Business bear and tiger man!

Whew, home at last after a fairly productive day at Tafe, I would say... this happy bear is going to make his home on the front of my business card! I have heaps of fun making this and by the time I had finished, my headache had gone away!


And these are some concepts for a drawing piece. It's looking a little bit too 'Disney' for my liking at the moment but it's getting there.

Vaudeville 1914, take 2

I'm a horrible sketcher, I know- my sketches are always so dirty and unpolished! I also need to work on drawing hands. But anyway, these are two explorations for my revamped Vaudeville illustration. The other ideas that I had were not very good; they were a bit crude and probably a bit offensive and inappropriate. I've been having a tough time with this project unfortunately and it's been wearing me down a bit.

Instead I wanted something a bit classier and more suited for a general magazine or paper. I wanted to combine some elements of Vaudeville - performance, music, a cute girl in a skimpy yet dazzling outfit, and for some reason, a tiger (dead or alive). I opted for the first sketch here since tigers don't really have much to do with Vaudevillian entertainment, though I'm sure they'd jump at the chance to star in a show or two.

Monster practice

One of our new assignments at school is designing and illustrating 3 monsters for a competition, which we will actually submit and hope to win! The prize is pretty awesome: 10 thousand bucks, and the opportunity to illustrate an entire book and design about 70 monsters for it. And it will be published all around the world!! The 3 monsters we have to do are basically 1) a tiny vampire 2) a long legged pig and 3) a duck with boots! The brief has much more information on each monster. The book is a whole 'manual' about all different types of monsters.


I keep playing around with style. A little while ago I did the image that is over on the right- the bookish owl, and I loved it. But I still don't think that is the style for me- I want to be a bit more illustrative and use more line in my work. So here I am again, experimenting... trying to find something right for me. I'll find it soon! I just have to keep drawing.

Beasties of the Night

Every time I visit ConceptArt.org I feel really inspired by the incredible visionary work of the pro's working in the game industry. It's a great place to kill a few hours looking at all of the amazing work there. Tonight was one of those nights and after a while of browsing, I wanted to sketch some fantasy beasties! Now this is the type of stuff I would draw when I was 16-17. I'm not sure if I really have it in me to draw things like this all the time now, but it's fun to go back to where I started out sometimes.

It also shows how much I have improved in the last year or so, even though I've mostly been doing graphic/cartoony looking work. This was so fun though that I might come back to it a lot more!

Black bear, black bear

I sketched this cute little guy and decided he deserved some colours. With this one I tried to keep it as simple as possible - large shapes defining the form of the character, simple background, bold colours. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.


And here's a polar bear! I may add some colours to him aswell.

Tiger on the loose!

Just a little bit of sketching before hitting the sack! I might colour this kitty up tomorrow, depending on whether I decide I like his face or not - I feel like I could abstract it a bit more to make it a little more interesting. Since doing the owl yesterday I have felt like I'm really onto something cool. I just have to keep working at it!

Oh yeah, I got around to jazzing up the layout today, I think it looks pretty groovy. Next up is my portfolio website, Bearprints.com.au - but still a ways to go on that one yet.

The Deceit of Zeus

Sorry the scan isn't very good. For drawing class, we were asked to pair together two phrases from a small list to form a title, and create a piece to go with that title. When I was looking through them the first two that stood out to me were 'The deciet of' and 'Zeus', and I immediatly thought of the story of Zeus and Europa - probably my favourite tale from Greek mythology.

Zeus becomes enamored with Europa, and transforms himself into a white bull and mixes into her father's bull herds. Europa became fond of this white bull's gentle and playful nature, and one day she climbed onto his back. Zeus took this opportunity to take her away with him, he carried her on his back and swam to the island of Crete where he ravished her.

At first I started out with a more realistic looking style, but eventually it evolved into a more simple, graphic look. I think the final is sort of a mix between the two. The final piece was painted on toned pastel paper with a limited pallette of gouache.

I think I am getting closer to what I would call my style!

Foxy

These are some studies for a John Wolseley inspired drawing. For this I wanted to do a character in my own style, and put it in a Wolseley-esque environment. I chose the fox because it's an introduced species, and around it will be dead leaves and plants indicating the result of allowing a foreign animal to thrive in a new habitat. Or something like that!