Jessica Name Illustration

Name plate illustration, for a child, recently completed.

Bored of seeing the same image on my blog but haven't got round to posting the holiday images yet so here's an evil zombie astronaut sketch to mix things up...

Sketch Book Pro 1st test

Sketch Book Pro 1st test- 40 mins total on an iPod Touch with one finger (no stylus required).

SketchBook Pro rocks.

SketchBook Pro doodle

DIY photos

Some photos of recent work on the house, before and after style.

First, the original fireplace, shortly after we moved in.

Room shell gutted.

Above, new fireplace.
Below, photos of some boxing in I did in what will be Holly's Library.

Photos of the original room door, stripped and repaired- if a job's worth doing it's worth doing Baroque :)

Leela sheltering in the woodshed.

Digital Art Equipment

Tablets are great and Cintiques are very handy, but there are downsides to both.
If you learn to draw on a tablet, then switch to a more cumbersome and expensive Cintique, you'll find it hard to switch back.
You'll be stuck with the Cintique. You can swap from one to the other of course but, for a digital artist, this can take weeks of adjustment.
Weeks that, if your creative work is your source of income, you just won't have.

If you're not used to drawing with a tablet and you'd rather not spend weeks getting used to it, then getting a Cintique makes sense as you can just draw on the screen and get comfortable using it very quickly.
Of course, your drawing hand can get in the way sometimes, obscuring what you're drawing, just like in life.
Not a problem with a tablet.
With a tablet you are less cramped in the way you work, though carpal tunnel syndrome can occur with long term use of either instrument.
My advice (having tried both) is to get a tablet, or if you do really have to get a Cintique, get the anglepoise bracket to go with it and change your drawing position regularly to avoid health issues.

Whether you’re considering freelancing, hotdesking or just feel like setting up shop in a pub or café for a while, here’s some recent developments that may be of interest.
They’re not all available today but they’re a lot closer to release than hoverboards (which will only become available in 2015).

The Sensu Brush
https://www.sensubrush.com/
The Blue Tiger Project
http://tenonedesign.com/bluetiger
The iPen
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ipen/ipen-the-first-active-stylus-for-ipad
The Inkling
http://www.wacom.eu/index2.asp?lang=en&pid=9226&gm=1

This just in (I mean I should have added it when I wrote this post in the first place!).
The Leap, from leapmotion.com:
The Leap

Also of interest- Muji (the Japanese goods chain) do a few interesting pens now.
1. Pen and biro in one (twist to switch between the two).
2. Erasable blue drawing pen (0.5 nib).
3. A 0.38 drawing gel pen for just £1.

Comicon 2012

Comicon 2012
Never been to one of these before. It's a real education. So much visual information everywhere you could easily spend the whole day and not see it all.

Some people indulge in what's known as Cosplay, though I think the above might more properly be called Fancy Dress.
Definitely one of the best costumes there.

Steampunk dude, made all his own gear. Some of the tiny machinery thingys were beautifully crafted.

Holly and a Dalek.

Got talking to these guys for a while.
Gradually it dawned on me that they're actually kind of famous.
Weird feeling.

Matt Dixons prices.
Quite reasonable so he must be getting a good deal on production off someone.

A Michael Keaton sized Batman.

Personal Projects

I'm adding a few images of my various personal projects to my professional blogfolio. I may reconsider this so check it out now before I change my mind if you're interested.
Subjects include ceramics, photography, cakes, poetry, lighting and sculpture.
My blogfolio

Snooty Girl Illustration Remake

Taking an old illustration and improving it with my current skills and tastes.

From left: Old (scanned pencil and digital colour), new (digital, black lineart), new (pale lineart), new (coloured lineart).

Perspective Drawing

Here's my comment on yesterdays post by James Gurney.

He's recommending several old books that are timeless, trusted classics for learning art.

James helped me find Earnest Norling's "Perspective Drawing". I'd been given it as a child and I'd forgotten both Title and Author. Since buying an old copy online I've found it just as comprehensive and useful as I'd remembered. As you progress through the book the charmingly vintage American illustration style walks you gently through everything you need to know in a very efficient manner. An infant would find the early pages understandable and a professional might find the final pages challenging. It really is a book that can serve you well for a lifetime in art.

View the original post at Gurney Journey.

Influence Map

Here's my Influence Map:



An Influence Map is a sort of chart of your artistic influences, the larger the image, the greater their influence on you.
Only those you've actually copied, studied and learned a lot from should be included.
No friends and colleagues included as I wouldn't wish to embarrass anyone by including them (or leaving one out!).

Download the template file from the creator's DeviantArt page at http://fav.me/d2vx881 and create your own.

Trick Cyclist

For all the other cyclists called Tom out there, and for anyone else who enjoys sleek, cool fun Flash playthings, here's the latest from Vector Park. http://www.vectorpark.com/thomas/seasons.html

I'm engaged

Dear Reader,I've just come back from an amazing trip to Wells, Somerset with my long suffering partner, Holly.
More about that later.
More importantly, on the way back we stopped off at Brent Knoll and, to cut a romantic story short, we got engaged.
Wells is beautiful so I'll post a load of photos here soon but in the meantime here's a few examples.

First, the cathedral itself.


Close up on the facade.
This is a water map machine, under construction in the grounds of the Bishop's Palace.
Here's Holly, re-enacting the fountain hoody scene from Hot Fuzz, which was filmed in Wells.
This is a section of a wall I worked on.
You can see where it goes wobbly thanks to the effects of rough scrumpy on my mate Clem.
This is the entrance to Tor Hill Wood, just outside the town, where I worked long ago.
So long ago that the many seedlings I planted are now small trees and I'd forgotten I'd done this until we stumbled across it.
It's the entrance to the woods.

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Efficient social media management

All the major digital art talents agree on one thing- it's vital to get connected.
As Bobby Chiu (or was it Neil Gaiman?) said "Think of yourself as an island, you have to put a lot of messages in bottles/build a lot of bridges to other islands to get a response.".
In the interests of getting more connected with the greater art-world then, I'm going to start blogging again. Blogging, tweeting, updating face book. The problem is, it takes time. Time I should spend working. So I looked in to it. There's this tweet management tool called "Hootsuite" that's supposed to make it easy to update multiple social media accounts at once. But it doesn't update blogs too. Unless you hook it up to Ping FM, which is being replaced by Seesmic. Bloody hell, what a mess. Surely there's a single, free, tool that helps you manage ALL social media. Well, at least it's a step in the right direction, so from now on I'll be updating my social media accounts with hootsuite, linked to Seesmic, which may add Blog functionality later this year. If you know of a better solution, please let me know. I'll also be adding better, regular content to this blog, to make it worth following.