Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Dragons in the trees




Went camping over the anzac day weekend and as a result -here are some tree camouflaged dragons.
A bit hastily sewn together- I'll fix that and repost them.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Her name was Lola....




She was a showgirl... ....
at Dr Sketchy Byron.

I went last night, arrived quite late, found a spare chair sort of close but in the worst position and right next to the speaker stack.
The problems with Dr Sketchy are
1. Not enough time to draw- most you can hope for is 10 mins but mostly its 5 and that's not enough to do them and their costume beyond a scribble-(and also overall in terms of time spent drawing).
Kind of need 10 mins for them 10 for the costume
2. Models don't stay still.
3. Lighting can be such that you can't see where the end of your pencil is.
The nice thing is the costumes, and the models.
(Although they could be 'ruderer'.)

Anyway here is Lola the Vamp, in a kind of tutu thing.

and the last pose (5min) of Lisa from the previous post.

Resisting the urge to run




Is what I often find myself doing at life drawing. I arrive in a fluster and absolutely no focus, spending half the time trying to remember the process which is hard when you are feeling inattentive.
Here are some images of spasmodic life drawing attendance at life drawing the previous 2 weeks. As usual I did my "invent somethng to make my life drawing interesting" thing.
So the male model here who actually looks quite frazetta-esque in the face/body who was sitting on his chair got a barbarian makeover and a 'ride'. Trouble with this is I just extend the drawing 'til I run out of paper- so there's no composition.
The gorgon girly at bottom was the first of that pose and I realised midway that I'd drawn the head too far from the left arm-so make it a feature and "Off with her head!".
Because that one wasn't working so well I tried again - its still a little wonky but was much better, but ran out of time to record the shading properly. The last pose- a five minute one of her seemed much better. This model, Lisa, would make a fantastic vampiress - so I might suggest it to the convenor (ie somehow get some kind of white dracula's bride looking gown for her to pose in)(or maybe try and hire her myself).

Monday, April 19, 2010

"Truth is no words"



Post Supanova I'd kind of decided to try and finally start on illustrations of Australian dinosaurs with a view to a book. Turns out there's not much help to be had in this kind of endeavour, so I might have to make it a bit of a fiction- maybe a lost world kind of story after all with simliar creatures instead of the factual thing I think is needed. Fortunately though there's so little been found of Australian dinosaurs-like a single bone as proof of an animal type thing- or a footprint- so I figure any of my 'educated ' guesses and fabrications are as good as any.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

SupaNova ("once more over the top.")



I don't normally post photos but...
I booked a table at the Brisbane Supa Nova artists alley, and here I am pictured above with my two small assistants and my (much larger) fellow artist and good friend Milenko Tunjic.

This was quite a different experience of Supanova to my earlier ones in my incarnations as Pandemic employee, (where due to the lateness of the scheduling there were probably as many tumbleweeds as audience members(Actually only the second post of this blog-which upon re- reading now looks like I was pretty down and pissed at the shambolicness.))

I had with me some folios of my current work and a few of old work from my years in games, plus lot of large rolls of paper to draw on. On the friday and at the start and end of days I drew quick large (table sized) drawings, as I did at the Ipswich writers festival, which I sold. I also did other drawings in between as you can see-often a quick dinosaur for kids). I wasn't quite organised with my sign as far as how to mount it-but it was big enough to see anyway.
Also Milenko and I commandeered the adjoining wall and put our drawings up there too.

The sheer number of costumed people was staggering- sort of felt this was the vibe they must have had in San Francisco in the Summer of love-kind of "wow so many beautiful people digging it".
Really those people ought to get in free. (While we're at it exhibitors ought to get free parking.)
It was very hot,- I just had a tshirt and it was unbearable so I can't imagine how some of those cosplay people survived.

Friday was quiet, but Saturday (pictured) was crazy, and Sunday was fairly busy considering.
We met a lot of nice people (fortunately with lots of nice things to say), and were visited by a few friends and people we knew also(Pete Mullins,Lucia and Vincenzo, Andy Monks, Steve Stamatiadis) , and there were nice people nearby:- the Whiteteaflake girls, Comicboy Studios, Quantum stand people, and Nigel Bell.
And very interesting observing who liked what.
Overall not exactly a money spinner at this stage but much more gratifying and constructive than, say, that New York SCWBI conference-( because that was all about them and this was about us.)
I watched Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust again after talking to the Whiteteaflake girls about Yoshitaka Amano , man that is one cool and cool looking film.