Composition study

I've been doing some landscape studies in colour in an attempt to brush up my colour chops, but after doing a few I felt that what really made a picture work was the composition. There's too much to think about when you're trying to cover colour, value, composition and drawing all at once so I wanted to focus on composition.

At the moment I'm sitting one floor below the incredible Neil Campbell Ross whose compositions are just killer. I was looking at some of his work for inspiration for this one.

Vila

This past week I found out that an old high school friend has died in a car accident. It's difficult to accept how someone so young, who's only just begun living their life, can be stripped of all their future hopes and aspirations. When tragedy strikes so close to home it's inevitable to be reminded of how fragile and unfair life can be.

Hug your special someone extra tight tonight.

Ross Noble tour poster 2012

I've been really fortunate to get to do another tour poster for Ross Noble's 2012 comedy tour - Mindblender. The 2010 poster I did was pretty cartoony and colourful but Ross had a very different idea about the direction this time around. It was really cool to do something a tad more realistic than usual for the rendering. I wanted it to be a caricature of Ross without pushing the exaggeration too far and risk loosing appeal in the process.
The metallic surfaces were a headache to render but luckily I got some help from John Aggs there.

This is the sketch Ross sent me of what he had in mind. He drew one of these for me the last time as well, and I really dig them! Even though it's a very simple drawing it put me in the right ballpark.

I started with a few thumbnails to explore variations of the composition and pose, and I did a colour rough to plan out the general colour scheme.

You can find the tour dates for Ross' show on his website - http://www.rossnoble.co.uk/

Draw

New additions to the gallery

These were done last year for a project that's come to a halt so I'm happy to be able to show them now. :)
Pic 1 // Pic 2 // Pic 3

Vampire Hunter D

D's design is full of big sweeping lines which is always a joy to draw.

Prickly

Happy holidays!

Ross Noble tour poster

Last Friday, comedian Ross Noble was performing  in the Cambridge Corn Exchange. I'm not generally that into stand up comedy but in this case we had a particular reason to go and see him.

Earlier this year I got the gig to do the artwork for Ross' Nonsensory Overload tour poster. I didn't know much about him before this so I had to do some research. Ross' shows seem largely improvised and he constantly feeds off little oddities and quirks that he finds in the audience. That unfathomable mind of his manages to make the most unconventional associations, of which he will happily paint you a vivid picture, usually resulting in surreal hilarity. This makes for a very random and bizarre comedy experience and it was this randomness that Ross wanted to show in his poster.

The idea for the poster was wholly Ross'. He already knew that he wanted a picture of his face with his long, crazy hair twisting and morphing into all kinds of random objects from past jokes.

In the beginning it was important to get a clear idea of what Ross had in mind was so I sent over a few different sketches with different levels of stylisation of his face. I felt that since he has such a distinctive look it would be a shame to make things too stylised, and indeed, the version that we decided to go with in the end was the most "realistic" one. After that it was just a matter of watching through a bunch of Youtube videos and noting down the random things said that could be used in the artwork. It was an unusual but fun experience to find yourself drawing owls in nightcaps, squids with foam fingers, feather-duster emus... not to mention the bum-faced kids. Gotta' love 'em bum-faced kids.

Rough and cleaned up drawing.

The colouring was probably the most challenging part since there were so many separate elements that needed to stand out. Normally I gravitate towards more muted colours so it was hard to figure out how to use a bright, crazy palette. I ended up going in circles and getting nowhere, but luckily there was a colour lover in the house. Chloe Citrine, my housemate, is great at coordinating bright colours and she quickly spotted the grave that I had dug myself into and suggested the solution.

The artwork was finished in April and to be able to see it used as intended now, towards the end of the year, is a great treat. Apart from posters and flyers, an animated projection of the artwork was shown on the curtains before the show started. When the curtains dropped, so did my jaw. A giant, colourful air castle made up from Ross' joke topics had been erected (or rather inflated) on stage and I could spot some of the elements that were used on the poster.

I was thrilled to see that the artwork was also printed on all sorts of merchandise. Signed posters were sold at the show for the charity  Riders for Health (Ross is a big motorcycle buff). I hope that the art helps to sell them lots of posters!

After the show we got to go backstage and meet Ross, which was awesome. I didn't communicate with him directly as the artwork was created so being able to get the approval from the man himself was the ultimate closure. It turned out he had even used parts of the artwork on the shoes that he wore on stage, how awesome is that?

Me, Ross and house mates/ fellow artists Chloe and Anna!

I really appreciate the time that Ross and his crew made for us after what must've been an exhausting show. Ross is practically doing a performance every night in what must feel like a maddening marathon. He's a super nice and, despite what you might think based on his comedy, down-to-earth guy when you get chatting to him and seemed quite interested in comics. Do check him out if you get a chance, it's a surreal experience. :)
I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to have been trusted with bringing Ross' idea to life. It's not the type of commission that comes knocking every day and it's turned out to be an incredible experience. Freelancing might have its downsides, but it certainly also has it perks!

My Deer

Based on a fashion shot.

Happy Year of the Tiger!

Happy Chinese New Year!

Or Valentine's if you prefer! :)

Gandalf

Over the years the most iconic Tolkien character I've seen portrayed is probably Gandalf. It's hard to shake the impression that those great images have made. When drawing this version I remembered an interview with Sir Ian McKellen where he mentioned that his own immodest nose was made even larger for the character of Gandalf.

Caricature of Jason Seiler

Bobby Chiu is doing a live interview with caricature artist Jason Seiler at 11:59 pm EST tomorrow (4 Dec, 4:59 am GMT) on his UStream channel. As usual with his interviews, a contest is held in conjunction with the show. This time people are asked to do a caricature of Jason Seiler and the winner will have the courtesy returned by getting their caricature done by Seiler himself.
I've been curious about doing some caricature drawing so this came at a good time.

Much as I tried, I couldn't bring myself distort the features as much as some caricature artists do. It made me wonder if the measure of how good of a caricature artist you are is how much you can distort someone's features, yet still making it look unmistakably like them.

More info about the contest and the streaming on Bobby's Chiustream blog...

Moon drops

Lullatone is an electronica/indie musical couple who describe their music as 'pajama-pop'. Quoted from the Spotify artist bio:

...Seymour moved to Nagoya with her about a year later, where they moved into a tiny apartment. It was there that he was inspired to start writing what he called "tiny songs." Seymour, who didn't sleep much at that time, would stay up late composing and recording lullabies for Tomida, making use of whatever he could get his hands on: xylophones, keyboards, music boxes, /.../ and, as Seymour put it, "a lot of daydreams."

Their songs make me think raindrops, sunshine and unicorns. If you're in the mood for that, check them out on Spotify where most of their albums are available. :)

Snake bite

These are part of some of illustrations I did as a test for The Naked Scientist podcast. The article was on whether or not snakes are susceptible to their own venom. Apparently, to some degree, they are! :)

(Click for GIF animation)

Snakes are rather expressionless so I had to figure out how to draw them. I wanted flexibility in expression so I took a lot of inspiration from Disney's Kaa (The Jungle Book) and Sir Hiss (Robin Hood). A cool thing about snakes is that that you can pretty much shape their body any way you want for desired effect. In the example above the whole joke is based on the flexibilty of the snake body.



Since we're on the topic of Disney, while I was in Visby this summer I discovered a copy of The Illusion of Life at the local library. It's truly a treasure trove on the origins of the Walt Disney Studios, the invention of Disney animation and information on what makes their drawings so special. It's so easy to take Disney animation for granted and sometimes I even sense that they're thought of as the big bully when it comes to animated features, but looking back, the way they pioneered animation is simply astounding. Gradually I've come to realise that there's a lot that can be learnt from animation for any kind of artist, especially when it comes to expression, form and gesture.
A great source on gesture in particular is Walt Stanchfields Drawn to Life books. They're two thick books consisting of notes which were distributed by Stanchfield to the animators at Disney over the course of many years. There is so much insight about drawing, mentality and creativity on these pages that it's taking me ages to get through even the first volume.
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The Naked Scientist - link
Illusion of Life - Amazon
Drawn to Life - Amazon: Vol. 1, Vol. 2

The King is Dead

I got into pop music way too late to have caught the Michael Jackson wave but he was a legend and touched so many lives. The world's reaction is a testament to his greatness.


For the first time I spent some time watching his videos on Youtube. I was watching a song called Beat It when it struck me how expressive and full of gesture his dancing style is.
We may exaggerate people's gestures to create more lively and expressive poses (which they often do in animation), but in Jackson 's case he is that exaggeration. His dancing is constantly pushing the limits... bending, stretching, twisting and turning.

I did a Google image search for "Michael Jackson gesture", and found Alex Woo, who has worked as a story artist on Wall-E. He taught a life drawing class back in 2008 where he used Jackson as an example for gesture drawing and camera awareness (link). He makes the point that Jackson is a master at positioning himself as to create the most striking and readable silhouette against the camera, and that artists shouldn't be afraid of manipulating poses to clarify the action.

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Beat It on Youtube - (link)
Alex Woo - link
Michael Jackson gives some insight into gesture drawing - link

Mid-day nap

A bit of doodling in ArtRage. I find the tools rather hard to handle, but the result sure is unexpected. This doodle started out as a black mark I made by accident when trying out the Wacom tablet shortcuts. I didn't bother to erase the black mark and in the end it grew to become the star of the show.