Back in colour

Here's a still life and self portrait study from this weekend. This is the first stages. there will be more details and refinement tomorrow.

You'll have to click on the thumbnails beow as they're very blurred for some reason..

MADE in Berlin

So why am I getting this lovely portfolio together? Well it's to have something to bring along to MADE. I bought the tickets a while ago and they were expensive but hopefully worth it. 4 days in Berlin staying with a friend and going to figure drawing classes, tutorials, presentations and lots of other stuff by some of the greatest concept artists in the world from Massive Black.

I'm particularly looking forward to meeting Andrew Jones. :)

Here's some more female faces and some studies of boats and me.

Some days you just can't draw!

It's true. Sometimes it seems impossible to draw. But with my super new uber plan those days will soon be far behind me. Read below for a detailed account of what I'm getting ready for next month...

Week 1: 10th - 16th May
1hr daily sketches for every day of the week: Result at end of week: 25 female heads from life, 25 female heads from imagination
Still life painted
Character portrait painted
Use idea reference, thumbs, image reference, sketch and final execution.

Week 2: 17th - 23rd May
1hr daily sketches for every day of the week: Result at end of week: 25 female heads from life, 25 female heads from imagination
Still life painted
Character portrait painted
Use idea reference, thumbs, image reference, sketch and final execution.

Week 3: 24th - 30th May
1hr daily sketches for every day of the week: Result at end of week: 25 male heads from life, 25 male heads from imagination
Creature Design
Use idea reference, thumbs, image reference, sketch and final execution.
Character Design
Use idea reference, thumbs, image reference, sketch and final execution.

Week 4: 31st May - 6th June
1hr daily sketches for every day of the week: Result at end of week: 25 male heads from life, 25 male heads from imagination
Vehicle Design
Use idea reference, thumbs, image reference, sketch and final execution.
Environment Design
Use idea reference, thumbs, image reference, sketch and final execution.

Week 5: 7th - 13th June
1hr daily sketches: Study elements to be used in imaginative compositions
Catch up
Work from Feedback
Prepare networking q and a
Assemble portfolio filling in gaps with my best figure studies.
Print portfolio. Post final digital portfolio on MADE forum, my blog, CA, VLP and on lap top. Include links to previous animation work and best of 3d just in case.

Week 6: 14th - 20th June
1hr daily sketches: Study elements to be used in imaginative compositions
Relax!

And enjoy the sketches if you can!

Hell for Leather Art work is finished!

"Hell for Leather" is finished Beta and is on the way to the printers as we speak! Here's the last illustration I did over the last week. It's been a while I've been drawing for this game but it seems short and it was painless. I enjoyed every minute of it and it kept me drawing. Especially since I had very specific briefs to work from.

Now I'll be going it alone.. If anyone has any suggestions of what they would like to see me draw then leave a title in the comment and I will try to interpret it in to a cool illustration or character design.

Watch this space as I use it to detail out my 6 month programme to learn the basics of being a great draftsman and painter. More info soon. :)

Gatling Face Shredder

Another fine illustration for Hell for Leather. Go and look at the post here on Cob Web games to see what my brief was and how I dealt with it. :)

Everyone's saying I draw too messy... :(

Hello,
Here's some life drawing. the last of it from a couple of weeks ago as the class is now postponed (by me) until the in work projects get a little easier to handle. A couple of people on concept art are saying I am too messy and need to tighten up my lines. I guess they are right, it might force me to draw more in my head instead of working it out on the paper.

Perhaps I should have been a sculptor..

Self Portrait

Here's me after work. Look at my dirty hair.


Sketched with Wacom on computer from observation in mirror.

Doodles on the train

A selection of doodles and observation drawings from travels in Italy in the last weeks. The first is Observation, the 2nd Imagination (kind of). I'll be moving on to Hell for Leather design for the next few weeks so I'll be posting a series of Hell for Leather posts here and on Cobweb Games.

Other news: I've been commissioned by a famous journalist to paint a picture for his beautiful luxury apartment. More details as and when they become available. ;)

Holidays and Deadlines

Such a long time. I've been posting a little bit on concept art but not much. Here's some life drawings for you to look at for now. I'll be a bit more regular here for at least a couple of weeks as I try to get the art work for Hell For Leather finished. Thanks for reading.

Hey all. Just to duplicate a couple of posts from conceptart.org: I'm bashing away at drawing but I don't feel I'm really getting anywhere. Probably I need to be more consistent and try also to copy some master paintings.

Ash gave me some brushes to play around with so hopefully this weekend I'll have some fun with that.

Here they are anyway:

Holiday in Brazil? Sounds good to me!

Hey Paulo! Thanks for the invitation. Fede and I are planning a holiday, when is the best time to come to Rio? We really want to come and visit!!!!!

For the rest of you here's a sketch I did of an Asian woman as a study of values.

Apple on Conceptart.org

Today's picture: Apple

Digital Painting Tutorial

Hello. I did this last night. I'm planning to paint some onions later and also read over the full manuscript for Hell for Leather.

You can check out my sketchbook on ConceptArt.org now anytime you want. I've put a link over there on the right! ----->

And I will probably be uploading all my art work up on cobwebgames as well in the art section just to be sure no one can miss it. :)

Daily Sketches

So here's the first few daily sketches. I have relearned a few key practices (that to be perfectly honest I thought I never would have forgotten in the first place): Light and form...

While the portrait of Ms Degli Esposti took more than a day the hand was done on a Wacom at the end of a lunch break and the man looking into the valley took about 2 hours. I know I've got to speed up but I'm happy enough with what I am learning if not entirely with what I am drawing.

Hell for Leather in Beta

I currently have two projects on th go at the moment.

The first is a daily sketch for conceptart.org which I will begin on Monday although I have been warming up the last week by trying to get something finished every lunch time in work. Also to note that on this project I will be more or less exclusively working digitally ie I will not be sketching traditionally. This is to help me to train myself for the work place.

The second is that I'm working as main artist for illustrating a table top role playing game published by cobweb games. I've already posted some of my artwork up there so I thought I may as well start posting some stuff here too. While I get my creative juices flowing by reading the beta draft I will also be scanning in some of my old doodles and posting them here for fun.

Illustration coming soon

Hey folks.

Here's some of my latest life drawing, I am too lazy to compose them nicely into one sheet so you'll have to just scroll through them (I apologise for the horrible composition on the blog post, it's me versus html and I'm loosing).

They're pretty large so click em up and zoom 'round.

I'm starting illustrating now for Sebastian's game "Hell for Leather". Check out his site here:

www.cobwebgames.com

Looking forward to filling his book with ink pictures of normal people doing horrible things.

J out.

Life Drawing Sketches

Wednesday nights squished into my company's largest closed room we now have 10 artists a programmer and a writer all huddled around a posed nude trying to remember how to draw. All thanks to me!

It went well and I'm proud because I actually got off my arse and did something for once instead of just talking about it.





Anyway here are the first classes drawings. There are two large hand drawings which I found in my notebook and I haven't posted anywhere so I included them as well.

Next post will be about some web designing I'm doing for my brother. :)

Just back from Berlin

After some weeks flying in and out of London Stansted, it's been a bit of a blur. But an inspiring blur. Barcelona was buzzing with artistic energy. Art was breathing through the graffiti and the festivals were alive with creativity.

London's modern take is a bit more stilted but no less impressive. In between the giant public spaces are an overwhelming plethora of venues to watch the latest art spring forth. Satchi held me for a few hours showing off the newest expressionism oozing from the States and the Tate Modern's entrance looks like you're in an inverted Titanic before she ran into Pingu's house.

But Berlin is the Queen. She has art in every flake of plaster, in every glued poster and every hasty stencil. The walls are covered with expression from the lude to the beautiful. Screaming kids and goggley eyed aliens, a girl pointing a wand at a star and an astronaut with a gasmask. Fish sculpted into the walls, toilets without an inch of raw paint, whole shops painted in rainbows and working 10" pink sewage pipes coming out of the ground like some sort of steel loch ness Flying Circus sketch. The people too looked like they dropped out of "Brazil" and I'm sure Mr. Gilliam spent some years either living here or building this city.

I must go back. I had about 1 billion ideas while I was there and the air of Cambridge has almost dried them up. On that note I'll say danke und tschuess!

Enjoy the pictures of my next few paintings and a slightly better version of Chiara. I'm opening up for more photo contributions. No subject this time I just want any picture you'd like to make into a painting. :)

Chiara

Chiara is finished and I'm starting on the first of the "Ape Car" series which will be called "La Macchinina Azzurrina". You're going to love these. The tiniest, coolest cars in the world. I'm going to make them my celebrities.

So what did I learn from this painting? A lot really. First off the joy of using more paint. It loosens the creative muscles, provides room for happy accidents and allows longer blending times to make more sophisticated choices. I've also discovered I'm not much good with a paint brush yet. I used only a palette knife which I had a lot more control of than I did with the brush.

Artistically I was hoping for something a little more pointilist and something resembling the kind of cheap compression that we got so used to seeing all around us in phone camera photography. That kind of greeny pixelated blur. I wanted the image to resemble a woman lost in thought and lost in digital inaccuracy. In a state of limbo between reality and perception. This is a further study on the inaccuracy of memory and of the manipulation of past perception where the recognisable is distorted into the individuals fantasy to become what they need and desire from what they have experienced. To distort the past in order to define themselves.

So look on my new work and also my little collection which has grown from one little picture to three. :)

Started another

Hey all.. Probably no one still reads this. Anyway here's my newest piece. It's just the first coat. Lots more pointilism style painting layers before it's finished. :)

What's that? Another painting?

It's back, thanks to a cunning schedule designed to fool one's self into following one's ambitions instead of lounging around fretting about them (courtesy of my dear brother), J the artist is back on form. With another masterpiece laid out before you all and three more in production all is looking well.

I will now stop referring to myself in the third person as this may be psychoanalyzed at a later date and lead to the discovery that I am, indeed, self obsessed.

It took some time to finish this one but it was time spent idling rather than working. With my new schedule, which I started two weeks ago, I am spending more time painting than I have since I left Italy. I work a two week schedule with the first week on painting in photoshop and learning other software techniques and every second week it's back to pure traditional painting with brushes and tubes of paint. During these weeks I do at least half an hour's solid work a day which normally eats into two or three hours.

Last week I learnt to use Channels in photoshop for selection/masking/greyscaling.

This week I've finished a painting, primed three canvases and started to update this blog. Now I'm going to scan this one and let you dwell on ir while I start the next ones.

The painting is called Rick.

Thanks man, I miss you. J out.

Things have changed

Change was in the air and old dreams were left aside for another future. New ones sprung in their place and were nurtured in to fruition. When each cool drop of rain runs down my neck I am reminded me that the portico's and protection of Bologna are far away. Here the streets are open offering little in the way of architectural umbrellas but in the same instance there are no barriers, nothing to obscure your fields of view. Bologna may shelter the ombrophobiacal pedestrian but it also shelters the mind and obscures not only the storm clouds but any vision or ambition for the future.

I have arrived in Cambridge where I can see a future. It is not some grand and poetic thing for tales by the fire. Nor some thing that gives the right to brag among the elite at a party of some circle of society or another. It is the simple truth that the future will be calm. It will be exciting. It will be happy and I will be content.

My love, my job and my home. To paint, to work, to live and love. Is it really as simple as this?

A change has come and gone and I feel displaced but displaced from something old. So very very old that being part of it was like being sucked into it's decaying history. Displaced into something new and something fresh. The change has come and gone and the change was good.