Jekyll & Hyde gestures

 
I still have quite a bit of work to do in clarifying the designs, but I thought it might help to flesh out their personalities if I did these quick story/gesture sketches first.

My idea for a fresh take on Jekyll & Hyde was to make Jekyll a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor who's obsessed with potency herbs. Hyde would be his wild party-animal state after taking the concoction of herbs.

4 weeks in, and the course has been a lot of fun, a lot of drawing, and a lot of eye-opening. My biggest challenge has been simplifying the design and making it read clearly. The biggest eye-opener has been thinking more of shape than anatomy.

Milko story

Visual story telling, it's finally starting to click for me what this means. I'm really excited about the possibilities after doing Alex Woo's gesture drawing course. These sketches are based on an experience growing up. One of my first jobs was helping a milko after school. I have fond memories of that job. I've also been reading about story structure. Hopefully I can find the essence of the story that I feel lurks in these memories. The idea will keep warm on the back burner until then. I hope you enjoy these scraps.

Life drawing

I'm not sure if I can call these life drawing, as I used photo reference (hope I didn't lose too many of you with that admission). Better use of tone and pencil rendering are what I was looking to work on here. The model photos were provided by a very handy Youtube channel here.

I also made use of a trick my teacher showed me this week, which was to begin with cylinders. I really thought I'd gotten past the cylinder drawing stage of my artistic career, but I was amazed how much closer this got me looking at the orientation of hips etc.

Below is a recent location sketch (whilst I'm misnaming posts) done directly in pen - mistakes and all.

Drover with horse

 Another experiment with the loose pen style. More practice at hatching will do me good. I had to fix a few spots in Photoshop and the horse didn't fade away into the background quite like I'd pictured it.

Holiday sketches

 

Holiday sketches from last January, except the very bottom one which was with Google street view - definitely the easiest way to travel.

Mall sketches

   Given the briefness of these opportunities I usually observe for as long as I can first, trying to draw in my mind before putting pen to paper. Usually once people notice they have become a subject I am done with the observation part, so I don't think it's too uncomfortable for anyone involved. It's much easier to look without being noticed, than to look-and-draw without being noticed, and I think it's good practice for the visual memory to divide drawing and observing in this way. In fact drawing in-your-mind only is something you can do anytime you want to make visual notes. Just look as if you really were drawing, following the contours and the forms. People get less mad this way, and it's amazing how much looking you can get away with!

Recent life drawing

   I've been trying a little technique in order to simplify my pen work, which I picked up from a tip on Wilhelm M. Busch's process. That is, using a light blue pen to rough out the drawing first. Of course, you could just use a light box, but this technique is useful on the run. It's easy to eliminate the coloured under-sketch after the drawing is scanned, but I've left it in here so you can see. 

Busch was an excellent draftsperson whom I only recently discovered thanks to some other bloggers. Observe the looseness of his lines, and yet the underlying design of composition, structure and gesture are all really solid.

The Ghosts of Nagasaki

Here's my final illustration for The Ghosts of Nagasaki. It depicts Inoue, one of the characters in the novel. Daniel has a real knack for interesting imagery.

Sketchbook

Just some snippets from my sketchbook. A mix of mall sketches and a caricature from memory. You could say 'compost' for future character designs.

Hand studies

Away, but not idle... not that there is anything wrong with idleness. Please remember to stop and smell the roses fellow creatives!

My recent house move is over, but things are still not set up. Nevertheless I've been enjoying working only with the simplest of tools, namely a pen and sketchbook.

Getting stuck on drawing a hand pose recently I thought I'd delve a little deeper into the problem. Study and visual research can be tedious, and stifling to the creative urge I find. But since I was doing it, I thought I'd do it 'good'.

You may notice I went to the trouble of studying fingers in and of themselves. It became apparent that my inability to draw the given hand posture was actually a problem with drawing fingers. This would make sense given they are 50% of our hands!

Life drawing

Life drawing in pen, time taken was about 5-10 minutes each.

Mall sketching

 

Happy new year

 

Hi, greetings from 2012!

I am back, and will posting again regularly. I hope this year is off to a good start for you.

I've just returned from a trip to the Lockyer valley, a region which experienced some of the worst of the 2010-2011 Queensland floods. This past week I was honoured to have the opportunity to give some illustration related presentations at a four-day arts festival held there.

Above are some drawings from the trip. I don't know the name of the trees, but majestic would probably be a good word to describe them. The top location sketch inspired the illustration below it. I hope you enjoy them.

Tree study in pen

I left my paints at home by accident so was only able to do a pen drawing. In the end it forced me to try and make it work as lines only which was good practice I think.

Have a safe and happy Christmas wherever you are, see you on the other side of the silly season!

Horse Paddock II

 

Horse Paddock

Rusty roof

This sketch was done from my car. There was at least a dozen times I wanted to give up on it, but I'm glad I persisted. The light was fading fast and a storm brewing, but I think this all made for an interesting atmosphere.

Gnarled old tree

Another tree study. I don't know where all this observational drawing is headed exactly, but the last few months or so I've had the urge to draw the things around me. I do believe using real life, and nature as one's starting point is a good way to develop a visual vocabulary of one's own. I suspect something is being stored away in the back of my mind as I spend these hours looking at things and recording them.

Tree studies

I found this nice place to study trees in my local area. There are some big old trees, and a few paperbark groves. It's quite untamed, and apart from the constant hum of traffic in the background, you might think you were in the countryside. Places like this eventually get manicured and developed, and one by one they disappear.

Life drawing