The Worst Journey in the World

There are better ways to beat the heat on a sweltering summer Sunday, but I attempted it by listening to Edwardian men pushed to the brink in Antarctica.

This week's Classic Serial on BBC Radio 4 was a dramatization of The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who was a member of Robert Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to Anarctica. Yes, that Scott expedition. Needless to say he wasn't part of the South Pole party because he wrote this book, but it's a gripping listen nonetheless.

All pre-1950 expeditions that necessitate coats and/or goggles default to Mignola style, by the way.

Dr Horrible's Stolen Ostinato

When I started this blog, I vowed it would be professional and sober and not a place for dorky fanart and stupid gags, but dangit, I just really like how this turned out:


This started out as a doodle when I realized the ostinato guitar behind that first song in Act II sounded a lot like the bit in 'The Island' by the Decemberists. That's Colin Meloy, see? Oh, my sides split with laughter! Well because it was that part I imagined it lit like that and the bare pencil sketch just looked bare. So, four hours later ...

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, if you haven't seen it, is available on iTunes ($4, bargains galore!) and is some Whedon kind of awesome.

Animator vs Reanimator

Look at this – look at this – I'm updating twice in one month! Watch out for further signs of the apocalypse!

I've been fully occupied banging my head against the wall at work, but we had an optional design class so I took the opportunity for a diversion and brought in a project that's been simmering on the back burner* for a while: adapting H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West stories (PUBLIC DOMAIN!) into comic books, albeit fairly animation-looking ones. I didn't have much of a problem with Dr West:


His half-unwilling accomplice and the narrator of the stories was rather harder ... he's a bland enough personality not to upstage West but not so bland that he disappears completely, and he has to look at least moderately interesting.** I did three pages of thumbnails before I got something I liked, then a mediocre rotation, which I showed in class. Luckily the teacher that day was the incredible Andreas Deja and he had some good suggestions for ways to simplify and push him a bit more so I went back and did these:


That's something to be going on with, I think. They'll evolve a lot, I'm sure, before I'm done. Here's a test setup with the two of them ... the narrator's model hasn't been updated yet.


After the last class I realized what I'm trying to do with their shapes is basically this. Oh well.

*and will probably continue to do so until it boils dry and ruins the pot, to stretch a metaphor to the breaking point.
**He doesn't have a name in the stories but I came to the sudden conclusion that he can have no name but Howard Phillips.

Arooo!

Wow, it's been a long time since I touched this thing ... many apologies. More will be coming as soon as I can get a chance to work on that daft crossover gag thingummy I've got in my head, but that probably won't be until later this month at the earliest.

Anyway, I hear there's a bit of a Wolf Man Challenge going around right now, so here's my two cents:

Animated Sarcasm

At long last, after more than a year since starting it (but only a few weeks' worth of actual effort, all told), I've finally got this animation to a presentable state:





That would be Sue Perkins in place of Emma Thompson ... her voice is a bit harder but she's got a good delivery.

Shrek Goes Fourth

Hey folks ... Sorry I haven't updated in roughly forever, I just haven't had anything to update with. What little I've drawn recreationally since getting back from California has been of a most specific and probably uninteresting fangirlish nature so it's been sequestered to my LiveJournal. I have a whole lot of things on my 'to be drawn' slate and nearly all of them will be worthy of posting on Blogger ... when I get around to them ...

Anyway.

Upon learning yesterday that the newest incarnation of Dreamworks' cash cow is to be called Shrek Goes Fourth, I realized they were following the Blackadder naming convention, and the inevitable crossover followed:

DONKEY: Hey Shrek! I got a cunning plan!
SHREK: Tell me, Donkey ... Is it more cunning than a weasel with a doctorate in cunning from Cunning University that has just broken into the cunning reserves and eaten so much cunning that it is literally oozing out his ears?

The more I think about this, the more I believe it would be bad enough to be actually entertaining.

Eowyn

Every so often I am seized with the urge to caricature the cast of Lord of the Rings ... this is a good way to keep my head from swelling because it's always a painful exercise in futility. After a couple days drawing the same thing over and over, I think I managed to get Eowyn. I begrudgingly chalk up another point for the Cintiq; as soon as I tried doing it in Sketchbook it worked. (Well, on the second try, but that's close enough.) Blast.

Airborn

I just finished Airborn, Kenneth Oppel's first book after his Silverwing trilogy. It's got airships and pirates and swashbuckling good times ... and apparently a reluctance to give up flying mammals, but who can begrudge him that? Anyway, it was fun, so I drew stuff:

(left) Main character, Matt Cruse, looking kind of bland, but that's more or less how he looked in my head ... and that's why I'm not a design star.

(right) Kate de Vries, leading lady, who makes me wonder about Mr Oppel's wife because she's very much like Marina in Silverwing. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm majorly ripping off some Jane concept art but it turned out nice anyway! Yay me! (No telling how many really awful sketches came before this one...) There's a girl at work whose 'look' I want to capture for her...


A thumbnail for the scene where they're offloading rubber hosing ... it looks cool in my head, trust me. Mostly dependent on colour, though. The composition needs a little finessing before I go that far.


Szpirglas, the pirate captain. After overcoming my tendency to picture him as Reacher Gilt, I realized I could base him off a family friend who fits the description rather well, but these were drawn before the realization, and I'm not sure I have any reference pictures. He could also look a bit like the author, but I don't know what Mr Oppel would think of that. Doesn't look very captainly here, or very piratey for that matter... More attempts later, perhaps.


The book is punctuated with occasional dream sequences in which Matt is flying, so I brought in a bit of the climax and stuck him with a flock of cloud cats ... apparently I can't get over Silverwing either.

Now for some moaning: Every day at work I draw what I would consider decent drawings. Admittedly, they're mostly poses in rotations, but they're solid and confident. I've even taken to doing rotations on paper instead of the Cintiq to keep me in touch with a pencil (and also because it's faster... and better). I get home, though, and open my sketchbook with pencil in hand, and what comes out looks and feels like the stuff I forcibly excreted in the midst of my rough storyboard-induced drawing decay period last summer. What do I need to change? I've been out drawing observational stuff more than ever this year but that hasn't seemed to have helped, it just seems to have made me impatient with my drawings so they're all really haphazard and gestural and I don't bother to get things right.

EDIT 21 MARCH 2009: What is up with this post? How is it getting so many comments? Does it turn up on a Google search or something? Could someone please tell me what is going on?

EDIT 14 NOVEMBER 2009: Thanks to those who commented with info regarding the traffic on this post! Interesting.

The Wintersmith

I finally got around to reading Wintersmith* and rather liked the image of the Wintersmith handing Tiffany her necklace in the snowy woods.
It started out as a speed painting but was rather blah, so I bounced it off Sean and with his suggestions managed to make this out of it,** which is actually presentable, hurrah!
I've been meaning to update this blog more often but if you look back and see how much of that I've done, well, that is exactly how much recreational drawing I've been doing lately. Must fix that.
*Most recent Discworld novel, but it's a Tiffany one which, while better than most other YA novels out there, did not warrant the urgency of, say, a Watch book or Making Money.
**...though that nullified the 'speed' side of it. Oh well, greater good and all that.

Belated Blogging

I promised this to some of you weeks ago but here it is at last:

MY PORTFOLIO
~ Rough Draft ~

Please, please, please make some comments ... What should I keep? What should I chuck? There's way too much in the 'design and illustration' section, for one thing, but I don't know what to cut out. Heeeeeeelp!

In Watson's Kitchen

I've been listening to BBC7's run of Sherlock Holmes radio plays, which are very well done and approximately as addictive as crack. There's a scene in The Final Problem where Watson finds Holmes a nervous wreck in his kitchen, having climbed in from the back garden to avoid Moriarty's men. It's jarring to see (well, 'see': this is radio, after all) this character behave in such an out-of-character way, and the scene made quite a visual impression on me. Watson was supposed to be in this scene but, er ... he didn't turn out. (Holmes is far more interesting, anyway.) Thumbnailed at life drawing with a 4B pencil, tightened up in Sketchbook, and painted in OpenCanvas.

The Oldest Creature

Here's the result of Sean's 15-minute design challenge 'The Oldest Creature in the World' ... it turned out better than I expected but still has a few improvements to be made. I'll forget about it if I don't post it, though, so now it is a Note To Self.

Revisiting the Post Office

This scene suddenly struck me as I was walking home yesterday. Usually I fritter away my independence on cooking dinner or doing dishes, but today I decided to cash it in and, in an uncharacteristically impulsive move, deviated from my walk home and spent two hours drawing in the library's café. This is the result of that.
This is the scene from Going Postal where Antimony Parker and his Aggie come to thank Moist for delivering the ancient letter. I've bent the text a bit and had Aggie be the old woman in the following:
    'I said is it true you're opening the old place again?' she repeated. 'My granddad used to work there!'
    'Well done him,' said Moist.
    'He said there was a curse!' said the woman, as if the idea was rather pleasing. [...] 'It lives under the floor and drives you maaad!' she went on, enjoying the syllable so much she seemed loath to let it go. 'Maaad!'
It's been far too long since my Going Postal drawing spree... I miss it so. Maybe I'll pick up my cruelly interrupted Clacks Board when I go 'on hiatus' in a couple weeks.