Illustration Friday - Crowded

For me the Illustration Friday topic, crowded, conjured up pictures of a busy, polluted city which is what I attempted to portray here. I actually used the crappiness of my digital camera to try and get a smoggy effect from my sketch!

I am off on holiday soon to San Francisco, so I hope to come back with some more positive, cleaner inspiration!

Easter sketchings

Spent some of the Easter weekend brushing up on my photoshop skills, and wishing I had a tablet. Still, the fruits of my labour can be seen below!



Compare to my original sketch here.

Car Essentials

My flat-mate is currently learning to drive, and after her parents bought her a nice, shiny, new car (not that I'm jealous or anything) they went on an enourmous shopping spree to fill it with all kinds of unneccesary crap - from bug-shaped air freshners to pressure gauge checkers.

Personally I've never really had an interest in cars, it's just something I never got into. My old banger gets me from A to B and I'm happy with that! But despite this, I decided to compile a list of essentials that any discerning individual should have in their car anyway:

• Driving Tunes - oh yeah, none of this crap pop stuff. I'm talking full on cruising anthems like Uncle Kracker and Tom Petty. ooo and one of those tape things to plug your CD player to that dated car stereo.
  
• The AA Girly Map - An essential item for those long, complicated journeys.
  
• Water - Cars get thirsty too.
  
• Lots of sweets - Preferably from here.
  
• First Aid Kit - Accidents happen and car surfing is dangerous.
  
• Pound Coin - For releasing shopping trolleys at the supermarket when stocking up on item 3.
  
• Shades - You never know when you might have to try and look cool.

What horrors lurk in the back of your car?

Bored?

Watch this for a laugh. You gotta love the expression on the ladies face.

Alternatively, you could try your luck at bobbing for sea urchins. I can't see it catching on myself.

My wee voice

With my freshly found interest in all things blog, I've been scouring the 'blogsphere' (as I believe it's called) and found some wonderul examples of great blogs and creativity. I had no idea there was so much to learn.

I stumbled across this article this morning. What an amazing piece - I feel that is exactly the point I am at now, my impulsions to discover and learn more about illustration are pretty much summed up here! Thanks must go to Fishbucket for the huge array of links, among which I found the article.

My own illustrations are slowly improving, I'm experimenting with different ways of converting them to neat computer graphics so I'm picking up lots of tricks in Photoshop too. Look out for some more characters appearing soon!

It's official...I'm stupid

Apparently when it comes to this game I found, the more intelligent you are, the longer it takes you to work it out.

I got it first time. Hopefully I'm not alone.

Charactar Illustration - First Attempts

Here's some simple sketches that I've been trying out. Now be gentle, these are my first attempts at character illustration!

The expression on old Daisy here just came out so bemused that I had to have something completely mad happening! The slightly crazy looking guy was inspired by Illustration Friday whose current topic was 'fragile'. I took this to mean mental!



This third one is actually a character I just wanted to practice previously done by Fitz - see if you can find his rather more pro version!



Here is a grumpy farmer type character that I came up with, and shows the converted sketch too.

Cartoons and characters

The gig went A LOT better last night thankfully, egos are back on track and optimism is flowing again! Hopefully the trend will continue for our weekend session! Enough of that though, I have a new passion to share...

I've recently developed an interest in all things cartoony - particularly character illustration art. You know those cartoons of people or animals that look slightly ridiculous, but somehow you know just what they're feeling and what they'd be like if you met them in a bar? Well thats what fascinates me at the mo!

I have a reasonably artistic family but I don't claim to be any good at this yet - but hopefully I'm improving with practice. Soon I'm going to try and upload some sketches I've been trying, and eventually want to try doing some drawing or animation in Flash. I'd love to be able to come up with great sketches like these:

Cartoons by Fitz!

This is (unfortunately) not one of mine, but by an artist whose great site and characters I discovered by accident while searching for some art resources, check him out!

You win some...

...and you lose some.

So last night we had a gig at a London University. Not a bad venue, only problem was it was somehow doomed from the start. In-fact before we even started - our guitarist managed to have a car accident on the way down to the gig after only two days of driving. An unusual event one might think, but no this has happened before last time we played!! (Luckily all involved were ok by the way)

Another problem was it was not so much a gig night as a Fine Art students' club event. Now I don't have a problem with Fine Art students at all, but it was actually one of the only gigs we have done where people had not specifically come to see us (or anyone) play. Somewhat disheartening, more so for our frontman who kicked off a little at the "crowd" towards the end. We chalked it down to experience, and practice for our next one...tonight!!

Gigs and Tuning

My band has a gig tonight - though it's a private one so we won't know anyone there - sometimes this is a good thing, new ears and all that, but sometimes can make for a boring post-gig experience.

We've been asked to play Shepherds Bush Empire on May 6th as part of a charity doo. This is a huge venue by our normal standards so will be very scary! It's kind of encouraged me to get into my drumming a bit more and I've been doing some rudimentary practice again, I may even get some lessons again at some point. It also spurred me into searching out some good new heads for the bands drum kit - so I'm hoping they should improve the sound of the kit lots.

Tuning of a drum seems very hard to me. Now don't laugh, I know you're thinking how hard can it be? I've done lots of research into the best way to tune a drum up and followed every instruction but sometimes it seems I just end up going round in circles trying to match the pitch around the drum. I swear sometimes my ears even play tricks on me, and if I concentrate hard enough you can get a sound to appear lower or higher in pitch than another just by imagining it is! I hope it's not just me that fins this so hard.

This one's still going strong

So here it is my first blog! All seems to be in correct working order - I guess my main interest for starters is my drums - I first started playing at around age 14. This was mainly because my other friends were in a band, but they didn't have a drummer. I'd always been able to tap around in time and hold down a basic beat so I decided to take the plunge and see what I could do.

A while after just messing with the school kit, I somehow persuaded my parents to buy me my first shiny kit! A black NewSound kit, which I now realise is quite horrendous and cheap sounding - but to this day is still dutifily sat in my parent's house! I'm 24 now and I'm still playing, and still gigging more so than ever. Here's where I surprised my parent's I think.

I suppose here is a good time to shamelessly plug my band that I currently play in...check the link!! more about this soon though...

Well hello

Ever had your parents utter the words "It's only a phase..." ? Yeah, me too - okay sometimes they were right but sometimes they were wrong too and I still have a keen interest in lots of things I discovered a long time ago.

I have a habit of getting deeply into things, lots of things. I have changing passions, maybe we all do and I've decided what I need at the moment is a Blog. Why? Well, I don't know, and maybe this is just another phase but I'd like to share with you and discuss what it is that I am currently passionate about - and maybe you'd like to share your passions with me too!