our last project started very innocently with picking a number out a hat. a few people got 1, a few a hundred, others anything between. it was all good fun until we were told that this would be the subject and number of books we had to make by thursday and thursday was three days away.

...

i'd got a hundred. at lest it could have been a little worse. 500 and 1,000 were a potential option for some very unlucky person.

these were finished at pretty much 59 minuets and 59 seconds into the 11th hour. i'll post interiors... sometime. many thanks to the uni buddies i embroiled into a production line to get this shit done.

stuff from the now-old moleskin. good thing that book is done; shit looks like it's fit to return to nature any minuet now.

speaking of nature, you should really crib notes from it. sun rises/sets should maybe look a little bit more like this?:


god damn. i love me some big ass clouds.

so at the end of this year, our campus is getting flattened. in a pre-emptive memorium, the illustration department's throwing together a book featuring drawings of the place. this is the life drawing room. we hang out here with naked people every week.

god damn. i'm going to miss this place.




i would like to thank the incredibly delicious camera i got for my birthday for snapping reference shots.

BUT WHERE IS THE TENSION? I WANTED YOU TO _FEEL_ LIKE YOU COULD _CUT_ CHEESE WITH THAT STRING selfloathingartist#



WOOP WOOP! bad story telling alert. that weird box thing in the bottom left hand corner is meant to be a carriage and not just some random polygon hanging out in old pseudo-victorian london. should have made that clear since it's pretty {SPOILER ALERT} prominent in the next panel.

LAMBASTING FOR LEARNING, YO!

page 13... we are inching towards victory, people.

christmas doodling in the spirit of CHRISTMAS.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, Y'ALL!

damn. bitch needs to learn how to draw fast, yo.

in other news, this girl has totally stolen my heart:



what a fucking champ. go find her band camp page. it will not disappoint.

so for this project, we had a day (aaaaaaacctually, make that more like 6 & 3/4 hours) to come up with a series of ten images to illustrate a scale using Italian words that are normally reserved for marvelling at sun rises in the alps. yeeeaaahhh. i wasn't feeling too imaginative because the best i could come up with was italians getting super enthused about food. way to stereotype.

anyhoo, here are the first four. god damn. i need to work out a way of drawing quickly that doesn't look like total ass.

some people managed to do some truly amazing things in that brief window of time....

pencils for another bit of the print project. my god. do a happy song already. shit's starting to get a wee bit to emo, yo.

on another note, dead man's will by iron an wine sounds SUPER dishy on the ukulele.... but that might just be me being a little bit bias. hell, i'd probably go nuts for thrash metal by way of one of those retarded little guitars.

character sheet for the animation. thrown together with some vague hope for continuity.

so last week we were doing these one day projects. dude. these were like, omgwtfbbq!?!?!?!? intense. the first one involved taking a line of text and illustrating it without ANY drawn elements. bwah? totally failed this one since the above offering was only done the next day (what little was done before the deadline will forever make me feel SSSHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMEEEEE).

it was pretty rad though. i kinda love cleaver typography but have never had the cojones to take it on. should make a point of trying this again...

p.s SPEAKING OF TYPOGRAPHY, last weekend one of the folks i was on with was part of an exhibition down off brick lane. DUDE, that thing was good. there was a crazy range of stuff, from illustration to photography to film to a printing press made by jenny which left the feeling that the world would be a much happier place if galleries were a wee bit more interactive.

more of those one minuet drawings. maaaan, it's not even funny how much this speed drawing malarky loosens you up.

in other news, we're only two weeks away from christmas? could have fooled me; i think i've been bitten by the humbug because up until now, i've been feeling impervious to christmas cheer. maybe it's the fact they haven't been stuffing it down our throats since september... or maybe it's that our visit to hyde park's winter wonder land revealed that place to be where ghost rides go to die. who knows.

that all changed with santa con this weekend. holy cow. so many santas. SO MANT SANTAS.how we hadn't heard of this before is a total mystery.

submission for our department's magazine. the theme was, keeping in these festive times, festivities. god damn, i love me a shit christmas jumper.

for the last project, we had to take a news article and re-tell it. mine was about these two sisters in china who, tiered of going out with men that they could trounce, decided to hold a kung fu contest to find a husband who could best them. the whole thing inspired by ancient warrior princesses dating methods.

for the print project. the will to etch this thing went out like robert falcon scott so it's just going to be a screen print. said yah boo sucks to the original format too, because A-sizes are for chumps, yo.

life drawing.

i think we had like, two minuetes to get these poses down. hot dog, do i love this exercise. it's just so easy to kill a drawing dead when you've got all the time in the world to tighten it up.

mole-skinning for the pygmy foot man project. spent the afternoon hopelessly floating round the british museum with the vague hope inspiration would thumb me between the eyes. it did not.

did find a TOTALLY SICK sculpture of alexander the great. phwoar. what a champ.



from after the crit. i'd like to think of it as a testament to how brain dead these projects leave us.

life drawing. guest featuring out tutor undoubtedly dropping some sweet, sweet knowledge.

rough (HA HA HA) for the hideously neglected print project. we got to write our own brief for this, so i totally hijacked it as a chance to live out that illustrated songs pipe/wet dream . oh my god yes.

we are going to come crashing back to reality when i try to etch this mother fucker in it's 3 x a3 glory.

NOTE TO SELF: YOU'VE SCREWED THE POOCH IN THE FINAL DRAWINGS. LEAVE SOME WHITE IN ROUND THE BREAKING POINT SO SHIT LOOKS LIKE IT'S, YA KNOW, BREAKING. WAAAAY TOO ROBUST RIGHT NOW.

panel from the liberty. oh god. i am so far behind on this. so so far behind. totally though i was going to get a chance to get another page done and dusted this weekend, but then surprise deadline came along and gave those plans the finger. sonovabitch.

hoy hoy comrades! so for this current project, we were tasked with finding a news article and making a sequence to go along with it. man, i am loving how much more open to interpretation the briefs are this year. and how they seem to end with me getting really enthusiastic about things i'd sworn off like plauge after year one- i.e print making and, in this case, animation.



frame from the first crack i took at this. i got mid-way through the second sequence and had to throw in the towel. that kinda sucked (although maybe not quite so much the cheery email informing us that we had one week less than thought to get this thing in the can. A CAN I HEAR YOU SAY WOOP WOOP?!?). but not nearly as much as what i was churning out. anatomy was being disregarded something awful and the whole thing was as smooth as velcro. blegh.




crack two. i've been roughing these out on layout paper and polishing them up in photoshop and so far, so good. fingers crossed that the whole thing doesn't shit the bed when it gets ported over to *shudder* after effects.

if all goes well and i don't die in the process, the final animation should be up by next weekend. OPTIMISM HOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

UGH. bad drawing is b-a-d. crack number two at following up our reckky to edgware road and things pretty much carried on going full pelt down hill. this was so very last minuet... and thoughtless. OH WELL. you live and learn... or just grow all the more bitter that you don't have some magical time stopping device.

the kingsgate show featuring work from this 'project' is going up next week. we went rummaging through the big box with all the selected pictures and oh my, there was some mighty pimp stuff in there. CANNOT wait to see it up on the walls.

every year, our course puts on a show with work focusing on one part of london. this time round they've got us down sketching in edgware road. huh. it's okay i guess, but we all seem to be having a hard time getting super enthused about what's going on down there. i this building though... this building i love. AND it seemed like a fun opportunity to screw around with the perspective!

greasy battles? awwwww yeah, totally rocking the typography there. one day, i will grow a set of design sensibilities... one day... maybe...
...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaand that's that for the pygmy footman. we're already pretty deep into the next project. there seems to be an alarming amount of animation going on.

more cards. man. those are some lazy ass backgrounds. i hope your proud.

in other news, The Show was last week.



there were drinks, a whole lot of people and some redicuosly fly work (that in turn, flew of the walls. kudos, people). i wish you could have been there.

finals for the last project. hot dog, that was kinda intense. for this one, we were all given different lists; i got all the burly brawls featured in that old classic "fifteen decisive battles that changed the world" by creasy. of course, the only logical thing to do wast to turn it into a game of heads and tails/ pairs.

(this may have just been a thinly veiled excuse to draw a lot of men (and one woman- you represent, joan of arc!) in fabulous period dress)

stuff foe the meow magazine. theme this time round was costumes. ugh... that top one... do you ever picture something in your head and then that's totally not how it ends up coming out on paper? saw that in a totally different style but it totally got lost in translation. it's weird... and kinda makes you wonder what goes on in between your brain and your hand... is a lot of drawing just down to physical habit?

this animation here is delightfully dope. LOVING the look of it too- kinda like the bastard lovechild of oldskool hand drawn and cgi. DELICIOUS.

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