More adventures in charcoal (20 mins, #2)

Another portrait!
Like my last portrait I spent about 20 minutes drawing it, focusing again on the shape and form of the face and hair rather than detail. The charcoal helps enormously with that. It's a pretty good exercise in restraint:

 

(charcoal on paper, A3)

Thanks to the unknown girl who put her picture on the net and ended up on my computer as a reference. I probably should look for some male faces to draw just to mix things up a little, but girls are just nicer to look at.

An A3 scanner would be great for these. Taking photos of a bigger than A4 piece just isn't the same, even after adjusting the tone and colour levels.

(I promise to try my best to not make certain people look fat in their pictures when they aren't at all...)

20 mins

Just a quick portrait done in charcoal.

(charcoal on paper, A3)

This was pretty easy to do. I only spent about 20 minutes on it because I wasn't trying to make it overly detailed. I might make this type of drawing a regular thing (yeah, I've never said that before...). Besides, I need a LOT of practice drawing human form.

Illustration Friday: swarm

*clap clap*:

(paint pens and soft pastel on black paper, A4)

I didn't want to go with the obvious choice of bees, so I went with the less obvious (or really weird) choice of moths... and other winged creatures.

I am not a vandal (Happy birthday, Morgan)

I made this as a birthday present, not because I was raging against the system:

(spray paint on... a wall, derp)

The closest I'd ever gotten to writin' my name in graffiti on the wall was when I was a teen and did a few simple tags here and there, but that really isn't in the spirit of graffiti, or writing (if you're a graffiti snob). Plus that spirit involves hitting spots at crazy hours of the morning, hiding from the law and racking your paint, none of which I really fancied doing. I'm still a huge fan of graffiti and it's place in hip-hop culture, so for the most part my graff has been kept on paper, until yesterday.

My cousin and his partner pretty much asked me to draw a little something on their daughter's wall for her birthday, with the words "lil' star" incorporated into it. I normally do the usual greeting card but with an unusual design on the envelope (a la keeping it on paper). My cousin suggested that this would be an extension of that tradition but on a bigger - and vertical - surface. I'm pretty sure he wasn't thinking the whole wall but I already was.

from the paper to the wall

I ended up having to stack the words on top of each other as it would have been too long to fit on one line. The funny thing is that they will be rehoused in a few months as the council are supposed to be demolishing their building to make way for a new development, which means that this will also fall into a big pile of rubble. Kind of sad to do something like this only for it to disappear down the road. But I guess that's one of the things about graffiti, that it's never supposed to be permanent, even if this was legal and not going to be buffed out by anti-vandalism cleaners :)

I like that the time-and-tested combo of chrome and black really stands out. I did have a few problems with it though:

• I have NEVER drawn anything as big as this before, in any medium... ever, so I got a bit excited with the size of it. It's a little too big.
• The paint kept dripping. This was most likely due to the wallpaper not wanting to take the paint properly. Wallpaper isn't a very good surface to spray on unless it's matt and super absorbant, which this wasn't.
• My white spray can kept sticking and clogging. How annoying is a can that splatters instead of sprays? It also made adding the highlights harder, and made my fingers hurt from pressing down so hard.
• I got tired at the end and my fingers were starting to cramp, so the final simple details kind of went a bit wonky.

Fortunately the pictures hide most of the drips and smudges. It probably is best admired from afar. Maybe if I had more than a couple of hours, a better surface and much more practice it would have been cleaner and crisper. But for a first attempt at anything more than a tag in about 15 years I'm pleased with how it turned out.

clash

Yeah, I've been slacking on updates. Let's just say that I've been pretty uninspired as of late.

I did however finish my post for "Ariele* & Kinga's Awesome and Amazing Illustration Project". It doesn't really have a title as outrageous as that, after all we're only on the second word. My word of choice as well.

And here is that second word. I present to you "clash":

(soft pastel on paper, A3)

This started out as a random photo that I took in the Philippines last Christmas, of 2 fighting cocks squaring up against each other. I used it as a reference to draw a simple pencil sketch which in turn was used as a reference to draw this almost entirely freehand in soft pastel. I decided on pastel because of how messy and smudged it can get, which was useful in trying to capture the speed and chaos in which the birds moved.

Cockfighting, or sabong is a very popular pastime in the Philippines and probably pre-dates the Spaniard's colonisation of the islands. More about the history and traditions here.

I remember the first real cockfighting event I'd ever been to, about 5 or 6 years ago. I'd never seen anything like it. Organised chaos describes it best. Shouting and betting on the favourite (meron) and the underdog (wala). The absolute silence in the pit as the birds are dropped to their feet. The anticipation of the first slash. It was horrific and exciting at the same time.

In the drawing above neither of the birds had a cockspur as it wasn't a real cockfight, merely a conditioning test by the birds' sabungero. Both birds had a glove over their natural spur to prevent any unnecessary damage.

And now the customary WIP pics :)

Update: Complimentary link-back to Kinga's illustration here. Check it out!

*This is indeed my real name. Hello world

Happy birthday to me...

lol.

(picture courtesy of somebody on the net)

New stuff to come, I think. I'm on the tail end of a week long bout with jetlag and illness. I have a new word for our little illustration challenge, clash (yeah I know, I couldn't have picked a weirder word) and maybe a couple of things I did over Christmas, if I can make them look not so crappy.

You can bring in the pretty girl in the oversized cake now.

bait

Kinga Bee and I decided that we would have our own little illustration task and illustrate a random word chosen by either one of us, but unlike other illustration tasks (a la Illustration Friday) there's no pressure to finish within a week. The topic chosen by her was "bait":

(pens on paper, A4)

 
My first real post with felt tip pens, so yay me I guess. It's always nice to use something other than watercolours or pastel. No apologies for the patchy colour, I just started using Alpha Markers and I don't know how to control the colours yet. They are godly pens, however.

This was the first thing that immediately sprung to mind on seeing the word "bait". And because I like to show you how lame my first sketch is, here it is in all it's awful shaky pencil, testing the pen colour because the indicator cap is usually different glory:

Update: A very (belated) Happy New Year!

This is a repost, I originally drew and posted this back on 11th October last year, then pulled it into drafts a few weeks later as the other "competing" half wasn't ready (i.e., didn't start). I don't really know if she'll ever get around to illustrating the word *HINT HINT :P*, and leaving this in a state of limbo is kind of a waste, so I decided that this should be the first post of the new year.

I should have had a whole load of other things to post that I was expecting to do over the holidays, but that didn't really pan out too well. I did some things but I actually had more fun with my new camera than I did with pencil and paper. Fortunately that means a bunch of reference photos for future use. I might post some photos too. But first thing's first, I have to open a FB page. I've been reluctant to do so for a while but I guess now's as good a time as any...

Happy new Year again! :)

Update 2: Well wouldn't you believe it, soon after reposting this Kinga Bee only went and did the damn thing! It only took 4 months, 3 reposts and some subtle prodding to get it done, hehe. Complimentary link-back here (clicky).
To-do: comment on her picture. Better do it later, I'm still jetlagged, it's 4:30am and my brain is lugaw.