Change clothes

Not a major update, I just decided to change my avatar, because I can.

My old one is from an obscure (in everywhere but Japan, that is) claymation called Taiko Drum Master (Taiko no Tatsujin), based on the crazy arcade game of the same name.

I always thought the animal under the mask was a fat cat, turns out (thanks to wikipedia) it's a teddy bear. I also thought the mask was a cat, turns out it's a fox. Yeah, you see it now.

My new one is from a bunch of doodles that I did while house-sitting for a certain somebody :)

At the time I looked more like the one on the right, but seeing as I don't remember the last time I had a haircut I now look more like the one on the left.

Jag...

Hey me, what's up? Here's that jaguar you were painting:

(watercolour, A3)

Some of the spots on his face bled, and the colour is slightly washed out. That's partly due to the way I photographed it as well as it being a watercolour. It adds to the charm dammit, and at least I wasn't tempted to over-paint.

And here's some WIP's:

I have to stretch out the paper and fix it down properly next time. Even with a liberal soaking and double masking tape it still managed to buckle.

I'm feeling to do something unrealistic, maybe something surreal... I watched an art programme about Dalí over the weekend and it was pretty inspiring. It kind of reminded me of my college days, even though I spent most of my art lessons drawing realistically.

'til next time, see you later me.

Aquarius

Maybe I should have waited until next January to post this:

(oil pastel on card)

When I was first introduced to oil pastels in high school I hated them with a passion. I remember drawing a still life one day and every time I tried to add more pastel on top of a previous layer, the previous layer would come off. It was really frustrating. The problem with that still life turned out to be the really crappy card I was given to draw on. Of course practice makes (almost) perfect, and I did end up drawing a huge A1 piece in college, but I still didn't like them. So, seeing as I haven't used oil pastels in over 10 years and my pastel set is around about the same age, this was a bit more of an experiment with those vintage sticks than anything else. I guess they stood the test of time :)

Illustration Friday: fearless

My entry for Illustration Friday, this week's topic, "fearless"

A friendly game of cat and mouse...

I'm quite pleased with how this turned out. It's one of the few times where I've used watercolour and the end result actually looks like a watercolour painting. Still, I had to restrain myself from making it overly detailed... old habits die hard :)