Illustration Friday: Poise

Following on from my last post, I decided I would like to enter Illustration Friday this week using a more children-friendly image. This is a new character called Georgie and I created him specifically to test out some illustration techniques, so although he's not the most original character, we may see more of him. This image took about an hour to draw and colour in so it's rather a swift piece, but as I'm slowly discovering, sometimes perfection is imperfection and the natural linework adds to the drawing's accessibility. Let me know what you think anyway.
Incidentally - has anyone here ever used acrylic paint? I used to use watercolour a lot, but I want to do some drawings and colour them in with nice solid colours. Is acrylic good for this? I never learnt how to paint things without you being able to see all the unsightly brushmarks at the end. I've tried guash in the past but with my lack of skill, the results were...messy!

Billy & Tinker (Illustration Test)

Here is an image I just whipped-up. For a while now I've wanted to branch out into the competitive world of illustrating childrens books. My style has never really been geared up for the task, though. Well, tonight I thought it was time I began exploring some possibilities. The above image was the first of several experiments, using a new drawing style (for me anyway) and some new production techniques. It's quite basic and not too enthrawling, but considering everything about this image was concieved through experimentation, it could've been a lot worse.

Illustration Friday: Subtract 2

As I'm not too blown-away with my entry for Illustration Friday this week, I've decided to enter a second one and hedge my bets. Interestingly, this is my first ever fully-computerised entry. The heads are recycled from the edit files of my film Waking Up In Wonderland. I had thought them lost until I managed to find them on an old scratched disc last week. The background was an experiment I did last week to see if I could create grass (seen in my Legendary picture).
After I made this just now, I realised that the characters bodies have been subtracted and thus, this image is applicable for this week's topic. I only wish I'd made this image first as I quite like the colourful disposition of the characters and background.

Illustration Friday: Subtract 1

For this week's Illustration Friday I wanted to make something quickly and intentionally-basic. My last four entries have been a little bit on the complicated side so I fancied a change. This is one of the quickest pictures I've drawn in quite a while so I'm not expecting much kudos back regarding it, and in any case, I have a full plate this week - this is the best I could manage!

Some More Texture Tests

Having recently discovered the joys of adding paper texture to old drawings, tonight I conducted a few more experiments. Here are two of the better results:

This is a piece from 2001 entitled "Eleventh Hour". There is a more completed version of this on file, but I chose to use the early pencil version in this instance. The results appear encouraging.

I then went on and tried applying texture to a 2004 drawing called "By The Fire" and this time tried to make it more natural looking. It almost looks like it was drawn on the back of an old envelope!

Whether using paper textures will work on some of my more flamboyant pictures remains to be seen. Watch this space!

Illustration Friday: Legendary

I don't know why, but this week's Illustration Friday word just didn't seem to inspire me that much. Nonetheless I've had a bash at it. I was originally going to do a Samson & Delilah theme, but changed my mind at the last minute and decided to do a King Arthur picture... specifically the legend that refers to the Lady In The Lake giving Arthur his famous Sword. I may've been slightly influenced by Monthy Python and The Holy Grail as I seem to have recreated Graham Chapman's beard to an uncanny degree. From the outset I wanted to do a high-grade image (like my Intricate or Instinct pictures) in the full knowledge that next week I'm going to attempt something more natural. So to help me along this week, I've used a bit more Photoshop than usual. I just hope the image doesn't look too...artificial.

Unfinished Drink

After playing around with old images and new textures on the previous image, I dug out this picture. It's an unfinished drawing I did of Biggins drinking a cup of coffee. At the time I abandonned it to draw another more energetic image (which some of you may have seen on my blog some weeks ago) simply entitled "Coffee". When I stumbled across this image the other day, I found myself wishing I'd competed it.

Biggins Vs Burrow Revamp

This is an old image that I just decided to re-vamped for a bit of fun. This image has been subject to a few experiments over the years (partly because it's a nice clean drawing). I was going to develop it into a more extravagant Boxing Promotion poster, but I stopped because I liked what I'd already achieved.

Illustration Friday: Intricate

This week Illustration Friday gave us the word "intricate". Following on from my image last week I felt encouraged to draw another vocational scene and it struck me that flying a plane (with all those complicated controls) must be quite an intricate process. As it turned out, the logistics of drawing a cockpit full of buttons proved to be slightly more challenging than I had expected... so in the end I scaled-back the details to make the image more managable. Additionally, in certain places the perspective got a wee bit out of hand and I had to be careful about how I coloured things in. Ultimately though I'm rather pleased with this, especially since I threw it together over 3 short evenings.

Illustration Friday: Breezy

For this week's Illustration Friday topic ("Breezy") I came up with about 20 ideas. I spent the whole of last Sunday thinking about which one would be best and as is typical, I simply ended up doing the first idea that had come to me. As you can see, I went for a weather forecast idea, and drew the forecaster in a very breezy pose. In England weather can sometimes be erratic, hence why in the picture I've drawn the wind directions in a very bizarre patterns... this is what it's actually like! I hope you like it!

Starhog 2009

Here's a pimped out copy of my CGI Starhog - with vector accesories and enhanced in Photoshop.

Starhog - CGI

Following on from my blog below - here are some images of Starhog drawn tonight using a CGI program. This is the first image I've ever drawn in CGI with any degree of success. The fact Starhog is made up of four big circles helped...but still...it's a big step forward for me.

Biggins & Company Vs Futurama

Okay - this is just for a little fun. Having just watched the latest Futurama film, I thought it was time to set the record straight on something that's been bugging me for a number of years now.
I'm a fan of Futurama and have watched it for a while now. However, the one gripe I have (not with the show itself particularly) is that Futurama and Biggins and Company have some..."similarities"!

Check out this comparison of the two respective main characters; Fry and Biggins. Is it me or are there some vague similarities? If there are I'm only too happy to point out they are co-incedental as while Futurama has been around sine 1998, Biggins & Co has been knocking around since 1996. Therefore, this interests me because it is a good case study for parallel evolution.
So I believe it's a case of co-incidental design, which encourages me because Futurama has proven there's a big market for this sort of thing - which can only be a good thing for Biggins & Co. Another similarity between the two concepts is their use of spaceships to get around. While in Futurama you have the Planet Express Ship, Biggins has the Starhog. For a little bit of fun earlier, I created the following image;