Tag: illustration

Superhopperus Maximus (#17)

thecreativepanic9 Comments
Superhopperus Maximus

Superhopperus Maximus – An amazing beast that although flightless, travels (at incredible speed) by hopping on its reptile-scale like underbelly.

I really enjoyed being a little more exact in yesterday’s illustration, using finer lines for shading and what not so I decided to carry that across to today’s image as well… more focus on nice line work and less on the think, solid stroke look I’ve been doing.

My daughter Neave and I were watching Pixar’s UP for the 723rd time last night and I have always enjoyed the part when Kevin, the crazy-arsed bird that follows Carl and Russell around makes his apperance. So after waking up this morning, I decided to draw a bird. (Take that Simone Kain!)

Inspiration for the style of the illustration came from Chris Edser, an awesome Adelaide illustrator whose work I really dig.

———————-
Illustration notes:

Done completely in Illustrator with the brush and blob tools with my Wacom board. I use Illustrator as opposed to Photoshop as I want to retain the artwork in a vector format so if I want to enlarge at anytime, I can.

The paper texture was added at the end (just one taken from Google Images) and I popped in some text with the Texas Hero font, the go-to handwriting font if you need something that looks old! I should have hand-lettered myself but it’s the weekend and I want to chill out a bit so chalk that up to laziness. I drew in the wine glass stain for a bit of fun.

Frank the Unfortunate Sock Puppet (#16)

thecreativepanicLeave a comment

Poor Old Frank

Taken from my forthcoming children’s book ‘The Misadventures of Frank the Unfortunate Sock Puppet”.

Illustration notes:

I had a lot of fun with this one. I knew I wanted to do a sock puppet as I had seen one drawn into a piece in the latest issue of Juxtapoz. I began drawing the sock with a mental image in my head of a snake puppet like we used to make at school. I drew a hairy arm holding the puppet up but it looked kind of ordinary so that was scrapped and drew the puppet lying unused. Next were buttons for eyes, a funky mustache and the obligatory felt forked tongue and I was in business… but a single sock puppet an interesting illustration does not make.

I had a quick think on what constitutes an iconic sock (yeah, I did a WTF to the phrase iconic sock too). Naturally, the good old footy sock we know and love with those bands of your favourite team colours looping around came to mind. That solved two problems as the black and white wasnt working all that well for contrast so colour would be useful.

The footy sock obviously conjured up memories of rabid supporters and their hatred for the opposing team. I thought it would be a bit of a laugh for our old sock puppet to had a big night out on the sauce and wake up in his least favourite team’s colours.

Now, I’m a South Aussie, so I had to go with either the Crows or Port Power. The black, white and teal of Port is what I tried first but it looked a little *meh* so Frank the Sock Puppet was going to wake up in Crow’s colours! I also threw in the famous Graham Kennedy crow call reference for those with a keen eye, it’s still swearing but not as bad as fuck. It is a children’s book after all!

Happy Thors-day (#15)

thecreativepanic1 Comment

JÖNSI. FEAR HIS BOWTIE... FEAR IT I SAY!

Thursday is the fourth day of the week according to the ISO 8601 international standard adopted in most western countries. In countries that use the Sunday-first convention and in the Judeo-Christian calendar it is the fifth day of the week. It falls between Wednesday and Friday. The name is derived from Old English Þūnresdæg and Middle English Thuresday, which means “Thunor‘s day”. ~ Wikipedia

Thunor is of course THOR, the mythical god of thunder and lightning, the wielder of the mighty hammer Mjöllnir and character of the Marvel comic and soon-to-be released blockbuster movie. So to celebrate Thor’s Day (Thursday) here is a little illustration of Thor’s lesser known hammer he uses on formal occasions… the mighty fearsome *ahem* the well-dressed JÖNSI!

[EDIT]  I uploaded a different version, one with some more shading on JÖNSI. I think it looks tighter… and I just wanted to type JÖNSI again. JÖNSI.

The Family (#14)

thecreativepanic4 Comments
Don't bring fists to a knife fight.. bring the Family.

The Family. A bunch of scary-assed redheads from hell.

  • Skullbones – The youngest brother… dyes his beard black but keeps it ginger on top
  • Bob – The eldest brother… loves disco, and knuckledusters. Dyes his fro black but keeps the stubble red so it hides the blood.
  • Sheryl – The sister. The meanest of the lot. Dyes her hair black but lets the red show through.

A little departure from the style of the earlier ‘One a Day’s’ in that I used the pen tool in Illustrator for the clipping masks (beard and hair highlights). The rest of the head, hair and text were freehand with the paintbrush tool. The character Skullbones resembles a character I had drawn before so I got him done quicky but the other two were completely new. Needless to say this one took longer than the regular 20 minute time limit (around 45 minutes) and honestly, when I have the time I’ll spend a little more time on tidying up each illustration from now on and push the time out to 30 minutes or so. It’s great to give yourself a time limit as I tend to over do things when I don’t restrict myself, although there are pieces of the other illustrations I’d tighten up given the chance. The redhead-ness of the family was only decided on before I exported the AI file to jpeg… I think it worked out pretty cool!

Just a note on the process of the ‘One a Day’ Project, while the illustrations are completed within 20 minutes, I do spend a bit of time before hand (in the shower, on the bike or in the bed) thinking about subjects and setting things out in my mind like style, colour etc. White Winter Hymnal is the exception to this rule as what I wanted to do was an owl which didn’t work (and ended up being yesterday’s piece).

In the next few days I’m going to video my screen and “try” to do a running commentary while I draw a ‘One a Day’ illustration so you can get an idea of how I go about it.

HAL’s pet OWL (#13)

thecreativepanicLeave a comment
OWL-9000

Headache. That’s what I got and it ain’t going nowhere.

Today’s ‘One a Day’ is, to be honest a “let’s get this stuff finished so I can go and lie down” kinda deal. My brain just isn’t up to the task of anything witty or insightful.

Introducing OWL-9000, HAL-9000’s pet Owl. Kubrick actually cut nearly all of OWL-9000’s appearances out of 2011: A Space Odyssey but if you look closely in the scene where HAL is reading Dave and Frank’s lips while they are discussing what to do, you can see OWL’s little antenna pop into frame. True story! OK, OK… that’s my brain starting to shut down. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be headache free and ready to move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom… ahem… time to go.

White Winter Hymnal (#12)

thecreativepanic4 Comments
White Winter Hymnal

So here I was, wondering how I’ll top Gorilla Sugar Skull as I really think it’s my best ‘One a Day’ so far… To be honest it was struggle street in coming up with something so I thought I’d draw a picture of the next song that came on my iTunes. Thank Sausage Jesus that the song was White Winter Hymnal by Fleet Foxes, a lovely little folk song about children’s heads falling off in the snow! For some reason, I always picture a little fox (I wonder why?!) wearing a little jacket and scarf walking through the snow. So there you have it, my drawing of a little fox in the snow brought to you by the letter F and the band Fleet Foxes.

You may also notice the white dots are getting used rather extensively throughout the project. They have been stars in the Pale Blue Dot and The Leadership illustrations and now snow! Copy and paste is your friend when you have 20 minutes in which to finish!

<plug>

Check out my RedBubble store where you can buy selected “One a Day” Project illustrations and wear them in public!

</plug>

Dian Fossey’s tattoo (#11)

thecreativepanic6 Comments
mmmmm, sugar.... mmmm, gorilla.

 

CHECK IT! You can now purchase Gorilla Sugar Skull in t-shirt form here!

I’m fascinated by sugar skulls and skeletons in general. I have awesome lino-prints of skeletons playing guitar and a sugar-skull Abe Lincoln and a few other strange skeleton pieces. I’m not sure what it is about skeletons I like so much but it could be that they are a reminder to live life as much as you can… I’ve believe death to be the end, but while some people believe that to be quite morbid and sad, I find it quite liberating in the fact we have one chance here on earth so we better make the most of it and do something amazing while we are here… don’t waste any time thinking this life is a trial-run!

</ depressing section of blog post>

OK, enough of that… today I decided to draw a sugar skull in the “Sailor Jerry” old-school tattoo style that is popular with the young ones these days. I didn’t want to do the normal old human skull you see around and as I was sitting down to draw I started to brainstorm what kind of skull I would draw. An alien? an animal? a Star Wars stormtrooper? I was a bit perplexed at all the things I could draw.

Luckily, a good friend on mine, Big Dave Streeter, an awesome illustrator in his own right, had come down from his farm to stay the night for a few Pales and a hot-chilli spaghetti bolognaise. I mention Big Dave because he has a video production company called GorillaVision and one of his great cartoon characters he has developed is named Gordon the Gorilla. So, that was it… Gorilla Sugar Skull!

I quickly googled gorilla skull, used an image I found as a reference and went to work. You also may wonder why I put diamonds into the skull’s eye sockets… it is a little in-joke for all you Simpson’s fans out there…  (yes, I know they are chimpanzees in that episode but hey… chimp, gorilla, they are all hairy ape-like things). I’m also not too sure if gorillas eat bananas, I’m probably being species-ist and for that, I apologise.

Illustrated on the 30th January 2011. It took 23 minutes… because my little girl Neave needed me to put on a new DVD on for her… 🙂

Self Portrait (#10)

thecreativepanic2 Comments

There comes a time in any young artist’s life where he embarks on the road of self discovery and … *pfft* yeah, whatever! Today’s post is a self-portrait. Just an illustration of me by me.

Just to note:

• The fills in-between the hair outlines were handled with Illustrator Live Paint… lazy but necessary when coming off of a few drinks the night before

This illustration was done on the 29th January 2011. It was completed in 14 minutes.

Me. In orange.

Keep the Change (#9)

thecreativepanic4 Comments

The Leadership. F*@K Yeah!

Today’s ‘One a Day Project” image is inspired by a classic interweb stumble-upon when I came across an awesome alt-country-rock-folk band by the name of The Leadership.

I was cruising the nets yesterday looking for some inspiration for a branding job I was working on and through various click throughs and a random jump to wicked illustrator Bill Connors site (who also designed the band’s album cover), I wound up at The Leadership’s webpage.  You can find their page here which features their new album Frontiers, streaming track by track.

Now, myself being a curious cat, I decided to have a listen and Sweet Sausage Jesus, I’m glad I did.

These dudes rock!

After an enjoyable listen to each of the eight tracks, I purchased the album and sent the band a message mentioning their awesome rock-ed-ness. I can seriously say I’ve been playing the album on repeat ever since. Stand out tracks for me would be Keep the Change, Little Black Book, the amazing “how-alt-country-rock-should-be-done” Bring it Back with a Gilmour-esque guitar solo to melt your eyeballs and Flesh & Bones featuring something rock has been missing for a while… a kick-ass sax solo that perfectly fits the track.

Anyway, as the “One a Day Project” is me drawing something in 20 minutes or less, Im naturally going to pump out something that is close at hand and in my mind at the time, hence today’s image features The Leadership. The image looks pretty random but it does reference a few lyrics within the above tracks and hell, I had 20 minutes so give the man a break! *hehehe*

Check out The Leadership here… Well worth the effort!

This image was drawn on 28th January 2011. It took 22 minutes to complete (yeah I know, I went over the 20!)

7 days a week, 365 days a year (#8)

thecreativepanic4 Comments

Well, I’ve now kept up this little project for a whole seven days! Seven images have been uploaded (not including this one) with such diverse subjects as Sausage Jesus, Ken Oath – Aussie Mystery Man of Mystery, Leeroy Lion with the mash potato mane, Carl Sagan and a little tribute to Australia Day. Please, have a look back through the first seven images and leave a comment. I’d like to know what people think of my apparent insanity!

To begin the second week I’ve done a little drawing based on the project itself. Just One, 7/365.

  • Just one drawing
  • Each day of the week (7)
  • for 365 days of the year

If I keep this up for a full year Im going to be pretty chuffed.

Im really digging the typography on this one, as most of the drawing time was spent on getting the text right.

The below was drawn on 27th January 2011. It took 19 minutes.

Just one drawing every day for one year.