Joelecdote

I’ve just come back from my holidays in Pembrokeshire on Tuesday (more on that in a later post!)…

Yesterday I randomly decided to do a sketch and the first thing that I saw was Patrick Moore on the cover of one of my “Sky at Night” magazines. So I challenged myself to try and draw him! I think the result actually looks pretty amazing, if I may say so myself! Although it doesn’t quite look exactly like him, but I’m pleased with the shading in general…
Click here to view a bigger version (I added a bit of a soften effect on this larger size)… (JPG, 286Kb)

I’ve also done a random animation using an old Blender test file that I made a while ago. It turned out looking a bit like a “silly walk” (like in Monty Python, Ministry of Silly Walks)… I’ll post the video later.

Just done yet another sketch today, based on one of the illustrations by Chris Riddell in a book called, “Muddle Earth”:

I think it turned out pretty good actually… I’ve also started reading “The Fundamentals of Drawing”, so in theory my drawings should improve more!! There are some pretty interesting exercises in there for me to practise doing, e.g. drawing straight lines (without a ruler) and circles…

The other day I also did a sketch from my imagination!!! Which is quite an achievment I think… I think I started by drawing the nose(s) and then went on from there. It’s ended up looking like a Chavlien (Chav Alien):

Anyway, you may or may not have noticed that I’ve added another page to the site, finally edited the “About” page, and updated the portfolio page with my latest editing job with the Anglesey Youth Theatre.

This brings me onto the next bit of news - the Anglesey Youth Theatre was so impressed by my editing on those 4 clips that they’ve asked me to edit a video they’re making about the dangers of over-drinking (I can’t think of the proper translation of ‘goryfed’ at the moment), called “Ffwl Gwirion” (Stupid Fool).

I’ve just (finally!) got myself a sketchbook and some graphite sketching “sticks”. I started sketching without any reference pictures, and it turned out OK, but not too good. So I decided to start by using references. First one I did was from Pauline Baynes awesome illustrations in the Chronicles of Narnia series, in the “Horse and his Boy”:

I think this turned out pretty good. There’s something not quite right about the front foot though…

Yesterday and today, I’ve been sketching based on a reference photo of a field mouse by a user called “gazzat”, that I found on Flickr:

I think it turned out pretty good actually. I think maybe the fingers at the bottom are not quite right. The next step is to draw something entirely from imagination!