Aminuls

I've been sorting through sketchbooks and loose papers the last couple of weeks, uncovering stuff I never finished, sketches of ideas, random drawings etc. There are lots I really like, but many of them are in sketchbooks that are really difficult to scan or photograph. Anyway, I've collected together some of the more successful scans of animal drawings (my favourite things to draw) I've done over the last year or so:

I like moths. I don't like how they hurtle around, apparently giving no thought to the giant face in their flight path, but I like their patterns. And some of them look just plain cuddly!

I drew some:

(They aren't to scale)

Next up is a pheasant I painted for someone fairly recently.

Some hare studies from earlier this year when they were EVERYWHERE:

General studies of British wildlife that I quite like. Red fox, weasel, roe deer, rabbit (technically not a British species):

My version of a mythological Simurgh; a cross between a dog, a lion and a peacock.

Awful photo of a painting of a wild boar and young. (No, I don't have fuzzy walls, it's on the carpet here!)

And finally, a watercolour cheetah study.

Aaand that's all for now! I am going away soon for a week. I hope to do some drawing on my short travels, and might hopefully return with some nice photographs, too!

Spirits

Third posting this month, I think, which is unexpected and very quick for me, really. I've been 'processing' a bunch of drawings and paintings that have been hanging around sadly in my sketchbooks, demanding attention, but I'm waiting to gather enough of each type in one place so that I can post them in specific collections.

However, I have just finished something that I got done much quicker than I had anticipated (I'm a slooow worker) - I thought it would be an ongoing thing in between other stuff, but I managed to plough through it in a few days.

It started out with the excitement of finding a lone piece of brown paper in my paper cupboard. I love drawing on brown paper, but I rarely find brown paper sketchbooks to the colour of my liking, so I cobble together collections of single scraps of the stuff, backs of envelopes, single sheets of nice toffee coloured stuff that the local art shop sells in single sheets sometimes, etc.

A fairly spontaneous doodle magically appeared on this single sheet of paper, not in relation to anything at all that I've been doing recently. And here it is:

She's meant to be underwater, but it kind of turned out as if she's... a little bit on fire.

Anyhow, this little doodle gave rise to another idea based on Venice and its annual Carnevale.

I wanted to do more than just a single picture, and I went through about fifty different ideas, layouts, even what the hell was actually going to HAPPEN in the damn thing, and this indecision happened right through drawing it out, colouring and finishing it. I do that a lot.

So, here is the finished product of all that irritating indecision:

And there it is. A page of comic-like panels depicting a single point in time, rather than the usual unfolding of events within a scene. A girl in a Venetian gondola dips her hand into the Grand Canal, unaware of the 'ladies and gentlemen' watching her from beneath the water. The middle panel is in the vague shape of a Venetian bridge, acting as a barrier between the two very different 'worlds'. The writing at the bottom is a terrible mutilation of a quote made by John Ruskin on the nature of Venice "A splendour of miscellaneous spirits." I apologise Mr Ruskin for using your words for my own devious ends...

That's all I want to show off for now, I suppose!

Until the next time,

Arrivederci!

Miscellaneous (Likely the first of many)

Bonjour!

Last post I said I had a bunch of work to show off that had no particular relation to anything. Well... that was kind of a lie - an unintentional lie. Probably about 70% of the stuff I think is somewhat worthy of show is related in some way or another to Greek myths, like 70% of ALL the stuff I've already posted on this blog since Christmas. I have an obsession... but I hadn't realised the magnitude of it until today.

But, seriously. Seriously. SERIOUSLY. SSSEEERRRIIIOOO - yeah, you get it. This is the last of my Greek myth-y submissions for a while. I promise. And by 'a while', I probably mean.. like... a month, or something. Who knows.
But anyway, for now, the following images are the last completed miscellaneous Greek Myth-y images I've done that I feel are adequate enough to post. They're all very different styles, so please forgive the messy jumble that is this Blog Post.

So, here we go.
First up, Hera. The goddess, wife (and sister <.<) of Zeus.
Goddess of women and marriage, primarily. The animals associated with her are the peacock and the cow, and sometimes also the lion. (I am disappointed that I lacked the skills to put a cow in the image and still pull it off as being somewhat graceful and goddess-like. Oh well, maybe one day.) I went for a kind of Art Nouveau/Greek patterns mish-mash here.

"Talk to the hand, pussy."

Next up, a fairly rough play around with indian ink.
Unfortunately, my scanner really hated the type of watercolour paper I used for this, so don't look too closely at it. It looks much better in real life.
This is a rather dark, gloomy interpretation of the usually fairly happy or otherwise peaceful Hippocampus - or, Half horse/half fish. For someone who drew horses almost exclusively up until the age of 12, they sure are a bit of a challenge.

And, finally, one I finished just recently.
A pencil drawing, toned and coloured slightly in photoshop.
A depiction of someone (not necessarily Jason, as the real myth suggests) stealing the fabled Golden Fleece from the unsleeping Colchian Dragon who was meant to be guarding it. Dragon be mad.
Most Greek dragons are said to be serpentine, and the Colchian dragon was described as having 3 tongues, but apart from that, few other details are given of him. So, since he was guarding a ram's golden fleece, I gave him ram-like horns.

(((Click for full view)))

And, that's it, for now!
No more Greek stuff. At least for a few weeks.
I'll save the genuinely random images that I have ready to show for when I have collected a few more to create distinct categories for them.

Now, I've been given a rather fabulous encyclopaedia of World Mythology by a very good Swedish friend, and I'm off to read it some more! ;)

Me Gusta

Greetings and salutations, peasants!

Heh...

I don't have a whole load of stuff to show you, really. I mean, I do, but right now I only really want to focus on one thing - something I started ages ago, then abandoned, then took up again and finished.

Once again, surprise, surprise, surprise - so much surprise anyone with a heart condition should probably avert their gaze - it is inspired, at least vaguely, by Greek Myth. By my 'Erebus' comic page (which can be viewed in a couple of posts prior to this one), to be precise.

I started it having no idea how to proceed in colouring it - whether it should be black and white, ink, pencil, paint, digital... I really couldn't make up my mind.
I left the idea alone for several weeks, until I rediscovered an image I had saved on my computer in my 'amaze-balls' folder, from the front cover of a book of short comic stories. I remember being quite amazed by the image, partly because it's a very nice image, but mostly because, if you look at it closely, you can see that all the little details in the image are in fact very scruffily painted in - a single stroke to make a window, scratchy, scribbled brushstrokes to define shadow and other details, but from a distance it looks meticulously painted:

(Image on the cover of the 'Flight' anthology of short comic stories,

 published by Image Comics/Ballentine Books)

I've always been in awe of people who can slap paint (real and digital) around quite haphazardly and come out with a professional, clean-looking image.
When I happen to give it a try - painting in a slightly impressionistic way that suggests quick, rough strokes to give the impression of detail and professionalism - my images usually come out looking like what they are - a mess:

Yeah...

But, finding that "Flight" image again for some reason made me take up my graphics tablet and accompanying pen and slap some digital paint haphazardly around on a digital canvas in the hopes that a half-decent image might form based around the 'Erebus'-inspired idea I had abandoned.

Wanna see the result?

So, what is it?
It's a vaguely Ancient Greek-ish town made from books and candles.
I imagine the inhabitants of this unmitigated fire hazard worship the distant grandfather clock as some sort of deity. It chimes the hours away for them, provided they offer it a sacrificial silverfish each and every morning.

As earlier suggested, I didn't want to go into huge detail - keeping the image busy but not weighed down with things like text on book spines etc. I'm fairly pleased with it.


Welp, that's what I wanted to show you - all the other images I have to show are largely random bits and pieces that I'll bunch together in 'bits and pieces' post at a later date.

Turrah for now!

Once Upon a Time

“Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.” - Johann Christoph Friederich v. Schiller

Aloha!

 I'm afraid I've been rather artistically challenged lately! A combination of stuff getting in the way, an odd lack of motivation, and an excessive use of that infamous little mental phenomenon called 'procrastination'. The things that have been particularly prominent in my mind lately, and that have been the main focus of my limited random doodling in recent weeks, are myths and fairy tales, as may have been evident in my most recent blog posts.

I’ve long had a fascination with fairy tales and myths - European folklore and Greek myths being my favourite. I wrote several essays and a dissertation on the nature and evolution of fairy tales during my years at university, and my major project in my final year was based on folklore from around the world (though I shamelessly messed around with tradition and skewed tales to my own needs).

Since this obsession has been particularly intrusive in my brain of late, I’ve decided to vent my thoughts onto this blog, and share what I think are some amazing artists of the fairy tale genre (and also a collection of my own fairy tale doodles towards the end). Get ready for a hella big blog post!

Some of my favourite artists are closely associated with the fairy tale genre, many of them from around the time of the Golden Age of Illustration during the nineteenth century; Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac; and also some modern ones such as the fantastic Brian Froud and Tony DiTerlizzi.

Fairy tales originally began, across the world, as oral traditions, stories for both adults and children to enjoy when books, literature and the ability to read them were scarce or reserved only for the elite members of society. They were mostly tales of morality and caution, teaching modesty, courage, honesty, cunning and many other virtues of human nature that were very often portrayed in archetypal form as animals.

Fox= cunning and deceit

Dog= loyalty and bravery

Pig= gluttony and sloth

Etc.

It was only really when the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came into being that fairy tales became thought of primarily as stories for young children, and the great illustrators of the era rose to fame through their rich visual narration of those tales and newer stories (from the age) with heavily folklorish elements, such as 'Alice in Wonderland'.

Arthur Rackham

My second favourite artist, and probably the most renowned fairy tale illustrator of them all; illustrated such books as 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' and 'Alice in Wonderland'.

'The Old Woman in the Woods' by Arthur Rackham

"The Goose Girl" by Arthur Rackham

I just love the detail to his work, the muted, aged colours, the foxed backgrounds, the flowing penmanship.

Kay Nielsen

Another prominent Fairy Tale illustrator.

"Blue Beard" by Kay Nielsen

Illustration from 'Sleeping Beauty' by Kay Nielsen

Fairy Tales have seen a recent boom in popularity in modern children's literature and entertainment, such as 'The Spiderwick Chronicles', created and illustrated by Tony Diterlizzi. I both love and hate this guy - his work is so wonderful and dynamic, but it makes me feel exceptionally inadequate as an artist. I hate when that happens!

Two illustrations from DiTerlizzi's Spiderwick Chronicles.

Even my all time favourite artist had a keen interest in fables and folklore. Leonardo da Vinci documented numerous folkloric takes on the fundamental nature of animals (or at least, the natures humans assigned to them), and drew numerous mythical creatures in his notebooks.

A dragon by Leonardo, reminiscent of Chinese Lungs.

A rough drawing of 'The Allegory of the Wolf and the Eagle' by da Vinci.

Fairy tales are enormously important to me. I've always loved them, but I think the artwork that so often accompanied them is the main reason my interest stayed as years passed. The stories themselves are very appealing, with wondrous imagery and clever metaphors for various aspects of the human condition. They inspire me to draw and write more than anything else, I think, and my recent ultra-obsession in them has prompted me to collect together several little doodles and drawings I have done relating to fairy tales and myths over the past year or two:

And here is an image I finished just the other day - an ink drawing inspired by fairy tales. I started it on a rather small piece of paper, then realised I wanted to make it bigger and more detailed, so I carried it over to another piece of paper and stitched it together in Photoshop.

(Click to View properly!!)

Fairy tales seem to many people old, uninteresting or irrelevant in modern times, but they have transcended from oral tradition, to books, and more recently to film and theatre. Their appeal and diverse methods of story-telling that helped shape society from its very beginning have stopped them being pushed to the back of the dustiest shelf of the oldest bookcase in the most shadowy corner of an underused library, even in a hectic age of technology and endless distractions of funny cat pictures and videos of people falling over, they manage to cling to the edges of our culture, quietly and modestly, but very much there. And that's why I love them!


As the wonderful Mr Dickens once wrote; “In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.” 

So, yeah. I'll shut up now. Go away and appreciate the hell out of those old fables! Or I’ll go Evil Stepmother on all your asses!

(Oh! And one more thing, while we're on the subject - My friend takes part in a lovely art project called 'The Drawing Circus', a life drawing event with costumes, props and live music. They are doing a Grimm's Fairy Tales themed event. If you're in or around Brighton UK on the 3rd of March, do make sure you go check it out! I wish I could go, but alas, 'tis not meant to be... http://www.draw-brighton.co.uk/events/42/the-drawing-circus-grimm-s-fairy-tales)

Momento Mori

Aloha.

It snowed this morning. Kind of. Barely.
Hopefully it is a sign of snow to come. I'd like to have a proper snowy few days at least this winter, as it'll be my first winter fully back at home in a few years, and I want to be able to take advantage of having a garden and woods and a dog to talk in them, and more importantly a FIRE to come back to, instead of my university room with the hole in the window and questionable radiator.

ANYWAY.

Returning to the point of me opening up a new blog post in readiness of oncoming words.
I only have one picture to show at this point, but you also get a FREE STORY to go with it. You lucky devils, you. Though, it's only like... 3 paragraphs long. So not that exciting. Still, it's FREE!!!

I wrote the story ages ago during the summer months when it was unseasonably dark and foggy and generally quite wintery and I was in a dark and foggy and generally quite wintery mood. I had made an image in relation to it back then as well but it was very speedy and rather shit, and I came across it the other day and thought "Ugh, that won't do." So, I made a new one (I originally did it as a charcoal drawing, but I royally screwed it up, so rather than do it all over again in the same medium I painted it digitally):

The carriage appears every night in the winter, when the ice covers the roads. No one knows who guides its horse; there has never been any sign of a driver. It trundles mournfully along that little trail. The trail no other carriage uses anymore. The one that starts and ends nowhere, with nothing but trees at one end, and nothing but the remains of a large, empty stone house at the other.

    The house belonged to a wealthy man, they say. A man who died quite young; shot after a quarrel with a friend over money. When they found him lying by the gateway to his house, a coin covered each closed eye. His pockets were scratched and torn, and they assumed his assailant had robbed him. Some said, however, they saw magpies in the trees. Dozens of them. And each one held a coin in its beak.

   The house fell into ruin after that; when all the man’s belongings were sold off or given to uncaring relatives.

Years after this, the carriage began appearing. At its arrival at the gate of that murdered man’s house the sound of coins clattering on the hard ground could be heard beside the carriage door. The exact amount for the carriage’s fare, some thought. But, no one could ever get close enough to retrieve those coins as anyone who dared try was attacked by magpies, clawing and flapping at the unlucky individual's face before swooping down to pluck the coins from the ground and flying away to sit in the trees, cackling to each other over their reward.

People tend to ignore the carriage now. They leave the memory of the murdered man, and his wealth, and his carriage to his only friends; the magpies.

There now. A heart-warming story to cheer the spirits on this cold winter's eve...

A friend suggested I turn the story into a poem, as it's short even by the standards of short stories. I like the idea, but I've never been much interested in poetry, with only a few exceptions, and so I feel that any attempt I could make would cause most half-decent poets and appreciators of the art to gouge their eyes out with rage.

Maybe I'll give it an attempt some day.

So, yes! Not much else to say, really, so I suppose I'd better stop.

Turrah for now!

*Vanishes*

January Blues

Welp, January is upon us, all the decorations have been taken down and the tree is sitting sadly on the compost heap - it went out with a vengeance, dropping every single one of its needles on the carpet as dad dragged it outside, making it look as though we were attempting, and succeeding, to grow an indoor lawn. 


All the festive fun and excitement is over...
BUT!! I'm quite happy! I have my vision back properly and am able to draw and read again! HUZZAH.


So, I've been doing stuff.


A bit of digital painting practice on a guy I dreamt about ages ago. A guy with stilts for legs in weird venetian carnival-esque attire who chased me round my own house. Normal-sized people have trouble standing upright without risking concussion in my house, so how this guy managed to fit I'll never know. 

I also thought I'd present an image done with a quill pen and a pot of ink a couple of months ago. I touched it up recently and rescanned it so I suppose I should show it. It comes with its own little snippet of story - not related to anything, just something I cam up with while drawing it:

"People flocked in the streets to see this particular carriage go by. The one with the trees engraved on the sides and wheel spokes carved in the style of gnarled branches, pulled by a stag - and not those flashy golden stags only the elite of the elite used to drag them around the city - a common red stag with a magnificent set of antlers and a known temper.
Children would jump out as it passed to try and grab the large silver ring dangling from the mouth of the horned demon on each door. One knock brought good luck, they said. Two brought wealth. Three brought fame. Four brought gifts of magic. And five brought the occupant of the carriage out to murder everyone in the vicinity. No child had yet dared to test the last notion."


Ahem. Yeah...




And finally, I'm returning to the rather Greek Myth-y theme of the last post and showing off something I finished just today. A pencil illustration, again, not of an actual Greek myth, but rather inspired by the concept of the Greek Sphinx, the guardian of Thebes, and a Riddle Master. Anyone who wished to enter the city had to first answer a riddle. Failure to answer it correctly meant becoming the Sphinx's lunch.


The whole illustration is again too tall to view properly on most screens, so I'm breaking it up.

The top:

The Middle:

The Bottom:

And here it is in full, just so you get the idea:

So, yes. A mish-mash of random crap to start the new year off!


I hope everyone is sticking to their New Year's resolutions. I haven't made any.
I suppose the only resolution I can think of is to make sure I stay SUPER HAPPY at all times!!! :D


Arrivederci!