Drawing Circus

My first life drawing session back in Brighton after a 2 month stay in Majorca was down at The Old Market where Jake and the girls put on another intriguing event. The 4 girl models struck a mix of nude and dressed poses with a variety of times from 3 minute poses to Mary's heroic 45 minute standing pose that my fellow cartoonist Geo Parkin manage to do justice to. I was working exclusively on my iPad using the fabulous drawing app Adobe Ideas. Here are my efforts. Pip pip!

Digital dabblings

Having been getting into producing digital paintings in Photoshop for a few months now, I thought I'd try expanding the possibilities with a new drawing programme called Artrage. I downloaded Artrage 3 from the internet having read a bit about it in Imagine FX magazine. It takes a little while to get used to a new programme's interface but luckily for my pea brain this one was quite easy to pick up and soon I was experimenting. The two things I like most about it are the way you can get brush strokes in the oil paint brush setting that look really real and also you can get a nice smooth line with the pen a setting which I haven't been able to get since the programme I used to use -Streamline went
kaput! I'm informed by cartoon buddy Geo Parkin that Illustrator can do this but I don't have Illustrator.

Anyway, here are my first stumbling attempts at starting a painting in Artrage and then tickling it up in the more familiar (to me) Photoshop. I'm having great fun with this and hope that one shining day I'll be paid to work in this style.

Men in Hats

I seem to be following a theme of men in hats at the moment. Here's Don Draper from the sublime TV show MadMen and the Basil Rathbone version of Sherlock Holmes. I'm working on a bigger digital painting of my 4 favourite Holmeses and Baz is the first one.

More digital paintings

I'm still trying to get to grips with the fine art of digital painting. It's good fun and I think I'm making progress thanks to the tutorials in Imagine FX magazine. Here are my two latest efforts. I found a great shot of the young Orson Welles (I'm a huge fan of the huge man) and fancied trying a speed painting of it in an hour. It was a few minutes over the hour but possible in that time as I was working in black and white which speeds things up a bit. Then after seeing George Parkin's Facebook posting about seeing Elvis Costello live I got the idea for the other one. I've long been a fan of the Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein's monster so this was a good excuse to paint him. I was hoping to bash this one out in a couple of hours but it took most of the day. Anyway, I was quite pleased with it so I think I'm making progress. More tomorrow.

Digital dabblings

This morning I did another digital speed painting. It took an hour an a half and is a caricature of the Twilight saga actor Taylor Lautner. This is my third speed painting and about my seventh digital painting overall. The advantage of the speed painting exercises are that you have no time to get bogged down in irrelevant details you just have to bang on with it. It's a great way to learn and it doesn't get in the way of other work and deadlines. I intend to carry on doing one a day until I've learned how to do it to my satisfaction or I'm bored shitless with it. Yesterday's subject was Liam Neason who I painted before watching him in a great film called The Grey last night. It's about wolves so maybe wolves are becoming an unconcious theme for some reason. There was also a wolf in the caricature I did of Amanda Seyfried. Hmmm. Well I am very hairy. Awoooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!