Filippo and Livingstone...

Wanted to get this posted, now I can go to bed!

the indifferent lion...and existential angst of sorts.

It's been difficult to find the time this week for my own work but finally here's a things in progress. The next fearsome beastie I'm exploring for inspiration and edification is the lion (or as Monty Python would put it..."number 3 the lion...the...lion...".

My sketching was a bit rusty at first for this one so as a warm up I tried 'sketching' with a scalpel straight into scrap paper without any underdrawing. Happily that got me the rough lion collage that I then touched up in photoshop. Perhaps I'm being overcritical of myself at the moment but so much of what I do has the background as a graphic afterthought to compliment the foreground subject. Pattern, colour and stylistic approach are all well and good but for this lion I want a bit more of a story for the beastie...and now I'm building things up too much for what should just be a quick bit of something. I've been thinking (too much...?!) of late about what I want to achieve with my work above the obvious of, hopefully, supporting myself full time at some future date. Time to just crack on with things Matt... visuals, humour (quirky odd is best) and story!

the colourful gorilla (and other tales...)

Sounded a bit like a book title (maybe / might be it is one / will be one..?)... I'm waffling at an early stage. Here's the second fearsome beastie for the smorgasbord. Just playing about still to rethink things and freshen up. I went way more colourful on this than I would usually do and also played around with how I use scanned in texture. Although I fiddled perhaps a little too much I'm very happy with how the texture went and fairly content that I managed to wrestle the colours into something, if not serene, then at least distinctive. I wasn't planning on the speech bubble at the end but the gorilla made me do it!