After a long time, in a galaxy surprisingly like this one...

... a new post was finally made on a seemingly abandoned blog! It has been a very long time since the last update, mainly due to me losing focus and not having completed anything new to upload. However, in the past couple of days I've been trying to get back on the wagon and have managed to find something to kick me into shape. That something is a 100 Drawings in 100 Days challenge, which I came across on this blog and have decided to undertake. It's a big challenge for me, since I often lapse out of good intentions and leave things unfinished, so we'll see how far I get. I've already done four drawings in that number of days and set up a new blog specifically to chart my progress. You can find it here to take a look and find out more, but I'm going to try and upload something new here very soon as well (hopefully)!

Plugged in and ready to surf

Good news: I now have a home Internet connection again after almost two months browser-free (thank you, dongle). Bad news: I seem to have a cold or something similar. Oh well, you can’t have everything I guess, and I’m happy enough!

Cue a hasty upload since it’s been so long without one. These resolutions are taking ages – I’m really going to have to get a move on with them. On the other hand, being without the Internet has kick-started me into reading again (see above!), as well as made me appreciate all the more the resources it places at my fingertips and motivated me to start working on some new things. Case in point: colour reference photos are only a click away, rather than printed out in monochrome, annotated haphazardly for colour, folded up, and lost deep in the recesses of my, or most recently my boyfriend’s, bag. Anyway, we’ll see how long this new earnestness kick lasts, though it’s a good feeling while it does.

P.S. (Haha - ‘dongle’! I have a puerile sense of humour. In my defence, so does my boyfriend.)

Music: Death Cab for Cutie - Long Division
Materials: HB pencil, Photoshop 7 

Be my Cooper

So, I haven't updated in a little while (another failure to keep my New Year's resolutions!), but in my defence there have been some mitigating circumstances! Sure I've been lazy and unproductive, but there also hasn't been any Internet connection where I'm staying for the last couple of weeks. I'm not sure the non-Internet maths adds up, but factor in the laziness quotient and that pretty much covers it, I think.

I'm updating this from my boyfriend's place (while he cooks me dinner - he's so good to me!), which is appropriate given the theme. I did have one short period of peak productivity round about St Valentine's Day: I've been a sucker for personalised treasure hunts ever since I watched Amelie and I really wanted to put something like that together for him. In addition to being an absolute gentleman, domestic god, and all round top-notch person, he's completely turned me onto David Lynch, so what resulted was a distinctly Twin Peaks themed adventure centred entirely around his desk. In this case, half the fun was probably in the making, but most of the details are classified Top Secret!

Surprise number 1: "Diane, I am holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies..." Bunnies not pictured. 

Surprise number 1.1. Incidentally, my boyfriend's name is not "Diane"!  

Surprise number 1.2: even more Cooper. 

Exhibit B: my favourite oddball romantic pairing after Andy and Lucy (I still can't get over "I'm a whole damn town!"). I was a bit hasty with the watercolour on the card, but I was really happy with how the fake coffee ring turned out. I love Audrey Horne. She's such a flirt. "Do your palms ever itch?"

Anyway, I'll finish off with a picture I took around the same time on my new camera (my old one had a  run-in with a banana and wasn't quite the same afterwards). It's of the area behind the flats where I'm living and it reminds me of the sinister and strange goings on in the woods around my favourite fictional town! The owls are not what they seem... 

Music: Tom's Valentine's mix-tape CD

Materials: black biro, watercolours 

Toes

The caption here pretty much says it all! I can't really get more topical than this for a resolution to post on this blog, and it seems to be going all right recently, judging by the frequency of the past few posts. Have to see if I can keep going in the same way! I like the way this one in particular turned out, since I left the initial sketch quite vague; using the Blur tool to do the paint swirls in the water and erasing part of the skintone layer to blank out the unpainted toes was pretty fun as well. That last part about unpainted toes is also literally true - I don't have a great track record painting my fingernails so I generally let my toes stay au naturel! 

Music: Erato - Call Your Girlfriend 

Materials: HB pencil, Photoshop 7 

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I love The IT Crowd. I love Roy's accent, Moss' hair, and especially Jen's voice. She sounds like she should be doing the voiceovers for the M&S adverts instead of being stuck down a basement at Reynholm Industries being alternately terrorised by Denholm and sexually harassed by Douglas. Incidentally, I also love the name Denholm Reynholm - if that isn't a name for a stress-obsessed, embezzling, mustachioed tyrant, I don't know what is. I love The IT Crowd so much that I've spent the best part of two straight evenings watching it on Youtube (with a short break so that Lewis could make my day), which may explain why it's taken me so long to finish this installment and why so much of it ended up on the wrong layers. Still, I'm happy with it, and I'm even happier now that I've started trying to figure out which of the "me's" best embodies each of Reynholm's best and brightest computer wizards. 

The amount of television this post alone suggests I watch is a fitting testimony to why I made this resolution in the first place - I clearly need to get out more. 

Music: Florence + the Machine - Shake It Out 

Materials: HB pencil, Photoshop 7 

The Great Wave

I'm so excited about having finished another Resolution Illustration that I'm posting it immediately, though I'd originally planned to post at least a few of them together. I'm conscious of having a large gap of a couple of weeks to fill, so to make up for that here's the story behind this particular resolution:  

In a nutshell, I need to drink more. That's not what it sounds like - I don't mean I need to steep myself in alcohol with all the frequency of a Japanese bullet train (incidentally, my boyfriend's nonchalant description of his own drinking habits is the suggestive but tantalisingly ambiguous, "not much, but often"!). Me hitting the bars on even a semi-regular basis would be a disaster, since I have fairly low alcohol tolerance; what I actually mean is that I have a tendency to forget to drink and get dehydrated, so I need to drink more water more regularly to prevent that from happening.  

I've included an image of Katsushika Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa (ca. 1830-32) because I've used it as a reference not just for this piece but also for countless others over the years. It's such an iconic piece that it's one of the first things I think of when I think of the sea in art, and I love how it's so stylised but still so animated and evocative. It's also incredibly detailed for what at first glance seems such a straightforward image: it took me a while to notice that the most distant "wave" is actually Japan's Mount Fuji, and even then I might have had a bit of help! I'd love to see an original of this print - apparently there are lots of different copies of it around the world, including in the British Museum in London - but until then I found the above image on the Metropolian Museum of Art website. The page has a lot more information - click here to have a look.  

This last image is an intermediary stage in the making of the illustration, because I love seeing that kind of thing on other blogs! For the uninitiated/relative novices like me, this is the isolated line-art, which was created in Photoshop by going over the lines of the original scanned drawing in sections on different layers, before they were then collated into a single layer. The collation was actually one of the last steps I did after adding fill beneath the layers as appropriate to build up a sort of 3D jigsaw of the whole image, but this is how all of the finished outlines would have looked like without fill added. 

I'd better get going - it's a work day tomorrow. Maybe with another new post? Optimistic!  

P.S. I actually do have a dress with that print on it - points for accuracy!  

Music: Randy Crawford - One Day I'll Fly Away 

Materials: HB pencil, Photoshop 7 

New resolution: follow old resolutions!

I make New Year's resolutions most years, but historically I'm not very good at keeping them. I'm hoping to change that this year, and partly to this end I decided to illustrate them for the first time and post them on here. However, in the two weeks or so since I last posted those good intentions have slid a little (I hit a bit of a rough patch) and it's taken me much longer than I anticipated. So without further ado, here's no. 1. At least with the amount of time it's taking me I'm hoping to internalise them much better!

It's the first time I've used Photoshop for something like this in years, and I'm really happy with how it turned out, particularly since the original scan was quite low-res - not that I'm complaining, since I'm too cheap to buy my own scanner and apparently too lazy to figure out the right settings anyway! However, I did buy a new mouse for less than £5 so I've got more technology at my fingertips, literally, without having broken the bank.

Time to get on and internalise the rest now!


Music: Regina Spektor - Hotel Song
Materials: HB pencil, Photoshop 7