New Year at the Beach

Well, we've successfully completed another transit around our local star, and we've ticked forward an increment on our calendar. Time to celebrate!

This time I spent New Year staying with some friends, a couple of whom were generous enough to host us, in Cleggan, County Galway. It's a more rugged, rainy, and windswept place than I am used to in Ireland. Dublin's gentle, graceful shore is nestled against the rather contained Irish Sea. The West coat, by contrast, is hewn into its serrated undulations by the unrelenting violence of the Atlantic Ocean's full fury. 

Click for full-sized version

Now back in Dublin after strolling those beaches, strewn with rocks and tide-pools, I've kicked together another little digital painting. This has wound up becoming another bit of concept art for my "Land of Winter" narrative project that's been in the works for some time, but I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out for a relatively quick piece of work. I was doing some experiments with layering textures to give the sense of a large, shallow, sandy tide-pool, one only a couple of inches deep, but blasting a reflection of the tumultuous sky back at us.

Here's a version without the two guys fighting to the death, in case anyone's interested.

And just for the sake of documenting, here's the rough composition about five minutes in. Unlike how I usually do these, I didn't start with a scanned sketch, so I just kicked around digital paint for a bit. As anyone who has taken a cursory glance at my other illustrations can see, yes, there's the overpowering backlight again. I'll tone it down next time, but in this instance, I stuck it in there as anyone who's spent a winter as far north as Ireland will tell you, that low, blinding, cold sun is a feature that is difficult to escape, and is one of the main visual cues I plan to use in "Land of Winter" to create a sense of contrast and alienation in our poor hero. (It also makes driving here in the winter a real pain.)

The combatants' poses I came up with while referring back to sketches I had done at a fencing club a few years ago. I can't claim that they are terribly accurate or effective poses for skewering one's enemies, but I hoped that the downturned sword in the foreground would both give a sense of being on the defensive backfoot, while also drawing the eye to the mid-ground figure. Our hero's the one in the unenviable position of fighting for his life with the sun in his eyes.

Rough Draft

Dealing with the Zombie Menace

"If you're NOT a flesh-eating thrall of undeath... Grunt ONCE."

Click on image for full size.

Just in time for Halloween, here's a painting I sketched up a few months ago.

I'm not quite the zombie fanatic that some of my friends are, but they have certainly inspired some fascinating work (early George Romero and the oeuvre of Max Brooks to name just two), the best of which are fun mirrors into our own society's fears. Perhaps not surprisingly, they usually suggest that those in our society mostly fear each other.

When I set out to make a zombie image, what interested me wasn't the zombie itself, but how it is manifested as a plague to be controlled. I tried to draw upon the dread that I felt when I saw photos in 2010 of Tsunami relief efforts in Nuclear-Disaster-stricken Fukushima prefecture, the mint-colored HAZMAT suits had a chilling unreality to them.

It reminded me that the color palette of most real disasters is the antiseptic tones of the equipment and clothing draping those responding to it.

New Writing Blog!

In an effort to keep the focus of this particular blog on visual work, I have decided to clutter the internet further with another blog, this one devoted to written work.

I am adding a link to the new blog to the sidebar on the right of this page, and additionally you can find it by clicking on this link, which will also take you to its inaugural offering: a short story that's been cooking in my brain for a little while.

Look to the sky! It's digital work masquerading as brushwork on scrolls!

To accompany this story, and something which I think ought to be a habit of mine from now on, I decided to make companion illustrations as headings. Half of the story is set in China in 1006 A.D., so I decided to try my hand at an imitation period Chinese painting, even though I opted to imitate the Yuan Dynasty's style, which came about 200 years after this story is set (1006 A.D. would have been the Song Dynasty, but paintings of that period tend towards monumental complexity and I chickened out)


The Chinese text at the top-right corner is Ke Xing 客星 — literally "Guest Star" — a name given by Chinese astronomers of antiquity to temporary or unexpected events observed in the heavens, a phenomenon that factors into the story on the other blog. Hopefully I didn't utterly butcher the rendering of the text, or generate a pastiche image of culturally inept banality (I always hope that part, though.)

The Zoo!

I don't need to tell people that the Zoo is fun, or that it's a great opportunity to sketch some really interesting things that almost all of us can't possibly encounter on a routine basis. Drawing animals is tough, very tough. Trying to figure out their skeletal and muscular structure, their balance, the way they move, all while hopefully imparting character... All very challenging.

That's probably why the sketches I'm most happy with happen to depict the most human-like creature of the lot, Gorillas.

 

Inkling!

I just recieved a belated Christmas gift today, the Wacom Inkling, a little device that you attach to the side of whatever you're sketching on, and it records all of your pen strokes as vectors, negating the need to scan anything while preserving the act of drawing with an actual pen on actual paper.

Wacom Inkling

I've just finished charging it and had to give it a spin, so here's the inaugural sketch on my Inkling, drawn on an A5 Moleskine sketchbook, of a Rob Gronkowski ball-spike in honor of last night's Patriots NFL win.

Gronk Smash!

As usual, I'm going to end with a promise to be more active in my posting. It's pretty bad of me not to keep updating regularly, so pretty soon I'm going to scan in the sketches I did of a recent trip to the zoo. Everyone likes animals, right?

Kanellos!

Such a nice doggy.

As usual, click for the full size version.

Getting a little bit political here, but I have been quite amused by the emergence of Κανέλλος the "Riot Dog", a stray dog named "Cinnamon" that always seemed to be at the front lines of civil unrest in Greece. He's recently reappeared during fresh strikes / riots, and I thought I would make a play on his odd mixture of cuteness and utter ferocity towards authority.


A true icon for our times, I suppose...


(CORRECTION: I seem to have gotten the Greek onomatopoeia's spelling wrong for a barking dog, it should read "γαβ, γαβ". It's late in the night at the moment, so I'll correct it later...)

Rugby World Cup

All Together Now

Next weekend, the Rugby World Cup begins. The first match is on Friday, however the first in which I have any national stakes takes place on Sunday: USA vs Ireland. Being a dual citizen, I sort of have my pick of loyalties in this case. Being someone with hopefully a sense of morality, I must throw my full support behind the underdog, in this case the USA Eagles. A confident performance this year could give the US Rugby team the visibility it needs to grow the sport in the US (as much as I do enjoy American Football, there is room for the NFL and a healthy Rugby culture in a country as big as America.)

I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how the extremely talented USA winger Takudzwa Ngwenya fares.

This rather fanciful image is, if you haven't yet guessed, a bit of a take on the famous photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, with a beam of sunlight standing in for the flagpole. While I'm waving the flag, I may as well appropriate such things in the process, right?

I seem to have an unhealthy obsession with flooding an image with ridiculous backlighting, don't I? I'll have to start playing around with other ideas soon. I think it was that I found in animation it was quite a nice way to pump a bit of thick atmosphere into an image, and create almost a live-action sensation of light.

Some Science-Fiction to Brighten (Blind) Your Day

Nothing helps you hide
like glow-in-the-dark eyes.

Just a quickie random bit of science-fiction imagery to break things up a bit.

This actually is character / environment I used to draw a lot in secondary school, thinking it was something I could turn into a fully fledged fictional world. While I did wring some ideas out of it what I think are quite good for other potential projects, it was a case of coming up with a "world" before a story, which will almost never work.

Then again, I was 16 at the time, so I don't think I quite grasped that difficulty.

The world in question revolved around a giant city that had expanded upwards to the point where roads and footpaths were all essentially "skyways"between high-rise buildings, glass half-cylinders lit by yellow ribs of light, creating a mix between a cathedral nave and a hamster tube. And of course it being a world devised by a 16 year old boy, it was a society policed by an oppressive corps of quasi-fascistic super soldiers, hiding behind impassive glowing red eyes.

On the Beach

A typical Irish summer.

Just a quickie little tonal piece again, this time our intrepid hero shortly after arrival. Still needs work, just wanted to convey the idea of a vast stretch of low-tide beach covered in sky-reflecting tide pools.

Hospitable looking place, isn't it?

Totila

Trying to channel a bit of Gustave Doré here I suppose...

Just a quickie little rough tonal sketch here, done in Corel Painter.

I've always been fascinated by the marginal corners of history, people and events either shrouded by obscurity or by not having been chronicled. This is a not-at-all-historically-accurate fanciful rendering of Totila, the 6th Century Ostrogothic warlord the day he conquered Naples. It had been a long siege and the locals were terrified that once they had surrendered they'd be massacred by the supposed barbarian. To their surprise, he instead delivered a speech about how Italians should resent being an exploited colony of the Byzantines, and gave a rebuke of colonialism that sounds strikingly modern.

I imagine him here having just entered the city, standing atop their walls to address them — imposing and alien, yet stoic and egalitarian. Part of the pose was inspired by the Soviet war memorial near Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.