It Is Not A Toy.

Taken as far as i can in the small sketchbook i have, the next step is possibly trying to colour it up some how.Kinda like it like this though....

Submitted for Illustration Friday topic: Toy.

It Is Not A Toy. (work in progress - 2)

Got a bit more time at it last night while watching telly.

It Is Not A Toy. (work in progress)

Good Lord! Is it late March already? I haven't put up anything since before Christmas.... after a very dark and long winter, filled with flu after flu being passed on between the 2 kids, the missus and myself (we all nearly drowned on the amount of snot pooling in the house), it would appear all is clear, the sun is back, and the finger has been pulled out.

So to ensure people that I haven't died, I thought i'd put up a sketch i'm working on, more of a doodle really. It began yesterday when the Girl was asleep (finally) and i had a hankering for drawing, but couldn't leave her alone in case she fell off the couch.

This is not digital, by the way.

It's been quite some time since i used pencil for anything other than scratching out ideas for complete works - really rough sketches - so i took the time here to feel the lead on the surface of the page, and just see where it took me. I'm still not sure where it is taking me, other than i know i probably should have started this in a larger notebook... the spiral bind is going to stop me being able to finish the top of the head, and  the chin may loose out too. ~sigh~
Let's call this a work in progress; I'll put up more as it progresses....

Wreck The Balls (Merry Christmas)

Was running a bit late getting a card ready to send out this year. After last years card (here), the pressure was on, but i just couldn't get there... properly anyway.

This started as a sketch when i had christmas carols stuck in my head, and couldn't get them out. This is a take on Deck the Halls. It could have easily have been When Shepards Wash Their Cocks By Night, but after the commission i've just completed , the thought of another landscape just horrified me.

Not sure the blue glitter really worked out, but whatever - at this time of year, it's the thought that counts.

Bring Me The Head Of Brian Cowen

A man can dream, can't he?

50 x 45 cm prints available, and, this year, would make the perfect Christmas gift!

Solitary Turf War

The finished commissioned piece. It was a Christmas gift for the husband of the client. The husband is referred to as Francis of Assisi by the surrounding neighbours, as when he goes for a walk, his 4 cats, 3 dogs and Billy the goat go with him. And because he uses colourful nylon rope as a belt, because he feels that a normal belt just doesn't cut it. The current colour is bright pink.

During the course of doing this work, the old labrador sitting in the cabbages died, so i was asked to kinda 'nice' it up a bit - i had made it a little geriatric and decrepit  looking.

For some of the background to this work, scroll down, or click here...

Client is very happy with the digital preview, as am I, though like most things, there is always something you 'd like to change, or would like to spend more time on - but sometimes you just gotta leave it alone.

Been a good experience, full of learning and patience - primarily hardware shortcomings. (Taking donations now for replacement gear ;-) )

The print came back quickly from Steve at www.360-dpi.com and looked great printed on canvas, though paper would have been my preferred medium. After meeting the client on a cold windy day in the carpark of Coona Tesco the hand over was done.

Got a call on Christmas day to let me know everyone though it was great, which was nice, and a huge sigh of relief!

Submitted for Illustration Friday topic "Cultivate"

Process Diary: Commission (part 2)

The continuing saga....

Process Diary: Commission

Thought I'd upload some of the bits for the commission I'm working on at the moment - November has been a very slow month for blog updates! The image has a pile of animals, and getting the particular coats "correct" has proven to be a challenge, as has getting the personality of the critter too... great fun though. 

I'm having to split the job into different parts, as the required resolution and the size of the final output is giving my computer a nervous breakdown, and it's already teetering on the edge. 

For now, however, time is ticking.... 

Interview for Limerick Post

A screen shot of my interview with the Limerick Post digital edition. The paper copy is out this weekend, 23 Oct.

Pretty happy all in all - hopefully it'll drum up some business!

Thanks again to Rose Rushe at the 'Post for making me sound life i might be fun to be around.... sorta.

Still Life With Jeans

 A second to add to the Still Life Series. This had some challenges - the crusty muffin look, and the denim were a bit of a pain. Which is to say the whole thing was tricky, but started with a good sketch, and it made it bearable at least...

I have a screen capture recording that i'll have to edit and speed up, to let any one interested to look at the process that was gone through to get this done. Could be anther couple of days...

Update: Video uploaded! Was a bit of a churn - 10.5 hours reduced to just under 9 minutes, speed increased by 8000% (for god's sake....). 

Pencil 2D Animation Software Revisited

Well, maybe i should have found out about it sooner, but i just jumped straight in and began drawing... didn't look at te size of the area i was working to, just pushed through to about 1500 frames (no, not every frame, just the animatic...).

So, then i try to export and it can't handle a file over about 700px wide it would seem. Fine, i'll render it at 600 wide. But now the animation is really small, and can hardly be seen.

Try camera layer, you say? Right! Oh, hang on now nothing renders, though i do get a folder with an image sequence of the entire thing....


I think this may not be for me.

In import into Flash proved difficult with 1500, 1000px wide jpg's, and after a whole lot of crashing, went and batch resized the images for import in Photoshop. A million years later, importing a few humdred at a time seemed the best way.

Then came the deleteing of static frames - when pencil spat out the jpg sequence the were 12 frames or jpgs for every second that the picture stood still as well as for motion. This was expected but it did lead to a bit more arseing around than i was perhaps wanting.

Is there a lesson learned?

Yep.

Anyway, here's where it's up to now spat out by Flash... the timing is still pretty bad but it's progress people, progress!

Beneath

Submitted for Illustration Friday topic "Beneath".

I had worked through a few idea for this one, intending to go with the main gist that something would be partly submerged, one thing on the top, and beneath it turns out to be something else, eg, an island that is actually the shell of a turtle, sort of thing....

I had a sketch of an 'island' and the water line, then moved down and it ended up looking a bit like a body floating backside up. Then it got tied up in ropes. The i added a weight to it. Then going back to the 'island', i drew a palm tree, coconuts and a monkey.... it all got a bit stupid  - looked like the tree was sticking outta the date -  so i pulled back to just the body completely submerged.

Decided to try a new 'medium' of Painter 11 that i haven't used, the Airbrush. I quite like it , but it'll take some getting used to! Might need to look at getting one of these if i want to keep using it....

Pencil 2D Animation Software

I've down load the free 2D animation software, Pencil. So far it's actually pretty impressive, and i appologise to the guy geeking away in his room for no money to make it, but i wasn't expecting much. But i'm kinda into it now....

Issues i've come across to date:
- Adding length to timeline doesn't always work. Toggling scrub size, and actually resetting the number in the timeline length field seemed to trigger it to work properly. eg i've upped it to 1000 frames one time, then dropped it back to 900 another.
- Re-opening the file causes the timeline to revert back some default length eg, my animation is currently about 600 frames, but i cannot scrub past about 280...
- Marquee tool to copy doesn't disappear automatically. To make it work select object to copy -> ctrl-c -> click another part of the screen to deselect before trying anything else... like pasting whatever it was you wanted wherever it was you wanted it.
-Adding a new key frame adds a blank keyframe. This requires one to redraw the whole frame again (unless you want to go copy the previous).... would rather it set a key frame with what is in the previous, allowing you to erase the parts that need to be altered, eg: hand or foot or face. Maybe i should be putting all this on separate layers, but sure....

Anyway, these issues aside it's great fun so far. Zero crashes, software freezes etc.

Keep you posted.

Until then, here's what i've been doing. It's a kinda detailed animatic (work in progress....) for a future attempt at animating the Acrobat image i did recently...

Blogger has compressed it , so it doesn't show up too well at the moment, but when it's actually inked in, it'll be much more visible.

Process Diary: Cowen

Starting off some of the process diary stuff. This is a work in progress of the leader of Ireland, Brian Cowen. I've done a quick one of him before, but wasn't completely happy with the likeness, so i'm having another stab at it.

Getting the jowls right is more of a challenge than i'd thought possible, in particular getting the to hang properly off those mammoth lips, but at the same time kinda prop them up...


Well see how this develops over time. Hope to keep going with it, but have to juggle a couple of other jobs at the moment too. Maybe it'll be ready for Halloween...

Paddy's Evening Out

A small picture book with no text by John S. Goodall, it has to be one of the first books that i ever owned. The hard cover is now separated from the pages at the spine from over use back in the day.

Paddy, a pig, goes on a date to a show with dancing girls, magicians, acrobats and a live orchestra - i suppose a kind of variety show... He and his partner are given balcony seats in a BOOTH up on one side the stage. While waving her fan, his partner looses it over the edge of the balcony, and in reaching to catch it, Paddy goes over the edge. The book is him running around trying to hide and not make an arse of him self in public - and failing.

The book has half page flaps that drive the story by allowing smaller incremental changes for each page, which i though was brilliant as a kid, and still do, as it turns out.

Inspiration and Documentation

Been clearing out the office a bit in the hopes of child-proofing it somewhat. Maybe it's just a fantasy, but the aim is to be able to do a little work periodically with the little 'uns up here…. may only be able to check and send an email, or something less involved than actually painting, but i thought it'd be worth preparing the space.

In doing this all my old kids books and art reference books have been rediscovered, so i thought i'd periodically have a flick through some and write a post on why they survived every book cull over the past 34 years or so...

I've also been thinking about perhaps documenting my process a little more - trying to use the screen capture stuff - mostly for my own amusement, but it's possible some other out there might get a kick out of it! Will probably go into how i'm using Painter as well, to keep track of the softwares many many many options. Like, i've just discovered Dirty Mode in the Artists Oils.... it's a little check box - been sitting there for the past year and a half - did i ever click t to see what it did? No....

Feel free to let me know if there's anything you'd like to see.

Stay tuned!

Acrobat

Submission for this weeks Illustration Friday topic "Acrobat".

Chance to try Painters Tinting brushes - i quite like them!

Waiting

A piece that was put on the back burner some time ago, as it all seemed too daunting a task for me - an actual landscape scene (of sorts).

Mostly i draw characters or cartoons that may or not be in some sort of environment, but with this one i was actually aiming to paint the environment, with the figure being a secondary consideration. It started with the mushroom on the tree, and the rain lead to the mushroom providing shelter, hence the figure.

Other opportunities of study for me in this work were the concept that objects in the distance are somewhat hazy, ill-defined and much paler than the middle ground, and the foreground objects darker and slightly out of focus too - all these aspects helping to achieve a more convincing 3D space; and using a somewhat limited palette of colour. I've used many colours now, and also have a history with black and white, so it was a fun challenge trying to limit the number or colours used.

I'm reasonably happy with this study, and somewhat relieved to have it finished...

Here's a still's animation of the process. Not great quality, but maybe next time.

Blacker Pastures

I've been playing with image ideas to go with the name of this blog. The name Blacker Pastures came from the idea that where greener pastures might be better than where you are, blacker pastures might be worse some how.

I found after 4 or 5 years living in The Emerald Isle there was a few different aspects that made me think that perhaps i'd moved to blacker pastures, which is in a sense why i started this blog - to pull my self out of a rut, and find something positive to focus on, and drawing and illustration has generally been has always been something that i enjoyed.

So in a somewhat literal translation of the phrase this image was produced.

A field or pasture - plenty of those in Ireland.

Lashing rain - plenty of that in Ireland, and on of the things that had begun to kill me.

Black ink and simple, chosen to make it kinda blocky and 'logo'.

Originally i was thinking of a making the animal a sheep, as it's what i think of when i think of pastures (possibly cows too), but i've had a few run ins with goats driving in the country, and i like the silhouette more. Besides, they're horny...

Submitted for Illustration Friday topic "Proverb", after finding the proverb "When rain fall, sheep and goat have to mix" (Trinidad and Tobago).

I stopped at the goat....

International Rules And Greyhounds (For Trick:Tigers and Dogs)

International Rules is where the Australians get a team together from varied AFL teams, compete against Ireland - who have also put together a team from varied Gaelic Football teams - in such a way that generally leaved the Irish nursing many a bruise. In fact the Irish had cancelled the competition for the 'foreseeable future' after one bad year where several of the Irish players broke nails during the match.

oooooohhhhhhh - fighting words. C'mon, y'softies....

Anyway, it's on again soon.

Also, something about a new greyhound stadium opening in October.

Not sure what else to say about this one, other than i had fun painting it for the Limerick Post.