Nostalgia is a pain in the arse.

This collection of heads was drawn just last week to consecrate the beginning of a shiny new sketchbook. I just felt like drawing something, and so I went into autopilot and started drawing a head, it occurred to me that I’d unthinkingly drawn one of the characters from my old webcomic; The Box.

Since I’d already drawn the first one I decided I may as well draw all the others. The fact that I’d then gone and drawn all my old characters made me wish that I could start the old comic back up, after I suddenly dropped it midway through last year.

Technically I can start it back up, there’s almost nothing stopping me. Of course the problem is that I never really liked making the comic, and I never had the time to do it. One single (often sub-standard) comic page would take me an entire days work, which I could have devoted to all sorts of other things I’d rather do. I did however enjoy the reader’s interest in the story and the feeling of creating a whole ongoing fictional world to share. Comics are much more involving than an illustration, readers get attached to the characters and the places, and feel much more strongly than they would about a single piece of artwork. It was a great feeling, but It just wasn’t a strong enough drive to spend all that time on something I didn’t want to do. Instant gratification generation syndrome maybe?

The temptation is always there though, to go back and start again, or to redo something you’ve already done that you enjoyed, even it won’t benefit you in the long run or you know that you’ll get sick of it fairly sharpish. Video games are a great example of this. I absolutely adore the video game Morrowind, I played it when I was a kid and loved how original and open it was, especially the setting and the art design. I love it so much that I decided to play it again. I spent half an hour installing it, 2 hours playing it, 2 hours adding mods to it, and then I stopped and didn’t play it again. Because it’s shit.

Which is what I’m getting at, nostalgia is all very well so long as you ignore it. It so often turns out that the things you once thought were brilliant suddenly look upon re-examination; a bit disappointing. Time gets wasted and your naive wistful memories of something are corrupted by horrible facts. Even Banana Man is awful!? When did that happen? Maybe I’m simply getting more cynical as I get older, I do still love Morrowind, but that combat system is inexcusable.

Asian Dragon

Since posting a selection of my old uni work several days ago I’ve been playing around with the charcoal dragon image and have now coloured it and done it up in photoshop.

This isn’t my usual method of working, but I’m happy with how it’s worked out considering I was just experimenting. It didn’t take very long either, which I suppose is one the benefits of having a sketch that you stick with from start to finish. I never do that usually.

Originally I thought of it more as a Chinese influenced dragon, but since I put that big red circle there to add to the composition I may have to declare it Japanese.

Train station faces

I recently completed this page in my sketchbook of people I’ve drawn while waiting around for more important things to happen. A lot of them were drawn in train stations, where you always get a lot of opportunity to draw weird and wonderful people. Train journeys are also a pretty good provider of inspiration, where you get the rare opportunity to draw people who are generally guaranteed to sit still for a while.

The big problem with train journeys is that half the people are facing the other way, or obscured by the people and chairs in front, and since one is also expected to sit still it makes it hard to get a good look at the inevitable nutter with the fascinating moustache who’s just come in and sat at the other end of the carriage.

Another problem is that people on trains often notice you drawing them, (which no one is ever comfortable with) since you’re generally facing each other. A cunning way to avoid this is to draw their reflection in the windows, sadly they usually notice that as well.

A small taste of uni work

One more year has passed and so too has one more semester at uni. Some projects were good, some were bad, many were extremely time consuming. However, the work I’m showing off in this post is but a small glimpse of one of the more enjoyable projects. More enjoyable no doubt because I had the opportunity to slip lots of fantasy art into it!

The general gist of the project was to start with one drawing in one medium and then produce the next drawing (which had to relate to the first via word association) in a different medium. It was an interesting challenge, I started with platypus and ended with alien, as I am wont to do. I suspect this word association drawing game would also make for pretty good practice in future, If I get round to it.

Site re-design in progress

Despite my current site only being fairly recently completed, it has been decided that it could be better. And so it shall be!

My brand new site is going to be made brand new again, from the ground upwards. The new site will be optimized even further and have a smoother more functional design, I even hope to have a few new sections. It’s in the early stages yet so I can’t say how it will look or exactly what it will include, but it’s going to be good!

In other news; I’ve been working on a new style of traditional illustration. It’s a more laid back look than my usual work and would work well for children’s book illustration I reckon.

Don’t ask me what the inspiration was, I just like octopi It was drawn over a period of a couple of hours with a technical pen.  and a fibre tip pen. Sooner or later I plan to colour it with watercolour.

Lots of pikemen.

Im currently working on a big time consuming piece that’s quite challenging. I’ve got to paint a big battle scene with lots of (English) civil war style soldiers fighting a giant creature. So basically that means painting a lot of pikemen. It’s the first time I’ve ever done so many people in one painting in this much detail and it’s pretty intimidating. Still, a little bit at a time and it should be finished eventually. I’ve been very inspired by the incredible big battle paintings of Mariusz Kozik, check his work out, he’s amazing.

These sketches are for this picture I’m working on, since I wanted to have a clear idea of the characters and uniforms I was going to paint. The bloke in the bottom left is the brave captain, who’ll form a big part of the image on the right side, while rallying his troops and appearing to beckon the viewer closer.

So far I’m about halfway through the image, which means in a couple of weeks it should be done.

Tourists of Turkey

I’m finally back from my holiday to exotic Turkey, and now I’m 2% less pale. Nearer to cream than white at the moment, that’s a tan by my standards. I spent most of the time reading books eating food and lounging about the pool, but I did manage to get some drawing done too; while lounging about the pool mainly.

The faces below all belong to tourists and holiday makers I saw about and found interesting or amusing enough to draw. If you just got back from your holiday to southern Turkey you may just see your face/moobs on here. sorry 😀 I should point out that most of the people on here have been made slightly more grotesque than they are in real life.

The sketch at the very bottom left is the Turkish coastline as seen from a boat.