Tuesday, September 26, 2006

More 2004 stuff

The stuff I have from 2004 just keeps on coming.

Oh dear lord, the state of my room! And check out the hideous rug! It was there to cover up a huge inkstain I accidently made on the carpet the year before. Thankfully it's replaced with a bigger, navy blue rug. When I move into my sister's old room when she moves out, I'll have no rug at all. I didn't have a desk you see, even though this room is the biggest of the house, I have to share it with my younger sister, and she hates seeing all my shit everywhere. I actually can't remember what I was actually doing here...maybe the Foster's Home drawing inside my sketchbook.

Here we go, college stuff. This was from when I started my attempt at the National Diploma in Art and Design, which I sadly dropped out of in the first few days of 2005. After induction, we had to be in groups, which I really HATED, and design some kind of tower thing made from cellotape and newspaper. It was a good thing I brought my shitty old camera along that day. When we were finished with out paper towers, our tutor made us burn them, and take photographs of the fire. OK...weird... Personally I called this a 'paper virus', because of how tall it was and those long bits that stuck out of it.

Now we're talking, old lineart for a Sandy Cheeks fanart. Round about that time I used to like inking with a small brush, because sometimes it could get just as good results as using a nib. This was just about before I learned the art of pentooling in Photoshop.

Finally, some more Ceramics stuff. This was my board for my Ceramics things only - the rest of my overall college work was in another room - and it's mostly of my old tiles and some chalk drawings. Those things are the bottom are my large pot, and my weird-ass tomato thing. The rest of my ceramic things aren't visible in this photo. Now, the drawing of the aubergine...there was one side project we had where we had to make 'angular' models of fruit and vegetables, and I chose aubergine...and well, the final model I made looked sod all like one. I still have this on my windowsill.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Oh Dear...

In case you're wondering, that's supposed to be Will Young. And yes, it's an old college work from 2003/4 I found hidden under my bunk bed. For this project my class had to rip up bits of greyscale paper or newspaper and stick them down to form a depiction of a famous person, using different tones at the same time. I'm not a fan of much of his music [in fact, at the time, the radio used to play 'Leave Right Now' so much it was totally doing my head in], but I chose Will Young because my sisters were, and I thought it'd be some dedication to them.

As the photo suggests, this was done on a massive A1 sheet of paper, so you can just about imagine how long this took, what with the little pieces of paper and all. I made the background - which was made of pieces of old schoolbook covers - just to make it look better. But that face! Jesus, I didn't even make the nose, because I was too lazy too. So as a result it freaked my sisters out a little. Also, he looks like he's got a fat neck.

But meh, that college course was rather school-like, so we didn't create much more than catalogue collages, Photoshop filter abuse and papier mache things. But then, at least those things were practical, which was what I think art courses should totally be, rather than stressing out over paper assignments about artists we don't like or have never heard of.

I think I better leave right now before I fall any deeper into embarrassment...

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Round 2

More from my non-college October sketchbook of 2004. Most of this is Team17 worms stuff today.

Starting off with sigworm stuff. Sigworms are characters based on Team 17's Worms which have different features that tell them apart, and were used a lot by users of Team 17's fanart section of their forums. I was such a user in summer 2004, and one of few females there. They used to call me one of the best up there...

That second one there is Christmas themed of a sort, with a Roy Wood [Whizzard] worm, and a worm that gave his friend his heart last Christmas. But the very nexy minute, he died.

Then there are Balamory themed worms. I was bewildered by that children's programme at the time because of its bright colours and strange writing. PC Plum and Spencer are my favourite characters from the show, because of the policeman's stupidity, and the painter's eyes that pop because he can't stop brushing. I made some worms drawings based on Big Cook Little Cook- another stupidly funny cBeebies programme - as well, but I'll be showing you that in a future post.

Next are some rather daft drawings based on my own sigworm, Saffya, which is the very creature in my Blogger photo if anyone was wondering. Why the hell I drew her in a tellytubby suit I have no idea, but it seemed kind of funny at the time.

As a fan of the DDR arcade videogames, I wanted to draw Saffya playing it, but alas, worms have no arms or legs! Team 17 worms however had Rayman style floaty hands that appeared at will. But I could imagine... and I did. I drew this sort of pair of metal legs that she'd sit in, and with pull strings, she'd move around and stuff, much like Masterkaag, the first boss from Rayman 3.

And lastly...this.


I also had this idea of some animation that I never got round to making, where another sigworm makes a clone of Saffya, which goes haywire and another female sig is called to kill the clone. Saffya would try to talk the mutant into not destroying the city, but the authories killed it anyway.

I used to be so good at drawing worms. Where did it all go...?

To be continued.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Round 1

Just posting some old sketchbook things I found lying around. The following is from 2004, in one of my own, non-college books.

This here is 'Charlie Chav', a pen doodle I made in a cancelled class at college. That college used to cancel classes an awful lot, but I abused the time a lot. Spending more time drawing whatever I wanted rather than what the college wanted. This drawing in particular is obviously a reference to chav culture, which was just about being recognised at the time - burberry hat, Nike trainers, gold chain, cigarette...yep, that's a male chav alright! Yeah, it does look fuck all like Charlie Chalk which I named the drawing after, but then, I'm always referring to children's programmes when it comes to my more stranger cartoonings. I love parody of such, so that's probably where it comes from. Oh yes, I can't forget that there were actual chavs [or perhaps wiggers, to make it more precise] in this class, and my last.

One more thing. Never use permanent marker ink in Daler Roweley sketchbooks. It yellows the other pages a LOT.

The next one is even weirder...or perhaps, nothing more than a piece of newspaper wrapped up in black acrylic paint and white acrylic scribblings. I was just experimenting there, after looking at someone else's sketchbook where such thing was in it a lot. Not just with the newspaper, but with the way I was painting white paint over black paint. Acrylic paint can be so nasty in paper sketchbooks, always sticking even though it's dry... The newspaper article is about schools giving kids free condoms I believe... which, I personally think isn't too good. Might prevent teenage pregnancies yes, but not underage sex. I'm talking kids aged 11 here losing their virginities and having children like they always print about in newspapers and Closer magazines...what is this world coming to...?

Alright, enough jibber jabber on the real world, and onto some more drawings.

Army dogs. With plaits and cigarettes. Now just...what? Just to prove that not every thing thing that I draw is cartoon and game fanart. But then, this was modelled after some old Chad Valley toys I used to play with, that my father brought down by accident, so whether that counts or now I don't know. These toys were called 'Puppy Dog Tales', which were like My Little Pony but with dogs, and from 1998. They even made a magazine, bless! It's not often you see anything made by Chad Valley that gets published as a magazine actually, but I believe it has the same address as the office that published the old Puppy in my Pocket magazines [I had LOADS of those still sitting in the loft]. Nostalgia plays a really important part of my will to draw.

Unfinished Little Britain/Worms comic. With worm versions of Lou and Andy. Lou would go and get one of the worms packages, and while he's gone, Andy, who's supposed to be disabled, goes and shoots the enemy worms Matrix style. And Lou would wonder how they were all defeated. Couldn't think of a way to end it, but looking at it now I'd make Andy say 'homing pigeon did it'. This was when Little Britain was HUGE here, they were running the second series which while some scenes were shocking, others were gut bustingly hilarious.

I think I'll take a break here, but I'll be back with some more weirdass drawings.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Gothic Tiles


My younger sister nicked my camera once again, so I had to scan it. My older sister found it while she was clearing out her room. I was scared that the weight would break my scanner...

It's a set of 'gothic tiles' I made in Ceramics while I was at college in 2004. I believe I used white buff clay and black slip. It was my input for a project in which we all had to make about four gothic tiles, making sure they 'repeated' when put against each other. At the beginning of the project, my class visited the Victoria and Albert Gallery in London, as there was an exhibition of gothic art going on there.

The thing was that I thought this was for Critical Studies, my least favourite aspect of my art course, so I took my Crit studies sketchbook instead of my Ceramics one. Nevertheless, I still drew a few of the artworks at the exhibition, and bought some postcards. If only I had both sketchbooks still, I would have scanned some pages and showed them off. If I ever do find them, I will.

When we actually got round to making the tiles, we has to make three kinds - the ones shown here, some flat tiles using red buff clay with markings all over them I believe, and white buff clay tiles with the first letter of our names on. Being called Stacey and all, mine had the letter S, and we made them look gothic too. We had to make all these bumps on these, and I didn't even know what I was doing, so I just shaped the top of the tile randomly, and my teacher thought it was a great example! Heh, the thigns you get when you don't know what you're doing eh... I coloured that tile with zinc oxide I believe - it came out green, and I'm pretty sure magnesium [or was it managnese?] oxide makes clay go dark brown... Both that and the red tile were possibly lost...shame, I would have shown you the S tile, because I was bloody proud of it.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Today was a dark day for my artistic world.

A week ago I was in my sister's room when I took one of my Duckula novels to read in. I then had the idea of illustrating that book, so I drew Nanny dancing to music that sounded so bad to Duckula that he begged her to turn it off. Days later, I got to colouring it with Copic markers along with watercolours and colour pencils. After taking this photo, I was almost done, it had a background and everything.

Then I left it overnight, on the floor. While I was a sleep, I heard the sound of a cat vomiting - that cat being a cat we're looking after for someone - and I thought he was dying then. So I turned the light on, looked around...and there it was. A BIG puddle of watery cat vom all over my artwork. And man, was I pissed off? This was something I did NOT need at quarter to seven in the morning! I had to throw it away, much to my sadness.

Of all places the cat had to vomit, he had to do it there. Maybe it was because I kept pushing him away because he was getting too close and stepping all over it while I was working on it. So now I know - NEVER leave or make artworks in a room with uncaged animals. My only choice now is to remake it...perhaps better it even.

This however cheered me up.

I've been chosen as a featured artist on Photo Lucidity, which is a new photography site related to Fanart-Central. This means that the photo of Jess I have there will be on the front page for all of this month. It's not long been up, but damn, I feel honoured to be seen like this! And my little dog Jessie is a star!