When I uploaded the photos from my five-year-old daughter’s digital camera, I found some shots that managed to capture unexpected looks and expressions on people. I was so taken by at least one I decided to work up an image.
I was also partly inspired by the character “Meave” that I created in my mind for this little piece of fiction for my Lost Heroes RPG project. Here’s the relevant two paragraphs:
The young emo-goth Meave sits by herself in the school cafeteria. She numbly rubs at the healed scars on her wrists. The other kids just ignore her today. This is a good day for her. …
Meave will see her father, the god Dagda, in the distance watching her. She will run from him, run as hard as a princess of worlds that don’t exist can run. And the crows will screech through the sky after her.
During the process I ended up branching and producing a second more creepy character (which I’ve been referring to as “deadeyes”). Anyway, here are the two completed images:
(Which one works best do you think?)
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Unfortunantly I haven’t been able to write much these few weeks. The main reason is our desktop PC at home is waiting to be repaired and my laptop has become the only computer left in our house – so to keep myself and my wife sane, we’re sharing it in the evening. This forced me off the sofa and digging into my art stuff again.
(Hopefully this post comes out alright on LJ, I can never be quite certain how my Wordpress posts translate to LiveJournal style anymore)
Demon Icon
This picture is one that I did a while ago. I find creating and designing these little graphical symbols quite engrossing. My little sketchpad is full of the previous design iterations for theses. I should really scan in some to show of the thought processes. This one is mean to represent the “Demonic Legions of Hell” for my Lost Heroes RPG project. I know it doesn’t have any traditional iconography of demons, but that is in part intentionally as the design is more subtle that way.
Olympians Icon #3 (Colour)
Olympians Icon #2 (Black Background)
Olympians Icon
The second image I’ve only barely finished. This again was intended to be part of my Lost Heroes RPG project. It’s meant to represent the Olympian and associated Gods. I did quite a variety of designs, finally settling this one. But I’m still not completely happy with it. In fact I did two further varianets of it, which you can see below. The first one I wanted to highlight the rose more so I used solid black for the background and tried to add texture with some hatching lines. The second one, I used colour to highlight the rose, a big departure from the previous icons I’ve done. I’d rather keep to the black and white motif (easier to print) but the colour would does look quite nice. Perhaps I should play around with using greys as well as black?
(More new art and a poll after the “link”)
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(Hopefully I’ve manage to lick that thumbnail cropping issue). Anyway, I did some more drawings over the weekend. I re-did the design of one of the ones I did for this post, so that it’s not so phallic:
I also did some new ones, continuing to base them on my “secret” project L___ H_____:
I also pulled out my charcoal and pencil again, concentrating on contrast, making sure my pencil lines are right (kind of taking my tips from my ink work). I like what I produced, though I feel should have placed it in a background. I’m also getting a bit annoyed about the scanning process, it always seems to take from my pencil work. I should really look into improving it.
So over the holiday I got to some drawing. The big thing really was that I started to use charcoal, not a major step but something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. But I started with a simple tonal study, to get my eye and hands back into the swing of it (for some reason Wordpress has cropped the thumbnail so to have a proper look at it, click on it):
So my first effort with charcoal was this (click on it to see the bigger version):
It was done as quick experiment on my sketchbook (across two pages) of a twig. I did the outline in ink. However you can see where the charcoal smudged accidentally. I liked it, it was much easier and faster to pull out the change in tones using the charcoal than with pencil like in the tonal study I did first. But a lot messier and prone to accidents.
I then went out and found something to really try the charcoal out on. In Chargey, where we were on holidays, there is lots of really old lovely things. There was this “saint” statue on the side of the old house, worn by weather, it had long lost its head. I love the fact that it was just a lump of rock but somehow you were able to perceive that it was once a detailed statue (again Wordpress has cropped the thumbnail, I’ll have to find a fix for that):
The first one was done with pencil and charcoal. I didn’t do any of the background which I think distracts from the picture, loses it’s context, but I also found the final work messy and, well, a bit random. The second study, I outlined in ink first, including the background and then tried to capture the tone of the stone statue with charcoal. I think the second one is better but loses the feel of the statue. Everyone who saw the actual drawings preferred the first one, because the contrast between ink and charcoal was much more noticeable than the digital copies here.
There was a second statue, much bigger than this one but also very similar. This time I tried toned paper (i.e. not white):
The first thing that hit was the effect of the grade of paper. My light pencil marks were not working, so I dove straight in with the charcoal but I couldn’t make any tone… just black and a tiny smudge. The effort was a bit, well shite. If you knew the statue in the house, you’d recognise it, but I think it failed to capture anything else.
What this highlighted for me was the effect of the type of paper on my drawing, in particular with charcoal. On my notebook (the twig) I was able to get a really good strength and contrast of tone, but on my A4 sketch pad, the paper is thinner. It has a different effect, harder to generate really deep tones. But the coloured paper was the thickest of them all but it’s texture made it impossible to create contrast in tones at all. I’ve always known that paper makes a difference, but it was always negligible for me. With ink, I would place a spare page underneath thin paper so it’d soak up ink that leaked through. Also the way my coloured markers’ ink spread, was really affected by the thickness of the paper.
So my first thoughts on charcoal is that it’s cool. I like what I can produce with it, but it does require further playing with it. And I love its messiness.
