If Asleep, now with a dash of colour.

Couldn't resist adding a wee splash of colour to the previous post. I really like the contrast it gives between the pallid greys of the vampire and the glowing sandy beach. Amps up the gag a bit more. I've also posted some doodles I did after finishing the illustration friday picture. I guess I had vampires on the brain! They are based on the intensely spooky Nosferatu film from 1922. I don't know about you but, even now, Max Schreck's performance in that gives me the heebie jeebies.  I think the skippy frame rate and disjointed effects in silent films create a weird, unnerving feel even before you get onto the vampire subject matter. It really goes to show you don't need all the CGI Hollywood bells and whistles (or even dialogue) so long as the story and performances are top notch. And as for 3D movies... don't get me started!!! The Fast Show did a pretty fine take on Nosferatu too :-) Sleep tight... don't let the vampires bite!

Illustration Friday - "Asleep"

It's been far too long since I last did an Illustration Friday topic. This weeks is "asleep"... a great subject for a bit of whimsy. Like all night shift workers Vampires need to catch some shut eye during the day. I suspect this guy is more interested in the night life of the resort.

IF "poise" - ongoing pachyderms...

Still exploring treatments for the story characters. This illustration uses the elephant cut outs and charcoal line overlay (with modifications) from the earlier post. With these cut outs as a guide I used watercolour on some really nice cotton rag paper I'd forgotten that I had. Expensive paper for an off the cuff experiment but I've had the paper for ages, too scared to waste it before now (the reason I'll never feel at ease using moleskins as sketch books...). It really is an interesting paper to paint on as the coarse open grain bleeds the paint in unexpected ways while the heavy weight allows for fairly controlled washes on unstretched sheets. After compositing the various elements in photoshop I chopped up the body further to give me more points of articulation for posing in the illustration. I'm really enjoying the balance (no pun intended) of dynamism against quirkiness which this unplanned pose approach gives.

IF - "repair" & A Happy Halloween to all!

With Halloween so close I couldn't resist combining this weeks Illustration Friday with an All Hallows Eve greeting. I was also inspired by a fascinating account I found of how an individual raven called Grip became the inspiration for both Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" AND a character (appropriately a Raven...) in Dicken's "Barnaby Rudge". So here's an illustration of a couple of cheeky ravens showing just how smart they are by putting all the pieces back in the jackolanterns.