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!