January 19th, 2010
Back at life drawing last weekend after a few weeks off over Christmas. Started off a bit rusty, but got into the swing of it by the end. The second pose, with the foreshortened legs, was really challenging, I had to start again halfway through. Really happy with the third pose. Let me know what you think.
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Tags: life drawing
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January 16th, 2010
Pet Portrait of Rupert
This is my friend Anna’s Beagle, Rupert. Her boyfriend commissioned me to do a portrait of Rupert for her Christmas present. I then had it printed onto 30 x 30 cm canvas. She loved it, and I really enjoyed painting it, it was fun trying to capture the dog’s unique personality. Here are a few images showing various stages of the painting process:
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Final
If you would like a portrait of your pet, or think it would make a good present for a pet-lover you know, I’m currently doing them for £100, which includes printing onto canvas and delivery within the UK.
Contact me for more details or to request your own pet portait.
Tags: pet portrait
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December 14th, 2009
I’ve been working on a couple of secret projects for the last couple of weeks, so haven’t got much to show for my daily drawing, except for a few really crappy sketches, which will never be seen by human eyes. I was having a really bad drawing day yesterday, so I thought I’d do some warm up sketches tonight. Ended up getting really into it and worked for about two hours on this Photoshop sketch of lovely Cheryl Cole.
Cheryl Cole - 2 hours in Photoshop
It’s notoriously difficult to caricature beautiful women without making them look ugly or fake. The whole idea of caricature is to accentuate those features that make the face unusual, which usually results in something quite grotesque, not an ideal way to capture beauty. But I think it’s possible to accentuate the particular features that make someone unique and beautiful, it’s just a lot trickier than giving someone a massive nose!
Tags: Caricature, Cheryl Cole, Painting
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December 6th, 2009
Life drawing again today. I was running late, so didn’t have time to get my watercolour stuff ready. I’ll take them next week. Here’s my favourite sketch from this week, you can see the rest on my life drawing page.
10 minute sketch
Still going strong with the daily drawings. Only sketched for 10 minutes on Thursday, but that’s better than nothing. As it’s coming up to Christmas, I’ve been drawing and painting a few things that need to remain secret for now! I’ll post them after Christmas.
Tags: life drawing
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December 3rd, 2009
Here’s my entry for the competition I mentioned the other day, to win a caricature by Jason Seiler, the man who taught me a lot of what I know about caricature. Didn’t have time to do a finished painting, but I kinda like this sketch style with the subtle colouring, might use it again.
Caricature of Jason Seiler
I uploaded this today and checked out some of the other entries. There are some good ones, so I doubt I’m in with a chance of winning, but it was fun anyway.
Still going strong with my drawing every day for 100 days (ok, it’s only 2 days so far I know). Worked on this yesterday, and an illustration for a book cover today. Should be able to post a preview of that soon. Will do some sketches tomorrow.
Tags: Caricature
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December 2nd, 2009
Drawing or painting a caricature portrait is very rarely done in a single attempt (for me at least!) An important technique I learned from Jason Seiler is doing several small, quick sketches, known as thumbnails (they’re not quite as small as an actual thumbnail but they’re pretty small, maybe 1 – 2 inches high), to make sure you’ve really captured the likeness of your subject. There’s no real detail,it’s just about getting the face shape and the placement of features right.
Here are the thumbnails I did for my Owen Wilson sketch. The first one was ok, but needed more exaggeration. So I cpoied this one and used it as a guide to draw the second one. This one I was happy with, so I based the final sketch on it, and you can see that even though I decided to use this thumbnail, the final sketch is an improvement again, not just traced from the thumbnail.
Owen Wilson thumbnail sketches
Sometimes it just takes a couple of sketches like this to hit upon a good likeness. Other times it can take many many more! I have a couple of sketchbook pages full of crappy Freddie Mercury sketches, and still no finished drawing or painting to show for it! I’ll keep on trying.
Tags: sketching, technique
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December 1st, 2009
So it’s the 1st of December, which means it’s time to start fulfilling my pledge to draw or paint something EVERY DAY for the next 100 days (through to 11th March). The idea, according to hundreddays.net is that this will make me a better person. I guess if I’m drawing every day, I will feel more fulfilled, which will make me happy, and if I’m happy, I’m nicer to people, which I guess makes me a better person!
In order to stick to this, I’m setting my alarm half an hour earlier every weekday, so that I can get in half an hour of sketching before work, then if anything good comes of that, I can continue in the evenings. Hopefully after 100 days, it will become a habit and I’ll keep it up FOREVER!
The tricky parts will be Christmas holidays, when I’m traditionally lazy, and also I’m going to South Africa for 2 weeks at the end of February, so I’ll have to motivate myself to draw whilst on holiday.
Anyway, today I’ve been working on my caricature of Jason Seiler for the competition I mentioned yesterday. Will post that tomorrow after I’ve submitted it.
By the way, just because I’m drawing every day, doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to post something every day. I’ll only post drawings that I think are worth seeing, but I will try to post as many as possible.
Anybody else joining in the 100 days fun?
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November 30th, 2009
This is an opportunity not to be missed! A chance to win an original caricature of yourself drawn by Jason Seiler.
Bobby Chiu is running a competition at his online drawing show site CHIUSTREAM. You just have to draw a caricature of Jason, and upload it to the Schoolism site. Uploading starts 1st December, and the winner is chosen on 3rd December so you’ll know if you’ve won in just a few days. All details and photo reference can be found on Chiustream.
Good luck to all entrants, but especially me!!
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November 30th, 2009
Here’s some more life drawings I did at the weekend. Wasn’t doing too great with the 5 and 10 minute warmup sketches, but as usual I really enjoyed the 30 minute poses.
There are quite a few people in the class sketching with watercolours, which I really need to try, but also really scares me! Might have to sit by one of the experts and ask for some tips!
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See more of my life drawings
Tags: life drawing
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November 29th, 2009
I watched Bottle Rocket the other night, which was Luke and Owen Wilson’s first ever film from 1996. Really enjoyed it, as with all of Wes Anderson’s films, and it really made me want to draw the Wilson brothers’ distinctive faces! Here’s Owen, and I’m sure I’ll get round to sketching Luke some time soon.
Tags: Owen Wilson, sketching
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