More skull and bones

Here are some bony illustrations I knocked up for a blog entry on ossuaries over on Cabinet of Wonders.

slapdash skulls

a very quick digital doodle using an older drawing

Perplexed Pan

This came about after trying my hand at some automatic drawing, in an effort to try and loosen up my style and be more fluid with my pen.

Here's to Love

This is another piece from last semester, an editorial illustration inspired by the short story by Anne Enright. It's part-collage, part-painting - for e.g. the hibiscus flowers were all painted by hand and then cut out (yes, it was a bit fiddly) as were the buildings, meant to reflect the settings described within the story.

Recycled images

Here are some doodle pages from last semester's sketch book. One of the briefs was to come up with some images to be used on recycled packaging. Note my liberal use of cadmium yellow - my favourite colour of the moment - and birds lifted from Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature:

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit

One of my neices has a new pet. A rabbit to be exact. 'Peter' is a white, lop-eared house-trained rabbit. She takes him for walks on a lead - much to the amusement of passers-by.

It's been a while...

... since I blogged on here. That being said, I haven't been able to scan much of my work as I've been working on A3+ papers or canvasses. I do, however, have a new camera so will be able to take more photos of my work than before.

This is part of a recent piece for university. The brief was to design a colourful and contemporary CD cover for Luaka Bop, David Byrne's World Music/South American label. An acrylic wash with cheap (I mean, 99p felts!) felt-pen and black fine-liner.

More aliens

Further to an earlier post, Out of the World, here are a few more 'aliens'.

First up, the Belo Horizonte cyclops. Originally a pen and ink sketch that was then digitally coloured and edited:






Secondly, the Cuidad Valley alien 'twins'. The final illustration can be seen on Greetings Earthlings!.

Pages from the sketchbook

I'd been working on illustrating an excerpt from Paul Zindel's The Day It Rained Cockroaches for a university assignment. Below are some doodles from the sketchbook I submitted as part of my final work. While the final illustration (I created a doublepage spread that imitated a child's textbook or diary with various doodles and collage elements) couldn't be any more different from this early stage, I did use elements from it - namely the gorilla, the newspaper clipping and also the drawing of the man with monkey feet.



Above, a combination of marker pen background (I was in a fairly psychedelic-frame of mind), a digitally painted gorilla and a newspaper clipping courtesy of an online newspaper generator. All elements - including the alien and the clipping's headline - came from the excerpt.




This digitally-painted 'man with monkey feet' is - again - mentioned within the excerpt.

Ritta-Christina

This drawing of Ritta-Christina's skeleton (conjoined twins, born in 1829) has been blogged over on Cabinet of Wonders. Below, the original that started off as a pen sketch before being digitally edited:

Sew-sew

I had been trying my hand at embroidery and needlecrafts - this is part of a cloth that I have been practicing on. I've never been particularly accomplished at sewing, in fact, I would usually go out of my way to avoid sewing anything. Whether it be a sock or tear in my clothes but I have been enjoying myself with this and it doesn't look that bad...

The Eighth Wonder of the World

pen and ink with digital editing

Say hello to Gef, the Eighth Wonder of the World...

I did have to go back to the drawing book a few times to get Gef's mischievous look right, along with his fine bushy tail (that earthly mongooses apparently lack). I also provided two digital paintings of Harry Price - the paranormal investigator, and of Voirrey Irving - the young girl who was at the centre of the Gef mystery - for Graylien's new website that provides a one-stop, fascinating analysis of The Dalby Spook.

Harry Price

Voirrey Irving

Also see: Categorising Gef (the talking mongoose) on Cabinet of Wonders.