Monday 31 January 2011

Megaman Tribute

A little off track, but I thought it might be good to show what else I have been working on during my FMP time. Been working on a competition piece for the 'Megaman Tribute Book' Illustrators around the world are asked to make their image based on 'Megaman' a sci-fi videogame, animated cartoon series.
Official Japanese art of the series, its definetly something I grew up.


And my own take on it. Unfortunately- this is the best I could manage with the short amount of time left to complete it- its not quite finished! Disappointing but quite interesting to see what I could come up with in a space of roughly three or four days.

The Rough Doodle I had in my head.
Was hoping it would look a lot closer to my original doodle but I honestly didn't have the time for it. I was a bit reluctant to send in what I made until some of my friends spurred me on. If my entry is successful, it will be printed into a book and sold in places such as 'Forbidden Planet' comicstore.

John Norris Wood Drawings

I've been a bit slow on updates, I wanted to show some of the characters I came up with while we were chatting with John Wood. I'm still trying to make as many characters as possible and include hopefully all of my ideas in my final major project.

John seemed to be interested in animals, speaking of crocodiles as though there were lovely old gents, but Crocodiles always seem to have a sly looking face to me.



Been meaning to draw a tiger/lion thing for a friend for a while, and I came up with this while talking to John I really like this drawing a lot but everyone seems to keep pointing out how big I drew the boobs! I just wanted to make a weird looking amazon warrior.

Still trying to come up with illustrations for the owl tree poem, my first real commision. I have considered making this commision as my final major project- but perhaps instead I'll try and come up with my own concept. For this particular drawing however, I'm not sure how this could fit in with the poem.

Thursday 27 January 2011

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.

Wednesday 26 January 2011

The Owl Tree

Today I've spent some of the day thinking up some drawings for a poem 'The Owl Tree' written by one of the writing students at Solent. I thought it might also help inspire me come up with some more character designs of my own or maybe be a good practice run for illustrating my own stories.
So far I've only made this image, and I'm hoping to make at two or three more. I Wish I didn't draw so slowly.
Not sure what makes great writing but what I enjoyed about the Owl tree was the placement of some of the words, some of the sentences just feel like they would be fun to draw.
These are all very rough but normally I don't seem to keep very many of my doodles, (they end up being drawn over or lost.) but I'm trying to think up some more drawings and characters for the poem.

I liked the idea of a 'silhouette of doom' mentioned in the poem. So I thought maybe there could be some sort of monsterous shape appearing in one of the images and I tried coming up with ideas for the main character's adoptive parents (which he is found under a moon)

The King figure is inspired from the sentence 'Winter is on time' I kinda liked the idea of Winter (or some king of winter) looking at its watch.













Hard to explain this one but I wanted to include a storm and rain attacking the little cottage. Underneath it, the earth is playing on a angry Cello.


And I wanted to include little marching angels with drums...


And just a bunch of doodles I did. I'm still trying to come up with ideas.


Tuesday 25 January 2011

Pollocks

I'm keeping this blog to write about my progress for my final major project, as of right now, I'm a little lost as to what direction I should be going, so I've decided to reflect upon some of my own personal inspirations.
I’ve been repeatedly told that my drawings have a ‘theatrical’ feel. After researching Pollocks toy theatres, I can see the similarities. The Pollock toy theatres were victorian cardboard theatre sets which I think were reprinted in the 1970's in book format. Theres something appealing to me about the flat cardboard cutout characters:

A photo of my lost ebay bid. A collection of cardboard theatre cutouts and backgrounds.

Saw a couple going on ebay- but as usal, I kept being outbid at the last minute or they sell for a ridiculously high price- high price for a poor student that is.

I did attempt something similiar with my previous project where I wanted to make my own version of Treasure Island, I wanted to draw my own characters and print them out on card and since then, I've had a lot of fun simply drawing at least one character a day.
Made another four today in the studio and I'm hoping this can be a daily thing, I'm up to a grand total of seventy, even if all them don't feel like the best drawings I have.

Still not quite sure what sort of direction I should be going in however or what my final major project should be . I'm toying around with the idea of making my own toy theatre or perhaps making an attempt at creating my own childrens book (though both seem impossibly difficult to me right now.) The Current idea is to draw as many characters as I can and make some sort of house for them all to live... not quite sure where the idea is going just yet but I'll post the doodles in a future update.