Charcoal Guitarist

Ah, reminds me of my days watching 'Take Hart', the kids art show on tv back in the 80s, when I was a young 'un! Tony Hart always seemed to be doing these awesome sketches with pastel, chalk or charcoal on coloured paper - I'm still trying to get close to how good I remember those drawings were now!

Does a bear..?

I stumbled upon this great blog http://threemeninatub.blogspot.com/ and thought doing a 'warm up' sketch each day was a great way to get the juices flowing before you begin any major illustration work!

The idea will be to use bold strokes as much as possible, and not worry too much about what I'm actually drawing - then post them on this site, no matter what - NO MATTER WHAT, I tells ya

Doggy!

Quick sketch, using ink and watercolour (well, the 'Scratchboard Tool' and 'Broad Water Brush' in Painter!)

There he is! Get 'im!!

Long time no post! Just a quick recent illo done in Painter. Again, deadlines were tight so I new going in I was gonna use a coloured canvas for this one - the rest of it is a subtle digital watercolour wash for the tones, and the main line art was done using a solid black 'scratchboard tool' pen.

The lines are quite varied in thickness, achieved by having the size of the brush be quite big, but using a light touch with the wacom where I could. There wasn't as much undoing and re-drawing as I thought there would be (my fingers are normally sitting on CTRL+Z) when doing the quick lines - I like to keep it looking fresh, but obviously taking advantage of the fact that I'm not drawing with real ink to keep redoing lines until I'm satisfied!

Ah, technology. At this rate I'll never learn the proper craft of inking...

Caricature ruff

A quick rough done in Painter X for a forthcoming caricature, using 2B pencil and oil pastels for colour. Don't know at this point how finished or in what style the final artwork needs to be, I'll probably still use the ol' oil pastels though! Failing that, some sort of digital airbrush use might be in order.

There's the possibility of doing a caricature for a client, but done in oil paint style on canvas, soon - should be fun! And when I say canvas, I mean the canvas paper texture in Painter and PS of course. Apparently it couldn't be decided if they wanted a formal portrait painting or a cartoon caricature, so I thought I'd combine both and see how it looks.

Will post it as soon as it gets done!

Horror Comic 2

So, not a sequel or anything, just the next phase of my old-style horror comic cover!

As you can see, no further progress on the actual artwork as of yet, but the details surrounding the cover are now complete. Future cover art can be swiftly inserted 'underneath' the various rips, creases and titles adorning this fantabulous facade, so as soon as I get a wriggle on I'll be able to show you more 'issues'!

The layout of the comic was done in Photoshop, but the artwork will be created in Painter. If there are any effects to do, though, they'll be done in Photoshop too.

Loyalty Cards

I recently had to create some fake coffee house loyalty cards, which were to be printed out onto card and used in some live action filming by proper actors and everything! Designing stuff like this isn't what I usually do on a day to day basis, but it was fun to have some general guidelines about what was needed but still have free reign to come up with whatever I wanted!

I also had to make fake architectural design sketches, travel agent window posters, and yet another coffee house loyalty card (I called that one 'The Beanery').

A recommended book for some nice, general design principles is 'The Non-Designer's Design Book' by Robin Williams (no, not him) - really easy to read, and some solid principles that can only help with general artwork and design creation - check it out!