Self-portrait

Selfie drawing

Work in progress.. my version of a selfie.

Random character design

Exploring shapes for a random character design. She's a bit rough around the edges and scary when you first meet her but has a good heart.

Brisbane on stilts

Inspired by the city I live in, Brisbane. Colonies of flying foxes at dusk, and seemingly rickety Queenslanders on stilts. Growing up here these were pretty typical sights, though don't try and find where this is. This one's made up. More process pictures can be viewed on my Facebook page.

Juggling projects

If you've been following this blog you'll be pretty familiar with this character by now. Here's a couple more scraps exploring different mediums and treatments. We are still seeking a publisher for this one, however I have been quite happy to just keep filling my sketchbooks with ideas for it. If/when we do find a willing publisher, I think the character and his world are going to flow from my pen/pencil/brush like an old friend..

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.

Chance portrait

In need of a motivational boost I was going back over my old sketchbooks to see how much (if) my drawings have improved. The sketchbook my hand landed on happened to contain some cafe sketching from three years ago to the day. Here's a spontaneous portrait I found of a gentleman from Rockhampton who I got chatting with. I remember not liking this drawing very much at the time. But funnily, when I stumbled upon it a second time I felt it was one of the more inspired pieces amongst a lot of pretty bad drawings.

Gesture drawing practice

I'm nearing the end of a gesture drawing course with Alex Woo. Here's some of my homework practice from an earlier lesson on exaggeration. It has been a challenge and made me feel like a complete beginner, but I think I've found a few ingredients that have been missing in my past work.

The Very Cross Bun ...continued

Above: Using dark cool colours and shapes that look similar to clutching fingers I hope to have conveyed a sense of danger for the bun, (who wants to keep dry naturally).

Below: Children tumble out of school at the end of a day. Bun meets natural predator, school children.

More from The Very Cross Bun. I'm about half way through the final art for this book. I don't think there's a single illustration without a few things I wouldn't change if I could go back and revise. But for those few imperfections, I think there are just as many happy accidents. I have tried to maintain a sense of play in their making, which I hope comes out in the art. Approaching each piece at the outset as an experiment rather than a finished piece seems to have tricked my perfectionism into finishing illustrations that in the end I hope are spontaneous and enjoyable to look at.

The Very Cross Bun

A new preparation sketch for the book project titled 'The Very Cross Bun' mentioned in the last post.

Style guide

After quite a lot of anxiety filled experimentation I finally came up with this piece which will serve as a compass as I finish off a long overdue collaboration with author Jennifer Poulter. You can see some more experimentation with style in this earlier post. I really liked the sparse pen & watercolour of some of those pieces, but in the end gravitated towards this more vibrant, textured look.

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.