Character sketches

I had some time off between classes this week so I managed to do some sketching for the first time in a while!



This first sketch is a freestyle marker doodle. The top-hatted idiot is Fred from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -- he laughs so much that I've always imagined him as some kind of icky fop. But his mother Fan is a dear, and I wish I hadn't run out of space with her dress.

What's below is more like a physique + costume sketch. I went a bit overboard with the first character's outfit so I made the second one really basic. I was more concerned with finding out this second character's physique anyway -- she spends most of her time in armour so I'd never figured out exactly what her proportions were. But I figured that it couldn't do any harm to make her... hot.



Colour study:




More logo work to be done, this time for something else ugh!! I always had problems keeping resolutions.

What I had to do all of last month

Being the only person in my service learning project group who was any good with Photoshop, I volunteered to do the logo for us. Because the group name was DreaMakers, they felt that having something based on the DreamWorks logo was a good idea. And they wanted something to do with pedagogy as well, because we were working with small children, so



At that point they decided that it was TOO similar to the DreamWorks logo, so I was asked to make it a little more different and a little more pedagogical. These two were the results.


Variant 1: rejected for looking pedogogial. Does anything involving a little girl and a remotely male-looking thing have to be sexual? Has our culture fallen so far?


Variant 2: rejected because some people felt that the boy was flinging the kid off the moon. Holy cow. OK, I agree that this needed more dynamism and more dynamism would have made it less ambiguous, but even now I can't see how a guy can toss a kid at that angle with a straight arm.

(One day I will invent a dwarf tossing logo and it will be a governing meme on the internet for two weeks)

After which I went grrrah and did some more.


Variant 3: so I thought, hey, if I turned the man into a woman, we'd skirt most of the pedo issues quite easily. Because pedo lesbianism is just sick, right?? It can't ever happen, right?? Because men are just crazy sex-crazed creatures who have no other reason to pay attention to a little girl, right??!


Variant 4: just to make it clear that this game only involves catching, not throwing.


Variant 5: and then I thought -- hey, I could actually bring the book back in, and it would be relevant.

And the logo they chose in the end was [none of the above]. I won't put it up here until the project's completed, maybe next year.

And this is why I didn't post anything over the past four weeks, which are even now staring at me accusingly from the sidebar.

Not volunteering for anything like this EVER again.

Mega post

It's occured to me that I haven't posted for over a month now and I am seriously contrite. I leave my tablet at home to stop it from distracting me in my hostel room when I'm supposed to be doing work but it doesn't seem to be working out for me on the art side. And now that all my classes are done tutorial-style I can't get away with drawing in class any more...

So here's an extra-long post. First, starring some lolita coordinates.

Outfit 1. worn to singing practice at R.'s house

Dress: Alice and the Pirates St. Mephisto's Cathedrale JSK (sorry for wrinkliness! I'd just washed it and I hadn't ironed it yet.


Outfit 2: worn to Orchard Road, at which I promptly splurged on bags (sigh)

Skirt: Juliette et Justine l'amour d'amants skirt


Outfit 3: worn to a Victoria and Albert Museum special exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore (300-year-old wedding dresses!! We honour them with our dressups), featuring one of the aforementioned bags.

Dress: Mary Magdalene Perfume Bottle JSK in cocoa
Parasol: Victorian Maiden Fairy Frill Parasol in fern
Bolero: Innocent World Millefeuille Tulle Lace Bolero in brown
Bag: Lapalette Buckingham Guard Bag (medium) in green x brown
lots of Chocomint and Surfacespell hair clips
el cheapo H&M pouch for putting extra stuff in

Shoes in all three pictures from Clarks, which sometimes has my shoe size.


I've been dressing up rather a lot partly to (over)compensate for not being able to go to the Juliette et Justine tea party held in London two weeks ago, which was awesome by all accounts. But I did send proxies in the form of headdresses. And here they are being worn at the tea party itself!!





My friend is soooo pretty. But her identity needs to be kept a mystery for reasons of privacy, so don't look at her face!


...And lastly, the results of eating a radioactive dragonfruit. I swear this is what I look like right now.

It was tasty. But it IS magenta.

More next time!

Rose garland finished!

Two weeks' catch-up

Headdress progress:


(yes, my handwriting is small. And yes, the flowers are huuuge.)



Also, something I doodled on the opposite side of a printed sheet during a very sad lecture, which is far better than paying attention. The class ended before I could draw feet for the lady at the back. Two more characters -- the lady in front is someone you might remember from January, the one in charge of training from Hell. She's kind of small.


By next week I should have finished both headdresses, so that's when the final photos should be up. Hurr for full-time job, which bestows me with largesse to live on, but which taketh away quality time with my tablet.

One reason why I've not been uploading, either, was because I'd spent my weekends scouring for materials with which to make a friend two headpieces for Juliette et Justine's September tea party, one of which will be epic.

Headdress I:




Headdress II:



Guess which of them the epic one is!

More pictures when they're done and ready to be shipped.

My femmy, clean-shaven boys

I finally got a little time off tonight. Felt like doing something relaxing, so I did some colour sketches for a bunch of male characters. These are two of the shaved guys; the unshaved guys are in another pile, along with the shaved guys I'm still not that pleased with. Vector is the most developed of the designs -- you saw that rather sad early example in that late January post. 





I'm not that used to drawing men yet, sigh. Silver-hair below is meant to be femmy-looking, but he came out looking like a rabbit. He needs to look more dangerous, because he is.






You wouldn't think they were related. The only things that are visibly similar about them is their eye colour and chinline. Gervain's mother came from a rather bleached race.


Hopefully I'll have enough time left over from social duties and work do to more next week, but there's no guarantee now. I'll try my best, at any rate. I'm getting assessed by my bosses in three days, first thing in the morning!! Argh. 

Fruit tree fresh

A few days late this time, but here's a sketch I made recently while waiting for a course to start. The subject matter is the sum of my group's conversation over the few minutes it took to put this on paper.


...and this, boys and girls, is the origin of orange juice.

Be back with more stuff this week.

Dead week

This week:

• first week of my real job
• dinner appointments every other night after work
• food posioning

Hence no art. Sorry. ;__;

Wait for next week.

Classic and wa: progress report II

I haven't made that much progress, and it DOES look ghoulish with the sort-of finished-looking faces amidst the flat colour blocks, but I'm putting it up here for posterity. Works in progress are rarely that pretty.



--I think I'll give the little one pinker cheeks. She looks quite grey against her big sister. And I still haven't thought up names for them yet.

Ignore the chopped-off brown hair -- I'd forgotten that I'd intended it to be Long. I'll just have to remedy that when I get back to it next round. At this rate I'll probably be another month at least with finishing this up -- so much for doing more art in my holidays, sigh. Didn't expect to be doing so much socialising -- or reading. (I'm back to a reasonable average of 1.5 books a day -- a few weeks ago it was 2.5, but then I realised that I had other stuff to do.)

If you have any ideas for names, please suggest!