Tuesday 30 October 2012

these days









Here are a load of variations of potential designs for my current project (and this isn't even all of them). I was just experimenting with a lot of these so they're pretty rough, but I'd like people's opinions on which one is the favourite. I think I like the first one best? I may end up doing some more, so any suggestions are useful.

But why is there a crab superimposed over the top of a face, I hear you ask. Basically, these illustrations all relate to one of the short stories in Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales, which my project is based on. The story is called 'The Fisher-Girl and the Crab' and features a girl who marries a talking crab, but constantly cheats on him because, well, he's a crab. So one day the crab follows the girl to a party and switches bodies with a tree spirit along the way (the tree spirit having the appearance of a 'beautiful boy'), and so the girl falls in love with him. Weird and pretty random, I know.

The original drawings are both made using a biro, which was pretty fun. If anyone is interested, here they are:




wheels over me



Here's a drawing of a hyena made using water soluble colouring pencils (I love those guys!) for my current project. Decided to have a go at drawing on wood, it's something I've been wanting to do for ages. I need to acquire more wood to experiment on though, it's hard to know what will look good. I'm not really sure how I feel about this one...

Tuesday 23 October 2012

greek myths





Here we have two covers I designed for a Greek Myths book this week. They're both based on the story of Icarus, who escaped the Minotaur's labyrinth with his father using wings made of feathers and wax. Overwhelmed by the joy of flying, he flew too close to the sun, melting the wax of his wings so he fell into the sea and drowned.

I'm not really satisfied with the type on both of these, the first one seems too childish and the second a bit boring? I'm not sure. Oh well, it was a short deadline for these, so I couldn't go too crazy with designs.

I'm not sure which of the two I prefer. The first one seems like it would suit a younger audience better. Anyway, I had fun with these, as I've never tried designing a book cover before and I'm probably going to be doing a lot of that this year.

Monday 15 October 2012

there there




Just a quick sketch I did just now. Not sure what to add to the opposite page yet...

Thursday 4 October 2012

nature is a language, can't you read?



 

Just a few images I sketched up during a life drawing session this week. I haven't done any life drawing in quite a while, so I'm pretty off the ball; these definitely are not my favourites! The first drawing was a warm up session, where we had two minutes per pose, and got asked to draw in a variety of ways (can't look at the page, can't lift the pencil from the paper, draw using a squiggly motion...) I actually like this drawing the best. The other two were ten minutes per drawing, I really hate the model's head on the last one.
But, despite all this, I actually really enjoy life drawing, and I've kind of missed doing it. So I'm going to a couple of sessions next week too!



Tuesday 2 October 2012

adam simpson (inspiration)










 
Today at uni we had a lecture by this illustrator, and he was just amazing! Everyone who sees this should go and check him out, click the link. His work is so insanely detailed if you look closely or zoom in, so much going on! The first five images here were made for the 2011 BAFTA awards, try and guess the films.





Monday 1 October 2012

let's get political







So here are some more scans from my sketchbook for the first project of last year, which was on politics. Again, not great quality images, they were all pretty speedily done. 3 out of 4 of these are all responses to different newspaper articles, and the other one a response to a book by Lenin.

PS: I finally got my scanner working! Hopefully I'll be posting a lot more up here from now on.