Painting practice

I've had a play with different brushes to get similar effects to how I used to paint traditionally in acrylics with alkyds (makes acrylic workable for longer) and gouache.  Back in the day I remember painting large boards with sticks to get scratchy lines! In some respects I miss doing a physical piece of art and would love either the money to rent a studio or the space to do large scale painting at home.  I prefer painting impressionistically because I'm lazy when it comes to the formulaic method of getting every line in the right place with a wacom pad when doing the commercial 'graphic' stuff means I need to spend a few moments doing this sort of thing.

So, anyway, here are a couple of paintings and sketches, I'm sure I have others on zip disks knocking about somewhere but I imagine they are dubious in quality, quite often they are done on one layer and 'scribbled' out in an hour or two, generally if I like them I save them and if I dont I close the file to save on storage space. 

More kids books

Hello,

Here's a small selection of artwork from a few books I've been working on recently. (I cant write about the books or the character until they are published at the start of next year) but they revolve around a young boy and time travel.  These books had a turn around of 1 book per week, I also had a few commissions from my agent to do while these were going on.  Despite the rush getting them out I'm quite pleased with the work, the need to work quickly helped improve my figurative work over the course of this project.

   

Kid's "Character Workshop"

Recently I was invited to offer some tips to a class of Children in their 3rd year at Primary school. When I arrived the kids were already designing their characters and 'pets' which had to be from one of the main animal groups (reptile, mammal, insect etc). I set my kit up then talked about being an artist and what is involved when we have lots of fun creating illustrations.

When the lesson ended I was really impressed by some of the Children's characters and asked the teacher if it was possible to have a copy of some of their designs so I could go away and work them into illustrations in my spare time, this way I could then show the class how an idea is developed and also explain how having an idea is probably more important to the creative process than having experience at drawing.

A couple of days later I received a selection of their drawings, I apologies that they are scans of the B+W photocopies, I wish I had their sketch books as they were really colourful! Below are the images that I worked up into designs from their sketches on the right.

This character was really good fun to replicate, I liked how they have drawn the character in an 'action pose' the pet the croc was going off the paper so he's draw it's head tilted up. I think this shows real creativity, in fact I kept the basic pose I liked it that much! Notice also the hearts for the character and the pet, I incorporated these into my version, this was something the pupil added of their own accord.

This Character was produced by one of the girls in the group, I was suprised how involved all the girls got in this project, wrongly thinking it would be only the boys who would be interested in designing characters.

I thought this character looked like she was wearing a judo suit so I thought a fighting pose would work nicely, like a character from Tekken for example, I also used the heart shapesfrom the earrings around the design. Her pet is a stripy squirrel which I figured would look great if I made it 100 larger than real life.

This character needed no further explanation even though it's a bizarre combination of blocky robot man and electric eel for a pet! Seeing as I already had the name and looking at the character's shape I thought, why not make him into one big bomb, so there is a counter on his chest!

So what have I learned about this project (...never mind the kids, I probably learned more than they did!) Well I realized that some children add elements of their own which haven't been specified in the brief pushing a brief further than it's restrictions.
Some of the names the children gave their characters including their powers were superb and really inventive, this is a skill additional to drawing. Some children would copy a classmate's idea and push it a bit further creating an overall better concept, this is a good example of how creative teams work and shows the importance of eveyones imput when working together on ideas.

Importantly I also realized that many of the children drew whatever they thought would be cool, often with unusual elements, without having really any pre-conceived ideas or commercial awareness which is a great thing to witness. In fact, many Computer Games with off the wall characters have received relative commercial success (such as "Vib Ribbon" and more recently "Little big Planet") against more franchised product lines (such as movie tie-ins) and this would apply to most of Japanese design culture where character design (such as Pokemon, studio Ghibli etc) has a very strong emphasis on creating unusual and conceptual characters.

It's been a while since my last post as I've been busy with commissions, part time jobs and doing projects in the garden. Like most of my work I've had to sign confidentiality agreements so I am unfortunately unable to upload a lot of it untill it's been published, but I can upload a few samples of other jobs I've been up to these last few weeks.

Clicking on all pictures loads up a larger version!

Finally some concept art! A couple of colour roughs I produced for a publisher needing some illustrations for a project in it's early stages of development, I produced these over a weekend between other jobs, I've included the line sketches.

These two characters are from four that I was commissioned to produce. If the project gets further funding I look forward to altering some aspects of the outfits / developing the characters more etc, but for a weekender I'm happy enough.

This is an accompanying illustration I produced over the same weekend, I also created a book layout for the client but I can't let the cat out of the bag by uploading too much from this project.

This job is still in the process of being worked on, the brief itself contains about 30 of these types of illustrations, mostly orientated around teenage heath. The above illustration is for an educational book in a graphic novel / comic style, the underlying theme is to promote teenagers into thinking about the issues they may face. The speech bubbles will be added later.

This collection is from a set of about 16 images I created for a client, the brief was b+w art to be delivered rough (there was no rough submission stage) they specified that they did not want polished artwork, this was probably due to the time constraints and their budget.

These are a couple of artworks from another commission, again just b+w, I was asked to give the girl a short 'stylish bob' type hair cut (1) I also wanted to submit something more interesting (2), the client didn't wish to deviate on this occasion but it's worth chucking in a few of your own ideas on the off chance. The boy appears in another publication and they wanted a high level of consistency in their product, hence his pose is mirrored. These are the roughs although I've clipped a section of the final line art so you can get a better idea of the linework I've produced using vectors, I love smooth vector line work.

Here's another rough for the same project, it's the same girl as the cover pose above, thinking about what to write in a thank you letter. I re-submitted the pose after it was established the biting lip expression was too subtle so I gave her pursed lips and more of a frown, she was also required to slim down a touch and I made a few other slight modifications.

Well, that's it for now. I'll have another update sometime, I've been watching Don Bluth's channel on YouTube and he's such an inspiration that I could listen to him all day, so now I'm desperate to also get on with some personal art, let's hope May brings some spare time, and fingers crossed a few commissions too!

Preliminary Sketching

Hello!

Sketching is my favorite part of the creative process and often I prefer looking at sketch work rather than the final article. Sketches rarely get seen, at least in a commercial sense, this is one reason why I like looking at other artists concept art and sketchbooks so much but also it is an insight into how they have tackled a subject.
My enthusiasm for sketching also stems from working commercially with clients where the challenge is not just to practice the physical act of drawing it's equally important to express what they are thinking. Quite often an illustration brief is fairly self explanatory, on other occasions the client may give the opportunity to invest some artistic license.

This post will focus on as small selection of my sketch work, some of it worked into an illustration.

Sketching for illustration


A selection of sketches from a recent project. The turn around was fairly quick so I usually just work without reference and look up specific items as I need them. A positive aspect of working to tight deadlines is that it forces me to work at improving my accuracy under pressure.

Here's a selection of 'vehicle' sketches from numerous commissions. These sketches were from a comic strip and are actually quite small in real life, less than A6 in size, I once worked with a guy who did all his story-boarding on post-it-notes (the small ones!)



This is an example of pushed perspective, to give an element of warping it helps make the cars look like they are speeding. I have the final piece on this site so have a flick through the older posts.


This is a sketch I produced for Egmont publishing, a technique I employed to add more action into the composition was to draw the cars racing around a corner, oh and I've used a tunnel in the shot again (this is a great way to avoid drawing more road / scenery!)... and yes I do make car and explosion noises when I'm drawing at home!

Some transitions to final art



This is a recent job for a client showing a sketch > worked up into colour rough > then to the final illustration. It took roughly 2hrs, including the sketching stages, to produce as this was quite a cheap commission and I tend not to hang around on these jobs. I suppose like everything you have to strike a balance between quality of work and speed produced.



Here is another commission worked into a final illustration showing the development stages. The brief said "Character imagining a Space station lab with scientists growing plants" so I went for a retro/future environment as firstly it is an imagined image rather than a factual one and also current space stations don't look more like a science lab.


Here is another job, it's from a range of 12 illustrations for an educational book, again showing the transition from my origional sketch.

Sketching for production / basic interface design


Here are a few product concepts I created for a client. The exercise was just to give them some direction but I still needed to work within some confines such as the dimensions of the internal components, so they can function properly, and also limitations of the vacuum molding process where certain shapes would double or triple the cost of manufacturing the unit.


These are a few quick layout sketches / colour roughs they are environments used in a children's book. I usually try my best to visualize in three dimensions, which sure helps with environment designs.


While consulting for a publishing house I created this interface for a CD-ROM project so the user can navigate features in a more interesting way. The concept I created was to customize your surf / skate / snow board using a screen made to look like a desk in workshop, that way the board would be created as if it sat on the desk rather than over a generic options screen. The final artwork appeared virtually unchanged from the design I sketched during the meeting.


This example shows a quick b/w sketch and another finished interface illustration.
Often I sketch using a Wacom tablet in the same way that I'd use felt markers and a biro for sketching. This is a quick way for me to bypass scanning artwork if an idea is needed in a hurry.


Here's another example of a visual I created using the Wacom rather than sketching on paper first. Using a Wacom tablet gives a slightly different line to pencil or pen, partly because you cannot move the orientation of the 'paper' on the computer screen to allow for directional pencil marks (although in later versions of Corel Painter you can) it's possible to move the pad but it's no substitute. For this reason I prefer doing line work on paper and because I like to have an original sketch but mainly because I am creating a line with the tip of a pencil. I think a Wacom Cintique would be the best digital alternative.


I produced these sketches during a meeting while I acted as consultant with a production company, examples shows how I worked up an idea and how it translated to final art. We needed the island to have 4 sections for each board sport. Naturally it is not geographically correct (snow right next to a hot beach!!?) but it serves it's purpose as a navigation tool. At the bottom is another idea for a separate interface, which was not used.... I imagine I've probably got through a fair amount of paper over the years going through the 'unused ideas' stage, but that's part of the fun!


Changing art Styles.
Although these examples are not sketching in the literal sense of the word, being able to offer variations in style during the early stages of a project is another caveat of production. As much as sketching offers the development of ideas the creation of a final style is also open to the same degree of fine tuning. The level of finish and style is most scrutinized at this point as in some cases things like key-line thickness / colour and tone etc can't be pinpointed from a sketch.
I work in many styles, whatever will please the customer mainly, although most of what you see on this site is commercial work so I don't really have any hang-ups about sticking to one style, I'm happy to produce whatever my customer wants (because they're the ones paying the bill!) This layout shows five styles I submitted during the course of one project.