Desert lemons and a little red dot.

Hi Hi,

I don't know about you, but I think it's round about time I showed you some new work. Sound good? Let's get started!

My new work for today is a recent piece done once again for the lovely people at Happy. My subject this time around was Long Island band The Lemon Twigs. Once again, the scope being a landscape illustration to accompany a interview. These guys are full-on retro (both through music and style), so it was quite a unique one to work on.

Like with previous works, I'd never heard of the group, so like with the last two illustrations I've done, I gathered up their Youtube clips and left them on repeat, particularly while researching and sketching. I find listening to songs many times allows you to notice things that might not be picked up the first time through as well as discovering what really stands out in the imagery, (visually from the music videos and described in the lyrics). These make it onto a list (I like making lists) of things that I decide must be worked into the image. Then it's a matter of taking the elements and arranging them in a strong composition. It's a rather methodical way to work and probably the reason why I really struggle with whimsy and spontaneity when I'm working in my sketchbook. In short, I overthink things sometimes. Here's the image!

It's a little bit predictable to feature both lemons and a twiggy tree, but I just couldn't help it. My heaviest inspiration comes from the clip 'As long as we're together' I felt it really captured the glammy retro feel better than their other clips, which was exactly what I was going for. The colour scheme was perfect too. Soft pastel colours give that 'old school,' (do people still say that?) feel.

My first sketch just had both brothers standing next to each other, but I found despite the greater difficulty, I really wanted to draw Michael in a more animated pose. He's always jumping all over the place in the videos and it also makes for a more interesting composition.

Costume-wise I was originally going to go with something really full on, but decided on shirts. As always, I wanted to engage my penchant for pattern design and I thought it might be overkill to have costumes and detailed patterns in the one image.Even having complex 70's drop-repeat patterns on both their shirts made the eyes jump all over the picture, so I simplified Michael's patterning to just spots. It keep focus on Brian's shirt and leads into the rest of the image.

For the background, being a quick turn-around I needed something quick and easy, but also something I could practice painting with. I'm still relatively new to background painting, so it's one of my major goals this year to really get a handle on it. It'll really open up many more possibilities for things I want to create in the future. Desert was great for this: It's relatively flat and uncomplicated, but still has lots of hue and texture changes. The tree was also quite fun to do. I was going to paint it from scratch, but since I wanted it to stand out a little more I kept outlining in there.

Screen-caps from Happy's website where the article was featured when it was published in April. It was even featured on the homepage for about a week, which is pretty awesome.

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Happy and Tom Cameron for the opportunity.


In other news, I've made a sale! Down goes the auction hammer, BANG "SOLD!" - Though it wasn't an actual auction of my work, who can't help but imagine such a scene?

Back in May I had a piece of my work featured in a group exhibition held by Illustrators Australia, (or IA for short) in Collingwood Gallery, here in Victoria on a lovely Autumn day.  It ran from May 5th to May 30th and was called 'paper to pixel.' It was certainly a good turnout of illustration talent; 68 amazing pieces of art were on display, each one more different than the last. Check out photos from the opening night of the event on IA's facebook page here. The exhibition was even featured in the weather segment on channel 10 (a major television network here in Australia). It felt pretty cool to have my artwork featured on TV, even though it's not like it was dominant in any way.

Many artworks had already been sold by the end of opening night, which was great. Little telltale red spots stuck next to the works indicated a sale. Unfortunately, my work was not among them.

That was until early June when I received a congratulatory email from IA saying that my print had been sold! I was super ecstatic. I was having lunch in the meal room at my day job casually checking my emails when I saw it. I did a little dance in my seat and probably looked really weird to all my colleagues surrounding me. The money didn't feel that important, it was the recognition that did it for me. Imagining that someone looked at my artwork among all others in that gallery and said "I want to buy this" and spent their money on it. Thank you, whoever you are! Something that I created from nothing was worth something to another. It. Was. Fantastic.

The work itself was going to be a new piece I was working on specifically for the exhibition, but I challenged myself a little too much, given the limited time I have in my life for illustration. It's based on a project for a client that fell through, for which I'd already done some designs and sketches for. I really don't like discarding things I've put time into, so it was a perfect candidate for the exhibition.Time however, did not allow it's completion, so instead I had to quickly chose one of my recent works.
 

Remember this one? See the full blog entry about it here.

I'm a proud member of IA, see my portfolio page here.

Well that's it for another blog entry, I've been doing some sketching lately which I should be uploading at some point in the not-too-distant future, stay tuned for that. I'm not sure if I'll make a new blog entry, but it will definitely get a mention on social media. I'll also upload it into my sketchbook section on here.

Other plans for the future are a couple of designs I thought would make some great t-shirt. So I've thinking of vectoring them up and submitting to Threadless. I've got some other stuff to finish first however, so not sure when I'll get to that.

Thanks for feasting your eyes.

Horsey with magic birds and a revival

Hey there people!

Posts seem to come with two and today is no exception! As per usual I have two new artworks for you today. So without further small talk I'll get straight into it!

 

So this first image was done for my traditional Chinese new year illustration. You might remember last years work for year of the snake? This year being horse, I had the option to draw a mount, which I always love doing. A bit of further research showed that one of the five Chinese elements is also associated with the year, this year being wood. There are also colours, symbols, seasons and even planets associated with the element. This gave me plenty of direction in my self-brief.

I thought this time I got through the sketch and line-work stages much quicker than usual, though I still think I could be quicker. The biggest challenge in this work was working out a good and stylised way to "texturise" the wood, which I think worked quite nicely.

Now to the story behind logo on the wind barrels. It turns out the planet Jupiter is associated with wood, so I wanted some way to include that in the art. I remembered from a previous piece of work that all the Roman gods and thus planets had a graphic symbol to represent them, and obviously what you see on the barrels is the symbol for Jupiter. Out of pure coincidence the symbol also looks like a two and a four for 2014! I love it when things like that happen.

As you might've noticed I've included detail shots, which I think I might do from now on. Often I have  details in my work that really can't be seen properly in these web quality versions.

Now onto the next work...

 Before

 

  
After

This next piece is a little different from my usual work. It's actually my take on one of my sister's creations. That's right, my sister is an artist of sorts too. She dabbles in collage and crafts, mainly sewing and knitting. She does some great work, though she won't admit it herself. I'd be plugging her website here, but she doesn't yet have one yet.

So as you've probably gathered, the top image is my sister's original and the after is my take on it. I simply decided to do this because I liked her character, but also because I wanted to try "complexifying (tm)" a quite stylistic design.  

I tried to keep as close to the original as possible, however I did tweak the colours a bit and decided for fun to add some birds, two of which are birds my sister likes (namely the fairy wren and the barn owl), the others are made up. The particularly daunting task in this image was the pattern on the skirt. I couldn't decide whether to opt for a scan of a illustration from the same book as the original or attempt to draw my own in the same style. In the end I though it might look at bit too busy full of really complex line work, so I opted to do it myself and rather pleased with the result.

Vicky was actually really proud that I used her creation, which made us both feel good!

One last thing to post, I lied. A while back I worked on a new version of my 2012 image (year of the dragon) So I though I really should update my blog with the improved version, so here it is.

Pretty much the only major change to the original is the pattern on the kimono, which was supposed to look like stylised fire works, but I don't think it really worked that well. Most of the rest are just adding more detail or tweaking shadows.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I've recently joined 'Drawcrowd,' a community site for sharing illustration and concept art with other artists. It was created by the ever generous Feng Zhu, who I ranted about before. He continually gives back to his industry in ways that are awe inspiring. So what are you waiting for? Check it out here! You can find a link to my page on Drawcrowd in the contact section of this blog.

Well that's it from me, time to get back to drawing. What's next you say? Well it involves penguins!

Thanks for reading.

Keeping up with nature

 So without further stalling for time I present to you a somewhat recent illustration I did for a very good and very far away friend of mine. The Record Keeper of the Forest!

My friend is a big fan of nature, so I wanted to try and craft my artwork with a strong natural appeal. I wanted to come up with a character that would be really interesting and different. Rather than going the road of fairy or dryad, or any other countless fantasy creatures, I tried to think of a unique character and one that could sit in a tree at that. I tried to imagine what an office worker might look like if they worked in a forest. Even nature needs to keep track of it's assets, right? The blue bird is like an assistant, who bring up scrolls from storage for her to peruse.

I was really happy with how the face came out on this one. There's something I can't quite put my finger on. The main challenge here was the tree itself. As one of the largest elements in the image, just doing cell shading didn't seem appropriate. Especially since I was playing up the naturalness of the illustration, I wanted to express the texture of the tree. So it took quite a lot of playing around before I was satisfied. Textures in this style can't be too realistic, otherwise they don't fit well with the flatter parts. But hey it worked out in the end. Sorry about the lack of updates lately, I've been really hunting trying to find a job.

I'm also now a proud member of Illustrators Australia! Which is a professional body of illustrators in Australia, hopefully I'll be able to pick up some jobs through them. It's also good to be part of a larger community, so hopefully I can start making connections too. See my IA profile here.

Until next time, (note that 'next time' is not bound by any standard measure of time-space relationships).