Weasels undercover

As if we haven't seen enough weasels already, here's some more.

But these have text.

 

Book Devouring Monsters

This is entirely your responsibility Brown!

Weasels are taking over the world! And my life.

This semester I’ve been encouraged to develop the image of weasels plotting world domination I did for the ABC book into a picturebook. So, after an awful lot of time spent drawing weasels and complex computing equipment from the 60s, here’s a few previews of some colour stuff. Alas, I’ve not added any text yet so much of what’s going on in these images may well be an incomprehensible mystery.

Look here! My new website.

Class photo in colour

What does a monster take to school? BIG.

An A2 version of 'what does a monster take to school?' for an exhibition I'm going to be part of in October (On Essence at the Rag Factory, London. 7th - 10th October. Private view on the friday, all the cool kids will be there). I plan to show a couple of other object pictures along with this which I may post up here in the near future. That's just one big drawing on a big piece of paper, no photoshop involved. I think I've got the urge to draw the possessions of monsters out of my system now and I promise I'll draw something different.

Walking the frog and other sketches

Other things a monster might take to school.

Colours are a bit odd again from substandard scanning.

What does a monster have in its packed lunch?

And finally for today, the answer to the above question and a few more monsters. 

The challenges of teacher design.

It's been distressingly difficult to come up with a teacher for my monster class. After having gone through a copious selection of ridiculous and terrible versions my best effort can be seen below. She's based on how I remember my year 4 teacher, Mrs Gillum, who wore pearls and had large eccentric glasses. I think she might have been Scottish. My version's come out more Dame Edna with pointy teeth than Mrs Gillum and I'm not sure how much I like that. She also may be a bit too near retirement age. I think more work is required but I'd welcome any opinions. Also, for reasons I don't understand when I scan ink washes at the moment the colour comes out completely different to how it is in the real world, much more than is usual. I've messed with the settings but it hasn't helped so if anyone has any tips on how to tame a scanner please do share.

Eurgh, trebuchet.

Class photo

Now that I have a selection of monsters I decided they needed a recognisable cultural structure to inhabit. Recently I've spent a bit of time at the wonderful Carlton Hill Primary School in Brighton under the supervision of the brilliant, generous and beautiful Mrs Cloke so I decided upon a primary school as my establishment of choice (yeah, that's what I was doing hanging about your classroom). As a result of this train of thought, here's the first inklings of class 3.

 Also, I'm devastated to see that my font of choice has been removed from the options. I'm having to use trebuchet instead, it's such a hard life.

Very very rough sketches of monsters.

It's only very early days for these chaps so they've got a long way to go development wise but I felt it's time to launch these monsters on the world. They've only outlines and very rough.

Fur conundrum

I'm having problems with my fur. Above are various versions of a picture of a little pink monster who is supposed to be fuzzy. I've found my fuzz has a habit of looking more like stubble then fur. I want him to look delightfully huggable and not like a beard so I put to you the question, which of these different ways of drawing fur looks the fuzziest, 1,2 or 3? If you have a better way of representing fur please do say. Also, does he look cute?

W is for...

Weasels plotting world domination!




Here's my offering for the ABC book. There's only so much you can really do with W and I've always been interested in both megalomania and tubular furry creatures so it seemed apt. I'm in need of opinions because I've not yet shown this to anyone who doesn't love me enough to just say 'oh yes that's wonderful darling, aren't you clever' instead of something constructive so please do your worst my illustrative comrades.

There's several things that worry me but the main one is can you actually tell what's going on in the main image? Are the cultural references obvious enough (or too obvious?!)? Also, I'm not sure there's enough depth and so I may not be apparent that the viewer is looking down onto the map from a gallery where the control panel is situated. I think once again this image has lost something in translation from the original sketch to the colour version so I've attached the sketch along with the outlines and colour (which were done separately and then layered digitally) so you can make up your own mind. There's still time to change it!

Drawing children is not easy.

I was allowed into a primary school today and for the first time I openly drew some children without worrying about being arrested. It wasn't easy because firstly, drawing people is hard generally and children are harder because they're all funny shapes with their fat heads and stubby limbs. Secondly, they have shorter attention spans and move around even faster then those monkeys I drew the other day. I much preferred drawing the classroom interior especially the tiny little chairs, they're adorable.

Monkey life drawing

I've not put anything up here for a while so here's some monkeys I drew at the zoo the other day. I see a theme emerging.

Cocktail Monkeys

During the hinterland of unstructured time that is this summer I’d promised myself I’d try new things, if only to hate them and write them off. Above can be seen an example of exactly this, I’ve confronted my nemesis, flat colour, but I’m not sure it’s for me.

I’m very fond of the cocktail monkeys themselves but I feel uncomfortable in the land of flat colour and I’m not sure I’ve pulled it off. I don’t think the big one is finished but unfortunately I’m not sure what else to do with it. I’ve enjoyed using a limited colour pallet, it’s stopped me form going completely over the top and trying to shoehorn in the entire colour wheel, which is something I tend to have a compulsion to do. I might try actually screen printing it and seeing if that adds a sort of charm but for now, I’m going to get out my inks and do something really tonal until I feel better again.

The gift of Snow Weasel

Also, in response to your message Anna, this is a present just for you. The first realisation of the wonder that is Snow Weasel! As you can see I’ve got far too much time on my hands and so my output of doodling has massively increased. Maybe I’ll also do big hole.

Moon Mouse

I’ve been working on a few colour tests in connection with the mouse drawings. They’ve been causing me no end of pain because I’m still being afflicted by the 50:1 crap to acceptable pictures ratio.

There are several things I’m unsure of here:

Firstly, the dark background. The concept here is that the white mouse feels an odd affinity with the moon. As they’re both white the mouse and the moon need to contrast with the background. Also, the moon tends to only be around at night as so it needs to be set in the darkness. I’m now wondering if this is a bit over bearing and the darkness may end up being too dominant.

Secondly, I’m in the midst of a pencil vs ink outline conundrum. The single picture has an ink outline and the sequence has a pencil outline and I’ve no idea which I think looks better or which I like better. I’ve been looking at it all for so long I’ve got picture blindness. I switched to pencil because I felt the ink looked a little too polished but I’m not sure if it’s helped.

I’m also concerned that the images, especially the sequence, looses something between my original drawings and the colour version and I’m not quite sure what it is or how to get it back. Eugh.

So Brown, what do you think?

Mouse

A bit of mouse character development using the rat utopia drawings. This is the tip of the iceberg, it’s taken about 50 awful drawings to get these few that I don’t currently hate. Tomorrow I’ll probably have decided the people should not see these and curse myself for putting them on the Internet. Neurosis aside. I’m quite fond of this mouse and could possibly form the basis of my first project idea for next semester. Hum.

Rat Tank Utopia

Okay Brown, these are for you. Here’s the rat tank utopia I was talking about. The bottom one is the rat city as a whole, it consists of about 4 tanks big enough for me to live in connected together with a network if tubes. The thing as a whole is about the size of the kitchen/living room of my house. Happiest rats I've ever seen.

Let us begin with some chickens.