Wedding

At the end of last year I was privileged to be invited to my first wedding - that of Sally and Peter.
Sally is a gifted artist who I met through the comics scene. She had done a fabulous job at decorating the wedding reception with origami orchids made from book and comic pages, which gave the occasion a very nice personal  touch.
Instead of presents she asked us to do some sketches and I was more than happy to comply!

I was honoured to be able to share their moment.

From having had a wedding attendance of zero only recently I'm looking at two weddings coming up this year. You can tell when you're getting older.

Recent sketches

I lost the pen I normally use for my sketchbook (a Pilot G-Tec C4) on a recent trip to a karate competition (from which I brought home a silver medal by the way!) so I've been reverting back to the good old biro until I get a new pen.

Biros actually feel quite a lot like using a pencil, minus the possibility to erase of course. You get dark or light lines depending on how hard you press and it's quite easy to fall for the temptation to correct mistakes by going over the same area again and again... usually resulting in nothing more than a messy nest of lines and no real improvement.
That's why I love using a more fluid ink pen like the G-Tec when I'm out and about with my sketchbook. Its thin tip is precise and it forces you to be decisive when you put down a line. If the line is wrong you just leave it and move on which makes sketching fun and liberating and there's a definite charm to describing things with as few lines as possible.

With the risk of this turning into one of those "this is the tool to use" talks, I'd just like to end on the note that of course it's all about what you're comfortable with. It's worth highlighting the benefits of using a tool that makes you take responsibility for your lines and preferably think before you put something down however.

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...