Side projects: Stuff I was working on...

This is one of the many projects that was gradually pushed aside for Honours work.  I finished the ink painting quite some time ago but I was planning on making it into an etching.  I was playing around with spit biting in my last etching and after many MANY tedious failures I starting being mildly proficient.  Skills like that should not be wasted, so I'm looking forward to using them on this image in the future. 

  

Illustration Friday: Dip

I was caught between choosing a dip in the pool and food dips.

I love drawing people swimming or just lazing by the pool

but I also love food...

In the end I compromised and did both.

So next time you're hungry and in need of cool refreshment

why not go down to your local dipping pool?

Everyone loves a good dip

But don't forget!

wait 30 minutes between eating and swimming

and apply sun cream

Inking about

I recently was very inspired by Jillian Tamaki's post on inks, and her ink abilities in general, and I wanted to try a little out myself since I'd been ignoring them and favouring watercolours recently. She had painted crocodiles and since I'm partial to them myself I followed suit.

The idea of a friendly crocodile comes from a children's rhyme or story I heard when I was younger. I can't really remember it but I'm pretty sure the moral ended with the friendly crocodile eating a few children that got swayed by its charms. For this reason I think it was written by Roald Dahl. Who had several kids, and even some adults, meet their end down the gullets of giants, rhinos and other menacing creatures.

For this reason I wanted my crocodile to appear very debonair and affable and a contestant for least likely to swallow and digest anyone. So when it ever did come to devouring it would come as a complete surprise.

Adrift: missed out again

Just a little something I made for Illustration Friday, but sadly I missed the deadline.

I blame the 8 hour flight from Singapore to Sydney,

and the 8 hours of sleep that followed.

Hope you all enjoy anyway.

Flamingos catching some Z's

Do not disturb the Flamingos

bear eating cake

I think the title is fairly self explanatory, as is the picture.

More Prints

Yes, he is fishing with paper boats. No, do not ask me why. But sleep deprivation and surfing on google images has you coming up with some strange things.

Bubble girl +fish

This image is part of a larger composition I was going to do for a Threadless T-shirt competition. Originally there were meant to be tons of kids running around and making giant bubble and balloon creatures.  It never got out of the sketching phase unfortunately.  The main obstacle in my image's path was an 8 colour restriction for a t-shirt print.  In the end I decided to forgo the competition and just make the image the way I wanted to. 

(I also ran out of time after mucking about with other projects and making the same sketch over and over trying to visualize it with only 8 colours.) 

This little girl is a bit of a colour test, so I'd love to hear any feedback.

After spending an hour circling through the five different blue's in the bubble fish

changing the opacity ever so slightly,

erasing something and then undoing 

and then re-doing and then deciding to try dodge it instead

I decided that she had to get off my desktop 

otherwise I would never get to any of the work I am meant to be doing today.

Murdoch Books: Monster Maintenance Manual Illustration Competition

There was an illustration competition for Murdoch Books new children's title: Monster Maintenance Manual.

Here are my final images for: Nose Ghoul, Quarking Ducks and long-legged Underbed pigs.
I'll post sketches soon.
(just so you know, the nose ghoul is pulling ginger hair out of his cloak. Nose ghouls apparently are the cause for nasal hair amoung adults.)

Mooks Artspace: My pet

Came across Mooks Artspace monthly competition while checking out Monster Children:  An Australian gallery, publication and general community.

Similar to Illustration friday, with the exception of time, and a prize! (or possible prizes).  If you win and then win again and perhaps win some more out of a draw of winners.... you might get a free exhibition with Monster Children!

Well a girl can dream...

Still out of those winners who aren't multiple winners of winners you can still get some great things.

Check out Mooks Artspace here

Process Work for A Float of Crocodiles

Earlier this year I was part of a group exhibition called 'A Murder of Crows'.  It was a show based on collective animal nouns and, as promised, this is the process work for my image.  

The first image isn't much, but usually it never is.  

I researched into various animal nouns and the one that struck me the most was 'a float of crocodiles'.  I had a wonderful image of crocodiles that had camouflaged themselves as pool toys.  So I did a small sketch and moved on from there to get images of crocodiles and children that would fit into my rough composition.

After finding a few resource images I made a rough composition and continued to refine it until I was happy.  Since it was a very complex image I did the first few sketches by hand but then surrendered to photoshop.  I am very particular about composition so this was probably the longest-or at least the hardest-part of the process.

    
   
Usually I know what 'style' or 'look' I am going for, and the composition follows this knowledge.  But this time I didn't know if I wanted to go for a fairly realistic image or follow a style more derivative of children's illustrations.  I did want a particularly happy perky image to off-set the horrible fact that children were obliviously swimming with crocodiles.

 So I looked up various advertisements and played around with watercolours till I was happy.  

(the kid below on the right looks like the cover boy of Mad Magazine!)

I decided on the kid on the bottom right hand corner, watercolours with a pencil outline.  I had originally wanted to screen print the image, but as the composition got more complicated and the costs started to count off in my head I decided to go with a more familiar medium.  But with the strong pencil outline and the big washes of colour I felt like this style was close to my earlier idea.   

I tested a few images with this style and felt the water was looking crap.  So in the end to get the right 'flatness' similiar to screen printing I used acrylics; and when that didn't work I used the computer.  I showed the above image to the rest of the 'murderous crow' crowd and got some lovely feedback.  Everyone felt it would work better if the crocodiles were less visible on first glance.  (To get more of a 'Where's Wally' sort of effect)  And I agreed with them completely.  So after making my crocodiles much more green I did the final image.     

and Ta Dah! the final image!

Don't you want to buy yourself a Crocodile float?