what? MORE life drawing!? surely not!

merry christmas, y'all.

did you know that contrary to popular belief, coca-cola did NOT invent the red sporting santa that we've all become so familiar with? instead, the finger of blame can be leveled at thomas nast (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nast), an american cartoonist who transformed him into the jolly little fat man we've all come to know and love. also, there are numerous links between mr clause and the norse god odin but those have pretty much been brushed under the carpet since the ye olde christians felt that smacked of paganism.

#THE MORE YOU KNOW!#

doing an over head crowd shot seemed like a really awesome idea until it sunk in it was going to take like a gazillion hours. i'd like to think that earned me the right to indulge in a little copy pasting when it came to the final three shots.

someone in the business let me loose on a script that's currently being worked on as a trial. i think the real thing's coming out in january (http://www.renegadeartsentertainment.com/comics/channel-evil.php) i can guarentee it's probably going to be a whole lot prettier.

p.s. do yourself a favor and check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00g1825/Four_Sad_Faces_Adam_Hills/

four of my friends managed to land themselves a sketch show on bbc7. it's goooooooooood stuff.

the 'colored' page. i'm not going to assault your eyeballs with the lettered version. 

argh! i am SO close to getting the second page done but work is a total attention seeking ho-bag at the moment (i do love it really though). bah, there is too much to do. life would be so much easier with a sweat shop of clones at my disposal... or a time machine.

cccccccoooome on scientific break through!

zombie girl says please give brains generously.

for the weekly sketch jam.

all i can say is thank god for inking.

hah... i got up at quarter to five this morning to try and clean up the page this panel's from. three hours later and i've only touched on seven of the audience members. 

...

...

...

fail man, epic fail.

aaaaaaand more life drawing! there's a whole stack of the results of the wednesday sessions i go to but i'm going to put them all up in one MASSIVE post because they're a bit crap. i am, however, a tad partial to this one. note to self- try using the big, fat pen by itself. could be interesting... or very, very messy.

oh my god... sharpie pens come in a whole range of incarnations and i love them all so very, very much.

in other news, the colossal tome of fletcher sibthorp paintings finally arrived yesterday. so worth the wait. that man does wonderful things with shadows and blurring.

finacial crisis? mmm, topical!

blegh... i am not wow-ed at all by the composition here, not wow-ed at all. also, i regret not making our skewered freind here a tad more buisness man-esqu.

on a more positive note, sharpie pens are delightfully cheap and cheerful!

worksheets. brought to you by the magic of photoshop!

more old stuff. life drawing: now with 95% more blurring!

work load just went nuclear. there's a deadline for the freelance project at the end of december plus we had a chat with the editor for fortunes luck and basically we're going to have to redo the whole of issue one due to some problems with both the art and writing. it's mildly frustrating *understatement of the century*. oh, and there's concept art. don't forget that. and portfolio stuff.

...

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GOOD TIMES!

something old for you today but i've still got a soft spot for it. still, can't quite shake the feeling she's just discovered something weird going on in her nether regions.

did you know that  in the late 18th century, students working in jacques-louis david studio would spend six hours every day drawing from nude models? also, in a rather ironic twist, women weren't permitted to life drawing classes as students until the end of the 19th century.

#THE MORE YOU KNOW!#

lo, my freaking awsome ability to draw circles!

pencils for the first page of a web comic i'm doing the art for. tis an epic affair about elves 'n stuff. more on that later!

whee! more gratuitous female nudity!

good god! it was freezing yesterday... but then what do i have to complain about? at least i was wearing clothes (+scarf+overcoat. my god, i'm getting soft)....

mildly pissed off seeing as i accidentally obliterated the layer that had the majority of final line work trying to be all cleaver with the copy/paste function . then again, it was pretty crappy seeing as i only discovered the wonderful 'spoon pen' brush at the last minuet. it's utterly lovely... kinda sorta behaves like a weird hybrid of a brush and charcoal.

best bit: the sketchier, larger drawing seemingly firing off a one fingered salute and SADAKO

oh detective mills, you really don't want to know.

damn this film. thanks to it, i find it nigh on impossible to say those three little words without doing my best brad pitt meltdown impression. i also love the fact that you really can tell i spent all of two minuets on morgan freeman/detective sommerset.

just part of a sketch jam some other folk and i do every week. i wanted to try something with just some heavy black and white after a combination of this http://www.threepanelsoul.com/view.php?date=2008-09-22) , this http://manga.clone-army.org/pxi.php?lang=%3C?php%20print%20?%3E&page=94&lang=) and frank miller strated to get at me.

a hoy hoy. i'm kinda busy at the moment working on the aforementioned freelance work so i'm not going to be able to put anything new up until tuseday depending on the outcome of a meeting.

in the mean time though, i'll be thrilling you with extracts from my sketchbook. wild huh?

some studies and notes done en rout to new york.

in other news i am twenty today. it's really, really weird.

  dear alex moore,

   please stop aping gabriel ba's style. i know you think he's hot shit but seriously, enough is          enough.

  

 your sincerely,

     your artistic integrity.

the two dudes and one dudett from the menu. wow, she looks positively ENTHRALLED. 

(i think i might have a thing for drawing people in dinner wear) 

menu design for margaret's 50th. well would you look at that, it matches my blog. that couldn't possibly be because a certain someone left doing this till the last minuet and didn't have time to come up with a new design? ah ahaha, what a ridiculous notion!

also, my french is apparently so awesome that i don't need to bother with all the little accents and hats (somewhere my old prune faced, battle axe of a french teacher is spinning in her grave).

totally having the french onion soup and the cassoulet.

veeeeeeeeery rough character designs for the freelance job.

hey alex, do you remember a little something called PROPORTIONS?

guess who can't draw trucks from above?

what's with these yellow and white drawings? a while ago, erik and i wrote a jolly(!?) yarn about a not so utopian, not so distant future and reality tv gone nuts. while waiting for stuff to happen with work, i though it might be fun (and good to keep my eye in/bolster my non-existent inking skills) to do some simple illustrations for it.

darken and multiply layer tools are totally my best-ies right now.

in other news, i managed to land some freelance work (booyah!) and margaret managed to make her entire class CRY with her film project. things are good.

aaaand more life drawings. hrmph, i think i prefer the minuet doodles to any of the ones i actually spent time on. of course, i could blame all this on the fact that i was stuck at the back of the room behind three people and heads aren't the most transparent thing in the world but that would just be too easy.

work from work. at the moment we're trying to get funding  for a picture and boss man wanted some pretty pictures  to stick in with the treatment to give an idea of the three different settings the protagonist flits between. 

(i think i might be starting to get the hang of this whole digital painting malarky.)

  

derived from a rather cutting quote on elen's blog. wow, it only took me just under a year to get around drawing something from it. now, this is the point where i could make some really lame pun about skeletons and bone-ing/boners but that would just be crude. 

did you know that the harpsichord has featured in a number of popular contemporary songs such as golden brown (the stranglers), yesterday's papers (the rolling stones) and r.e.m's half a world away?

#THE MORE YOU KNOW!#

and now for something more moronic than normal.

may i present to you... chair-bot!

 

and there's the finished model. cardboard man was made as part of my shiny new portfolio... until i realized that he's got very little to do with ILLUSTRATION.

*slow clap*

mmm, wonky! a pretty crudely done illustration for bach's 'air in G'. 

did you know that despite composing more than 1,000 pieces of music during his life time, it was only after his death that people started to recognize bach as a composer?

#THE MORE YOU KNOW!#

hmm. why do i never ever ever seem to learn that perspective works so much better when rulers get involed? there's something a wee bit funky going on in that upper right hand corner...

gah! my enviroments blow ass... even when they'e nothing more than tables and a big yellow void.

some more old school foundation stuff. they were all like 'WORK BIG, PANSIES!' so i decided to sock it to them with a drippy life sized drawing compleat with a crappy 3d hand (i'm sure there ws some deep, phiosophical reason for it at the time). since then, this monstrosity has been radically cropped, de-handed (thank god) and now spends its day brooding in the kitchen corner.

just some prep work for the GIANT (okay, it's only just a tad over half a meter but what can i say, clearly i'm easily impressed by my own handiwork. sometimes. when i'm not being crushed into the ground by my own towering sense of artistic inadequacy.) cardboard man now looming over all the junk cluttering my work space.

uh... wtf did all the male genitalia go?

oh, silly naive alex. the net idea was never going to work.

and here's the rest of the cover designs. open canvas has WAY too many fonts for you to play around with.

anyhoo, hate that first one. there's something a tad psychotic about that over-pepped house wife and her dead, soulless eyes. I wouldn't be surprised if those deserts she's offering were made from ex-people. the second calls for an apology to Patrico Betteo (http://www.betteo265.blogspot.com/) who's super cool style i shamelessly tried to ape. also, try to overlook the missing thumb. number three? that doesn't have a whole lot to do with pudding, does it? i blame freya for being all like 'do something with SPACE!'. still, it's probably the best of the bunch. 

just a couple of random panels from Fortune's Luck (aka, the pirate thing i've been working on all this time).

i cannot get over how re-god-damn-diculous that diving panel is. also, drawing stereotypically evil shouty guys with their diabolical little mustaches being total pricks is SO much fun.  you should try it some time.

more album cover design. now with added pseudo cubism!

did you know that the term cubism was coined by french art critic louis vauxcelles when he described a painting as full of little cubes?

#THE MORE YOU KNOW!#

 

the first of a couple of designs for the cover art for some friends'  album.  what little i've heard of their music is pretty damn awesome. unfortunatly, little is the key word here. i'd only listened to three or four songs before i started on this so wasn't 100% sure what to go with....

...hence the many drawings of puddings i'm going to bombard you with over the next couple of days.

this isn't lazy, it's simplistic. yeeeeees, that's right. *shifty eyes*

and some more naked people. i need to try more of this speed painting malarky.

life drawing from like tiiiiiiimmmme ago. 

i am so shamelessly style over substance.

a design for a tattoo. i don't know if the person ever got it done but if anyone out there feels like humouring me and getting this permenantly embeded into their skin you would make me one very happy camper.

part of that whole illustrating music project thingy-ma-jig. this is like the first second of the minuet waltz- i had some crazy idea that i was going to transcribe the WHOLE song in it's entirety. 

40 minuets in i realized that was NOT happening.

did you know that the minuet waltz doesn't actually last a minuet? even the speediest play throughs clock in at around a minuet and a half. Chopin originally wanted to call it 'the little dog' but his publisher went with the final title with the intention that 'minuet' be interpreted as small.

#THE MORE YOU KNOW!#

the cover for the first issue of the pirate comic thing that i'm doing the art for. so much for eye catching... it's way, way, WAAAAY too dark to jump off the shelf (that is assuming Fortune's Luck ever gets there. still waiting for that meeting...).

can you spot the hokusai rip off- er, i mean homage?

and some more of the same. the drawing was done by photocopying the pencil work onto acetate, decicrating the origional with water colours and then very crudly glueing the lot of it together. mmm, professional!

it makes for a nice effect but srsly, so much time and money could have saved if i hadn't been such a total luddite abotu the whole thing.

please try to ignore the doodgy knees. i know i do.

from a series of illustrations i did for my fmp for float on by modest mouse. this was one of those rare occasions where photoshop did indeed prove to be my friend. The cloud templates also ended up featuring in the backdrop we made for airside which was pretty nifty.

on a side note, OH MY GOD, is the music video for that song depressing. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLkC8l3nJro&feature=related

*sniff* poor sheep.

said painting. jesus christ, that's colorful. 

recently discovered that there are colors out there other than blue, black and grey and have embarked on a torrid love affair with the whole lot of them.

just some studies for a painting and some rather non sensical annotations. i really wouldn't recommend you try reading them since they're only there to make my sketchbook look more intelligent and dupe interviewers into thinking i actually put some thought into this stuff. muahaha.

....and that's that for the time being.

aaaaaaaand more of the same.

thank you graphite for saving so much time!

  hmm. kinda wish i'd done the whole lot of them on the computer looking back on it...

ah, the joys of hindsight!