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.