| Year 0000 | 3:15 pm, April 14th, 2012

You might remember an illustration I did a while back for the shit blog. Well I found another illustration I could clean up and here it is.

Yep more cloudy clouds. And more smokey smoke. The idea behind this is that the dinosaur wanted to go forward in time but the time machine malfunctioned, and now he is at the ‘beginning of time’.

| A Heart Dichotomy | 3:05 pm, April 14th, 2012

So I drew this literally years ago – I was going through my old drawings and found it. Then I found this horrific illustration I did 1-2 years ago, in the second picture.

I decided to clean it up a bit so after a lot of line adjusting and deleting, I came up with this new illustration which I’m still not 100% happy with:

I like how the flowers turned out though. I just had so much trouble picking the right background colour!! Should it be lighter? Darker? Should I get rid of the blue veins? I dont really know at the moment x__x I realise this is not exactly as ‘cute’ as my other drawings, maybe that’s why I’m having so much trouble LOL.

Progress shots below.

| Swinging in the Clouds | 2:53 pm, April 14th, 2012

Oh my God. You would not believe how much time I spent messing around with this. You might have noticed that I’ve moved to using Photoshop to create ‘clouds’. This is because I have found that using vector clouds with shading doesn’t really sit well with me… It just looked… Weird. I wanted to create a soft dreamy feel, while maintaining the clean lines of the vectors so I drew the clouds in Photoshop instead, and cleaned up the rest of the colour a bit.

Ehh, there are a few things I could probably still mess around with on this, ESPECIALLY the clouds but right now I think I’ve done enough manipulation on this for a month at least! I really wasn’t that happy with the waterfall either… Sigh. Photoshop has done some weird things to me.

| Kissy Kissy REVAMPED | 9:36 pm, April 3rd, 2012

So if you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might recognise the illustration above. Well, I was going through all my old drawings today as I decided to have a bit of a cleanout of my files… Yeah, that didn’t actually go so well (let’s just say I’ll leave that for another day…).

Instead, I got distracted by making this illustration better. I mean, who uses myriad for copyright watermarks anyway?

So I whipped out Photoshop and voila – end result below.

Hope you like it, there will be an original drawing soon… I hope.

(AND YES, I KNOW I STILL NEED TO DO A EUROPE BLOG. It is coming… soon) Gosh I’m a horrible blogger.

| Desertopia | 1:00 am, March 24th, 2012

And so here we have another drawing! I think my goal of updating this website once a week is going pretty well so far. As you might know I like drawing deserts and vast landscapes. I was really tempted to draw a penguin in this, but I decided that was just too cliché for me. In case you didn’t already realise, the flying turtles were supposed to be a pun on turtle doves. Now that I look at it, they don’t really very turtle dov-ey, but when I was in the middle of doing this, I may have decieded to focus more on flying turtles than turtle doves… if you know what I mean.

I think the colours in this were kind of hard for me to get around, mainly because I had so many elements with different colour schemes. Picking colours for the sky was the worst – at one point it looked like the molten lava of Mt Doom. I think the 360 project I did last year was good in the sense that it made me think of so many ideas – some good, some horrible *cough* smores *cough* but man it feels so good to just be able to work on something without the time constraints.

I don’t know about other people, but sometimes I’ll just draw a block or background and stop and plan out what to draw. This would probably be left on my screen for a few days while I’d just look at it and think what to layer on. Weird process, but I think I just like taking my time with illustrating like this. I don’t think I could ever be one of those people who do speed drawings in two hours.

That said, I’m doing this sketchbook project for Propel Youth Arts, kinda like the huge Sketchbook Project in NY but on a smaller scale. Only thing is, we have to submit the books by the 11th of April. It’s already the 24th of March and I only got the sketchbook yesterday  Yeah……………… wonder what other people are going to do. At least the book is really tiny!!! Oh, this is also the first time I have tried using moleskine paper – I always just thought paper was paper, but this is so much smoother to use pens and stuff on. Maybe it’s a psychological thing. 

| Greenwashing Parade | 9:17 pm, January 27th, 2012

Hi all – Long time no update!! I know it’s been pretty quiet over here since my 365 postcard project ended….that’s not to say I haven’t been busy however, ha ha. 

Anyhow, there are a few things I aim to do this year on this website, some of which are:

• Update this layout (Cam and I have something pretty cool in the idea factory…we’ve yet to make a start on it though  :o)
• Update this blog once a week with either a new drawing, tutorial, inspiration/idea post, and/or other random fun stuff to be decided soon.
• Make a zine or three to make a new section on the site – I’m nearly finished with my first one! But I bet you all won’t be surprised to see what it is once I’ve scanned it rofl.

Umm…yeah…that’s all I’ve really thought of so far. I’m sure I’ll keep adding to the list as the year goes on. I mean it’s only the end of January after all.

On to more recent news, I came across an unfinished illustration today of a huge ice cream I did last year some time (I know big surprise right?) It was supposed to be for some random competition but I completely forgot about it and didn’t bother finishing or entering it….mainly because the competition was focussed around global warming and I thought my idea might be a bit too sarcastic to submit  SO I cleaned it up a bit today and added a few finishing touches. I have to say I’m a bit rusty at editing colours in Photoshop so that’s why the colours in this are kinda really dodgy. Oh well, I had fun making bokeh light effects anyway (Don’t know what bokeh is!?!? Find out how easy it is to make cool lighting effects in my next post  /shamelessplug).

So without further ado – here is my first drawing for 2012 – what else than giant ice cream.

Everything in this poster was meant to be a satire of “green” products…except I made it kinda cute. I CAN’T HELP IT I can’t do serious.

| 337. Baby Dreams, Part II | 12:00 pm, December 3rd, 2011

This is what I imagine Jakki is doing right now.