Jamie Hewlett style cartoon

After spending the afternoon researching Jamie Hewlett I drew this, I'm trying to think more about creating bold designs rather than drawing in scribbles as it makes drawings easier to recreate several times for animations.

More Concept Work

At the beginning of the Summer I posted some concept work for a potential 3rd year project (click here to view the post). I've been thinking about it a lot recently and here's another piece of concept  art I drew this morning. I have an idea for a short 2D animation about a squad of soldiers losing a war on a foreign planet and I'm beginning to think about story lines and characters. I've mainly been thinking about the design aspect of the project and I think I've found a style which would suit the storyline. My main influence for the story was "Starship Troopers" and "Heavy Metal" but I'm taking a very different approach for the design of the film; "Starship Troopers" is a mock propaganda video so all the characters are square jawed with tooth paste comercial smiles and immaculate  high-tech uniforms. Instead I'm trying to design the characters around the principal of retrofitting (a design principle pioneered by the film "Blade Runner") by looking at the uniforms of the Americans in the Vietnam war and adding other modern elements.
In the story the soldiers have been abandoned on the planet for months so I'm trying to make all the uniforms look tatty and worn in and I'm drawing the soldiers looking gaunt and unshaven.

I've been looking at the work of Frank Miller, Mike Mignolia and Jamie Hewlett because I really like their bold, atmospheric styles and the attention to detail. At the moment I want the whole film to be black and white and I'm using very minimalistic backgrounds to create a feeling of isolation.

Recent Practice Drawings

Here's a few experiments I did to get to grips with my new pens and brushes;


This was a very quick sketch of an eagle's head drawn using dipping pens, I didn't do any planning and I just dived straight in with the ink which is why it's not central and the proportions are all wrong. Recently I've been looking at a lot of illustrations created by drawing one half of an animals face and then flipping over the other side to create a perfectly symmetrical image, I love the really bold compositions this creates so I'll probably try that out at some point.

 This lion was another quick sketch using 0.5 fine line pen, I'm finding myself paying a lot more attention to the angles of my drawings and I'm trying to make everything less flat. Once again I did no planning for this and started with the nose and drew the rest around it.

 The other day i was watching a video on "Funny or Die" where Jason Alexander (the guy in "Seinfeld" who's not Jerry Seinfeld) was joking with people at a 99% rally and in the background there was the brilliant painting of a severed pigs head with a top hat and a monocle. I really loved the painting (it wonderfully summed up the entire movements ambitions) but I'm yet to find the artist behind it so as I was sitting at my desk and decided to do a study of a pigs head. As I was painting it I was reminded of the Barrack Obama quote "You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig" (referring to Sarah Palin) and I had this in mind as I applied the watercolour paints.

 When I used the diffuser to spray paint on the Robo Cop drawing below I put down a few sheets of paper from my 40p Asda notepad to protect the surrounding surfaces and when I picked up the drawing I was left with a rectangular frame across two sheets. I had my dipping pen and ink out and I hate to waste paper so I quickly sketched (from memory) a photograph of the actor Danny Trejo by Estaven Oriol. Although I literally thrashed this out in a couple of minutes so I was surprisingly pleased when it turned out like this;

 I read an article about Richard Branson in the Guardian website and there was a really good picture of him which I think had been taken as he was genuinely smiling rather than posing for a photo, it was a perfect reference for a caricature so I sketched this out. Although I think it works as a cartoon I would have liked it to appear less flat.

 Two of my favourite movie ingredients are robots and american police officers so as you can probably guess I love Paul Verhoeven's "Robocop". This one didn't really end up as planned (I was trying to replicate the style Frank Miller's "Sin City" comic noires) but I learnt a lot about dry brushing by not dry brushing very well...

 This was one of the first drawings I did with my new ink and I really enjoyed working A3 sized paper again. The photo doesn't really do the drawing justice but I used lot of shading and detail using dip pens to try to make the eyes a focal point. The rest of the shading was done using brushes and different consistencies of ink and water. The drawing is of rapper Killer Mike

Also I've put together a portfolio of my work so far, if you want to see some of my I.B. work or all my stuff in one place click here.

My Current Work Space

On Tuesday a parcel arrived containing loads of new ink, dipping pens, diffusers, paints and brushes so I've spent a lot of time working on some new stuff. I'm not very good at keeping surfaces clean and tidy as I draw (I tend to splatter ink everywhere and create a general mess around my work area) so to save the desk in my new room from total destruction I covered it with protective wrapping paper. Last night I was sitting at my desk watching "The Simpsons" on my laptop and I couldn't resist drawing on the massive white surface in front of me, the following is the result of 20 minutes hardcore doodling;

Also here's the back of my laptop, I graffitied the back of it because about 70% of Falmouth students seem to have macbook pros and I didn't anyone to mistake mine for theirs (I also drew on my ipad because it was near my laptop at the time);

Clint Eastwood comes home to find Obama's broken into his kitchen again;

Abraham Lincoln drawn using the rules of 2 point perspective

Despite spending the past 2 days drawing (with brief breaks to watch Breaking Bad and visit the gym) all i felt like doing this evening was continue to practice drawing heads. As I drew this picture of Abraham Lincoln I concentrated on the angles of the face using 2 point perspective to make so that the face did not look flat. I've learnt that the trick is to think of the face in terms of planes (like modelling in maya); I think of the side and the front as the 2 visible plains scaled using 2 point perspective, the nose and lips are then separate planes which also need to adhere to the lines of the perspective, the rest is just detail and shading. 

Learning About Perpective Points

Yesterday I was looking through my work from over the summer and I noticed that most of my drawings were from the perspective of looking straight on at the subject and that a lot of my portraits look a bit flat. Wanting too improve this I did some studying and spent two days learning about and practising using perspectives, the following is a summary of what my findings;

Reading "How to draw comics the marvel way" when I was about 11 I skimmed through a chapter on drawing heads, in a nut shell it said that heads should be modelled around cuboids, without reading much further or thinking into it (I'd only bought the books for pictures of super heroes) I tried this out, below is a reconstruction of what I thought the book meant...

The cuboid above is how everyone gets taught to draw a cube at school and its what's called "false perspective, notice that every angle (if it'd been drawn accurately) is a right angle which is impossible. Below is a cuboid drawn with 3 point perspective the bottom sides are smaller than the top ones as they are further away.

I then spent the day finding pictures of people to draw in 2 point perspective (as if you were looking at them but there face was looking to the side). I spent 5 minutes planning and 5 minutes drawing on each portrait, below is a selection of the practice drawings.

Now I'm learning 4 point perspective which I think is going to really help with my life drawing, I'm trying to enhance my drawing abilities as much as possible before I start Uni again in November.