Randumb 6 and life drawing

More drawings done since the last post. (scroll down for the first ones) Oh wait, no. I lied. I only did the life drawings since then. The rest is a bit older.

Oh yeah, the reason I'm making all these music-related drawings (like, even more than I usually do) is because the theme for my latest project is music. Believe it or not, I didn't choose it myself. We had to pick these out of a hat. I can't believe I was lucky enough to get the coveted topic of music. In fact, I was hoping NOT to, because I do drawings based on music all the time anyway, so it's not that much of a challenge for me. :O I'm looking for ways to make it challenging though. I've decided to try recording my own 5-song EP (I don't think I can actually pull this off, since I don't have proper recording equipment or anything) and I'm also going to make a comic out of Buck 65 lyrics (since many of his songs have a definite narrative quality).

Stuff

Update: I promised an explanation for these, so here goes. The above drawing was inspired by a book of John Cage lectures I found in the library, which contained the following passage:

"Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."

I thought that was incredibly profound (and maybe a bit morbid too...*ahem*), and what immediately sprung to my mind was an image of a person somehow being reincarnated as sound. By the way, I also feel the need to mention that the dark bluish and yellow textures in the background were created by painting on a banana skin and pressing it down onto the page. I was laughing the entire time I did that, because I knew it must have looked weird to be painting a banana skin. XD

I don't know what this is, but the hands look like glass and I think that's kinda cool. ;p Now I probably know how to paint glass vases, should the need ever arise. The droplets are supposed to be "electronic raindrops." No, I don't get it either... ;p


A drawing of Olias and Spill Fector, for an exercise with drawing using only two colours...it looks better as a thumbnail, so you don't really need to click on it. ;p


I actually made the drawing of the apple & pear rock duo in the post above before this one. Then I thought "Wouldn't it be hilarious if I put a wig on the apple?" And it was!

Tom scarecrow-person

Uhhhh...uhm...I don't even know. It's pretty generic actually, isn't it? But I like the textures.

Randumb 5

Some sketches from the past week which I enjoyed. ;p

1) Sketches of chavs for an upcoming sequence in the comic. It's not as entertaining as it sounds. ;p
2) Six very large bananas.
3) Sufjan Stevens! (Sort of) With a funny hat! Yay! Y'see, I'm a big fan of Al Hirschfeld and how he was able to capture the likeness of a person in just a few lines. I may never be able to draw that well, but at least I can try.

Pages 53 & 54

!!!WARNING!!! THE PAGE ABOVE FEATURES VIOLENCE AND GORE WITH THE DEATH OF AN EVIL ZOMBIE PIGEON. PLEASE DO NOT CLICK HERE IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO SEE THIS. More of the same, but less of the violence. (FOR SOME REASON it won't make these last two pictures into links, so just right-click and go "View Image"). I quite like the cinematic feel I managed to get with this! And yes, before you ask, I DID finally watch Hitchcock's The Birds before finishing these pages. Good flick with some truly chilling moments. There's a lot that modern-day horror filmmakers could learn from this film and sometimes I wonder if they even BOTHER watching older films (it's kind of like what I said in an older post about music getting more and more homogenised because bands are just inspired by whoever came right before them, rather than going right back to the ORIGINAL source, as it were).

My favourite scene in The Birds is the bit with the woman in the cafe screaming at Tippi Hedren's character "I think you're the cause of all this!! I think you're evil!! EVIL!!!!" Great stuff. Now I have to watch Psycho... (luckily for me, it's included in the same DVD set! Woot!)

And now, while I'm at it, here's an older sketchbook page that I don't think I posted. And it has even more funny-looking bird things on it! (See, I don't think anybody's on the internet right now in the dorms, so I had a really easy time uploading all this stuff! Yay! :D) When people look through my sketchbook I actually want them to think I'm insane. But in a good way. Because that's the feeling I get when I see the sketchbooks of other artists online. "WOW! That's totally crazy! But so creative! How the hell did he/she come up with that? *I* should be doing that." And so on.

Page 52

Billy: Who ordered the eyeball special, made to Herbert West's extremely secret recipe?

(I would like to nominate this line for Best Joke/Semi-Obscure Reference ever. Congratulations, Paul. XD)

Apologies for the crappy photo...

Reportage final

"But WHY is Sonic there?" I hear you asking. Well, I actually bought a Sonic t-shirt at the shop Forbidden Planet in London. Yes, I am hideously lame. I wouldn't have done, except that 1) They had it in a medium, and 2) It features the classic, retro Sonic design as opposed to the idiotic looking Sonic Adventure redesign, and it says 1991 on the shirt to drive the point home. Not only that, but I've mentioned several times before that were it not for Sonic, I probably wouldn't be drawing now.

Ahem. Um. Er. Yes. So let's look at some of the other strange elements of this drawing, shall we? The Space Invader character is there because we kept seeing those mosaics of those characters all over London, by a graffiti artist from Paris (I think) who calls himself Invader. "Turn the bloody blimey Space Invader off!" is a line from the song The Man Whose Head Expanded by The Fall, which seemed to fit, and anyway I heard them playing from a car stereo, remember? ;p Even though it wasn't that song. All right, so I was just looking for an excuse to add some text.

"Dreams Never End" is a New Order song which I heard playing in a shop. I commented "Finally, I'm hearing songs I recognise" and Other Paul replied "This is your spiritual home!" It is, isn't it? And you could say that I'm living my dream right now. Oh, this makes no sense and it sounds so dumb when I write it out. ;p

This is mostly watercolour, with a bit of gouache for the bits that had to be opaque. Eee, I love watercolour. I need to do more things that look like this.

Tonight I am going to finish page 52 (and probably start page 53 as well) and it is going to be AWESOME! :D

Reportage part 4

AND YET MORE DRAWINGS...as always, scroll down for more.


Some lion statues I took a picture of in Chinatown. I don't think my drawing really does them justice, but I like it. I should probably ink it, because they're getting a bit lost in the background, but I prefer it in pencil...sigh.


And now here's a drawing of Spill Fector in the style of Egon Schiele, for absolutely no reason at all.

Reportage part 3

Yeah! :D First, motorbikes.


Perhaps this conversation is a "you-had-to-be-there" type scenario, but I think it's hilarious. XD
Obviously these comics owe a lot to James Kochalka...but they're fun! So I'll keep doing them. Sigh.


A very crappy drawing of Soho Square, appearing here only for completeness.

Reportage page 2

Scroll down for more! (Yes, that really was my first visit to Starbucks. Honest. And I hate to say it, but the hot chocolate WAS delicious.)

Reportage part 1

Cover page, featuring (L to R) Thea, Other Paul, and myself. (Thea took over 200 pictures!)


Lyrics to "Frightened" by The Fall, heard playing from someone's car stereo outside the bookshop. I got a little too excited about that. It also turns out there IS a guy in my class who likes The Fall, and saw them perform in London recently. He also agrees with me that the new album is shit. XD


Billy from Printheads and some demon-y thing in an alley, the alley drawn from one of the 7 pictures that I took (I don't know if I mentioned this, but I managed to get the memory card for my camera stuck inside my laptop and the camera's internal memory only holds 7 pictures. Yes, Elaine is very smart. *rolleyes*) On Halloween night I watched the 1957 film Night Of the Demon, which is based on an MR James story. It was totally amazing. I hate to sound like a cliche here, but they really don't make films like this any more. Here's the IMDB page.

More to come, I hope...

Fashion parts 2 & 3

Is it really November already? Well, that doesn't matter. I won't feel "accomplished" until at least March. Also I have an impending sense of doom because things have gone SO smoothly so far. Something terrible is going to happen to me soon. Possibly tomorrow, because we're going to London tomorrow and I'm absolutely terrified. I'm sorry, I guess shouldn't be acting like this...

I'm still trying to decide if I like these or not; I think they look sort of half-assed. I can't WAIT to see how much better everyone else's are...

Yes, the figures are traced once again, which is pretty obvious, because you know my figure drawings suck and I'd never be able to actually draw anything like that. One day, though.