

Alright, to start off here's the cover I did for the latest ISIS. The theme was 'making it', and originally I was going to have some luridly lit hands and a face assembling a nondescript thing, but I ended up with a poorly rendered prometheus-like image that was unusable. So, started over, decided I needed reference photos and spent some time with a camera in front of my bathroom mirror in my underwear. I should really bother to do this more often, as it's too easy to just draw what 'looks right' and get a bland image. Anyway, the drawing ended up with some Egon Schiele-like guy building a bike, which came as a bit of a surprise. Later I regretted going over my lines with ink as it sort of ruined the face, but what I do like is the strong positive/negative space and the composition, so it's not all bad.

The version below is the image that was finally used, in which there's only minor correction to the photograph. Josephine's camera is amazing, it picks up such fine detail with a wide-angle lens.

And here's my original version of the cover, with the colors corrected to be much closer to the actual painting. People at ISIS liked the above one better, but I still don't know. I like how clean this version feels, and the character pops more.

Mission Statement

Hello, 

This is my blog, it's a place for my art and the art I like. That's all. 

-J