All original artwork © Andrew J. Latham and may not be used without permission. If you want to contact me, email me!

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Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Flickring

Sketches-01-02-10Flickr is such a great resource for artists. It’s great for sparking the imagination, but I’ve recently discovered how useful it is for drawing practice. Specifically I’ve discovered a section of the site that gives a random slideshow of “interesting” images from the last seven days.

It’s great to bring the slideshow up and just start drawing, which is exactly what I did with the drawings below. I decided to forget about technique and to just generally not worry about drawing something nice. I also committed myself to draw anything that came up rather than just sticking to people.

Monday, February 01, 2010

Palming

Hand After my previous post, I thought some concentration on hands was is order, so I did some little sketches.

I was trying to decide on a method of breaking up the hand that I felt comfortable with. Here’s what I settled on. I would normally think of the palm as being one almost solid block, but it is clearly much more flexible than that, so I found it to be quite useful to break it up into three parts, which I have given different colours for clarity. On reflection I suppose the grey section at the base of the fingers could be further subdivided as it is quite flexible.

I’m also trying to keep in mind the fact that the fingers do not extend parallel to each other, but instead curve inwards towards one another, with the ring finger being the most straight of them.

I’ve been treating the pinky as more of a separate element from the other fingers too, letting it do something a bit different to its buddies.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Scaredy Cat…..errr Guy-Pig

ScaredyHere’s something I drew while watching a TV show about scary films. It was an interesting bit of teamwork between myself and my girlfriend Sian. She’s got a great imagination and ended up suggesting almost everything in this picture. I just drew what she told me to draw. I’m not at all happy with the hands. I should really have used some reference to draw from.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

How a Quick Doodle Can Take Your Whole Evening Up

I drew a character today at work that I quite liked, so I thought I’d ink and paint him. I ended up giving Illustrator a go as I’ve never really used it for much before. It took quite a lot longer than I anticipated, although I did have to learn the tools along the way.

Print

And here’s the original drawing. The far cheek is a bit weird to be honest, but I couldn’t be bothered changing it!

Face

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

New York

Here’s a random scribble done while listening to New York by Paloma Faith…..ny2

Monday, January 25, 2010

Upper Classes

Doodles-25-01-10

Painting-25-01-10Here’s a few things I’ve drawn today. The pencil doodles on the left were done whilst waiting for things and listening to music at work. The reclining pig was inspired by the Beatles song ‘Piggies’ from the White Album, a fantastic song.

The other drawings were done while watching TV. Not particularly inspiring poses I know, but at least I’m drawing! I thought I’d try giving them a digital paint job too. You wouldn’t know it but the lady in blue is the Queen reading a speech. I was going to do a quick real watercolour job on them, but my little set of watercolours is on a shelf at work.

Oooo in other news, I got ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs’ on Bluray today. I’ve been desperate to see it again after being wowed by it at the cinema. I love the animation in it – such a refreshing break from the usual CG styles of animation. And of course it’s hilarious. I can’t wait to watch it again, but I’ve also got to fit in a trip to see Toy Story 2 on re-release at the cinema. Can anyone explain to me why in America they got both Toy Story films together and we have had to wait for the second one? If any of you across the pond like films and are thinking of emigrating to the UK…..DON’T DO IT!!  Six months we had to wait for ‘Up’!

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Andrew Shek – Confusion of Colour

hippo_sketchesGoogle Reader is fantastic. Pure and simple.

My reason for stating that is that it takes a look at the blogs you read and it suggests other ones you might like. Other feed readers may do this for all I know, but I’ve only ever used Google Reader and so it’s got my thumbs up. Today it introduced me to a blog I fell in love with. I found myself leaving it open on my computer, returning to it periodically through the evening to have another look. Rarely does a blog cause this behaviour in me.

The blog I refer to is called ‘Elephant Art’ and is maintained by character designer Andrew Shek, who as the blog name suggests, is partial to the odd elephant. Now I could talk at length about what I like about the images on Andrew’s site, but I think it would be more interesting to mention what I find bewildering. In some of his sketchbook drawings, he uses flat blocks of colour that seem to have no relation to what he has drawn. Take a look at the image above showing his sketches of hippos. I’m baffled by his choice of sketch_book_1putting two grey rectangles over his drawings. They don’t frame the hippos, they don’t seem to highlight a particularly nice composition. The reason that I bring this up though is that I really like that those rectangles are there and yet I have no idea why!

On the left is another example. It looks like he has painted the page red and then painted white blocks over the top. What I can’t tell is whether he has done the sketches before or after the painting. I would guess sketching came first as that makes more sense. Anyway, yet again I love the use of these blocks, but I don’t know why. They certainly highlight the three rhinos drawn within them, but why has he left out the remaining animals?

Below is another example that I really like, but this time what he has done makes sense to me. When I first looked at it, I just thought that maybe he had chosen to mess his page up before drawing to get rid of that horrible “blank page syndrome”. However I came to realise that the paint not only suggests the colour of the elephants, but also their skin texture. Brilliant!

So could this idea apply to the rhino drawings? And the hippo ones? Well black rhinos aren’t necessarily all that dark in colour, so it’s feasible that the theory could Untitled-4apply there.

The grey blocks against the red background certainly give a feeling of these great beasts standing in the hot African wild. What about the hippos though? Yes they are indeed grey, but they don’t cover enough of the animals for me to believe that their purpose is just that. I find the small grey block on the left page to be particularly intriguing. I would love it if someone could explain this to me. I have written an enquiring email to Andrew in the hope that he can provide me with some clues. Should I get a reply, I’ll be sure to do a follow up post.

Colour in general is a subject that I find extremely interesting, yet I feel it is the part of art that I least understand. Yes I understand that red can mean warmth or danger and blue can mean cold, and I can look at a coloured image and try to analyse why particular colour choices have been made, as I have been attempting to do here. But when it comes to colouring anything myself, I struggle. I can paint in a fairly convincing manner to get colours that look roughly like what is in front of me, but I find it rather difficult to be more creative with it than that.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Skull

Skull ModelSkull-20-01-10 It’s tough to learn the anatomy of a skull from pictures in a book, so I decided to buy a model to work from.

I had a quick go at drawing it tonight. As I expected, the result could be better really, but I suppose it’s not bad for a first attempt. The jaw is a bit of a mess though! The model is a “budget model”, meaning it’s not perfectly accurate, but it should suffice for now. I can always supplement my study with more detailed images in anatomy books.

I plan to watch some videos I have by Glenn Vilppu on the subject of anatomy in the hope that I can learn better ways to approach the subject. I’d give anything to attend classes by that guy. Well actually I wish I just lived somewhere with some decent drawing classes nearby! My girlfriend is also looking for good dance classes, so far without luck. Why oh why is Manchester so educationally lacking?