an eagle looks for lunch or no stone left unturned...

It's eagle for this months creature submission on A Little Bit Bunny so here once again is a sneak peek of my efforts. I have to admit to going a smidge overboard on this one as far as planning goes. I certainly got into the eagle sketching zone by the end of things. For me that's a fringe benefit of submitting creatures to ALBB each month... I've filled the dreaded "first blank page"... and have my design thoughts on eagles underway should they be needed again. With every month of ALBB I get another creature for the sketchbook 'ark'.

Given how obsessive I got over the planning stages I decided to make a conscious effort to loosen up with the linework and colour treatment on the final piece (just a detail below) and, all things considered, I'm happy with the results... although, looking at all the sketches I'm sure I could take another crack at the tortoise, hhmmm, maybe the eagle's face too... and perhaps the tail feathers... ... enough!

I'd waffle a little more but scanning all this in took much longer than expected, I'm starving and need to go and "turn over stones" in the kitchen to find myself a meal! Pop on over to ALBB if you fancy seeing the final pic.

Albanian jet fighter exchange...

Bit out of left field (or should that be iron curtain...) this blog post, but I'll try and cut a long story short... A few weeks back I was pleased to be approached by the amazingly talented dutch photographer Arthur Mebius about a stylised concorde graphic I did way back in 2008 (gawd bless the internet, nothing gets thrown away...). Arthur wanted to arrange for use of my concorde design in a project he is currently working on (I hope I can post about it at a future date...). Well, long story short (too late), being a bit of a aircraft nut from my childhood I was really impressed with some of Arthur's photographs, especially some of derelict Albanian Mig fighter jets at an airbase called Kucova. I recall also seeing them on an episode of Top Gear does Albania once too (4 mins in... I hope I'm not as boring a geek as James May on this !). So much did I like them I suggested coming to some arrangement and we sorted out a Mig swap... one of Arthur's Mig photos for prints of a couple of mig designs (one and two) I also did in 2008. Then Arthur sweetens the exchange with a few more photographic goodies so I felt I should add to the pot... loooong story not at all short..... hence this painting. I had real fun on it too!

slugs and snails... no puppy dog's tails though...

Blimey, my "a little bit bunny" contribution... this early in the month...! Well ALLB for July is slugs and I figured, as they are so gunky, I'd get a bit messy and see what I ended up with. It's been a while since I actually did some real watercolouring, you know, with paint, a brush and water and everything. I even chucked in some salt to see if I could get that offensive gastropod skin texture. It's nice to leave the computer screen alone for once in a while, although I still assembled everything and added finishing touches in photoshop. Pop on over to ALBB for the final illustration.

RIP Lonesome George...natures living 'picnic hamper'

Poor old George. Depending on which sources you read, but the last remaining living specimen of the Pinta island giant tortoise, aka Lonesome George, died on sunday last at the (again, depending on who you ask) ripe old age / or middle age of an estimated 100 years old. The rest of his species were lost when wild goats were misguidedly introduced to his Galapagos island home and ate all the food. Whether some individual examples of the Pinta island Tortoise exist on another island in the Galapagos is open to debate, but either way it's a sad day as we tick off another species that may or may not have still been around had we not buggered about with things we didn't understand. It's not only the goats either... Man more directly played his part in why it is that all examples of giant tortoise are now a protected species. Damn it nature, what were you thinking of, packaging a tasty meal and a drink in one handy living picnic hamper, as illustrated in this episode of QI. Not to get on my environmental soap box, I'm no green angel, but the sad demise of lonely G does paint a picture...

Congratulations Cass!

My good friend, the super and super talented Cassia is expecting imminently. Everything else she produces is amazing so I'm sure this latest creative endeavour will be true to form! My (stereotypical stork) pictorial congratulations Cass and Liam!

Tough commute...

Torrential rain and a puncture... happy, happy, joy, joy! Still I got a drawing out of it. Every cloud has a silver lining :-)

IF "poise" - ongoing pachyderms...

Still exploring treatments for the story characters. This illustration uses the elephant cut outs and charcoal line overlay (with modifications) from the earlier post. With these cut outs as a guide I used watercolour on some really nice cotton rag paper I'd forgotten that I had. Expensive paper for an off the cuff experiment but I've had the paper for ages, too scared to waste it before now (the reason I'll never feel at ease using moleskins as sketch books...). It really is an interesting paper to paint on as the coarse open grain bleeds the paint in unexpected ways while the heavy weight allows for fairly controlled washes on unstretched sheets. After compositing the various elements in photoshop I chopped up the body further to give me more points of articulation for posing in the illustration. I'm really enjoying the balance (no pun intended) of dynamism against quirkiness which this unplanned pose approach gives.