Something character based:

Today I met John Norris Wood from the Royal College of Art. It wasn't the first time he visted our university, I still remember attending one of his lectures way back in my first year and I was introduced to the works of Edward Bawden, which seemed like a close friend of Johns.

Shame Edward Bawden is no longer alive, but I've taken quite a liking to some of his works. I finally managed to find a reasonably affordable copy of his childrens book 'Lady Filmy Fern'

I can't seem to find a decent picture of John himself on the net, would have made a lot more sense if I had taken a photo of him during his time in our studio but sadly, it was on that particular day I didn't bring my camera. Myself and a few others were fortunate enough to have a bit of a chat with John and gave us a little bit of critique on our sketch pads.

John liked my drawings and felt that some of my drawings felt very narritive based.

I was pleased to see that John enjoyed looking at my drawings. What I did find interesting however is that he also felt that each of my drawings (and characters) could have a written story about them. I don't feel particularily great at writing but I do enjoy coming up with story ideas, perhaps this is a good direction for my final major project to go in. I also managed to churn out a couple of drawings from chatting to John, I'll upload them in a future update.


As mentioned in one of my previous updates, I would like to start uploading my character designs. I currently aim to make at one or two a day.


A collection of pirate designs I made.



I also found myself playing a little bit of my super nintendo today, and I did think back that videogames are also perhaps one of my biggest influences on my drawings- especially the older and more outdated ones.
A lot of the older videogames could include ridiculous concepts and ideas- they could literally be about anything.

Official art for the super mario games

Take this as an example. An italian Plumber travels to the mushroom world to save the mushroom princess. Along the way, he is capable of eating leaves that give him racoon powers (capable of giving him flight.) and must defeat an evil turtle empire.

It would be these sort of videogames where I would often try and pause the game and copy what I could see on the screen, and most often or not at a very early age (creating some truly awful characters that looked like awful representations of Sonic or Megaman.) and since most sprite characters were quite small and difficult to make out, you would really have to use your own imagination as to what they were, they would simply be a blurred mess of blocks and colours.. Heres another character I made after playing a few videogames and without really thinking of anything in particular.