It's Christmas Eve (or non-denominational festive season day 24), so here are some snow-tos.

Christmas card

Make a card for your Grandpa, she said. "BLERGARGH!" I replied.

Two hours later this had been squeezed from between scalpel and paper.

Aileen Wuornos

I was watching Eileen: Life and Death of  Serial Killer and was sketching. Yes it's morbid, but sometimes a crazy murderer just has the best facial expressions. She changed so much, back and forth in the space of the documentary that it was almost terrifying.

"Cloud Power" New Scientist Article

The image from before in situ.

Cloud Power

The project was about illustrating for New Scientist, for one of two articles. This one is about harvesting power from clouds by forcing condensation with lasers. I'm not sure how much it is in the New Scientist style, but I like the image. I'm enjoying working with colour now, although I don't find it any easier.

Below is a working page from the sketchbook, seeing as I rarely show process with finished work. After speaking with the tutors, I realised that filling the image with too many elements would lead to confusion. I was advised to go with very simple flats, but it felt alien and unenjoyable to me, so I went somewhere in between my original idea and the advice. Flats like this:

As per usual, the bulk of my physical materials were inks, and in this case I took it into Photoshop to comp and colour.

Puppet Finals

I had a good day at the Sedgwick Museum

After an odd day (nice, and crappy in parts, but generally just odd) I decided to go and hang out with some dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals. After asking around, I discovered that they had been so discourteous as to become extinct, so the conversations were pretty one-sided.

I got stared at by disturbed French students.

Megaloceros

Tyrannosaurus Rex

Hypsilophodon

Allosaurus

Deinotherium

Stamps

We were asked to create a State and design stamps for it. Brilliant project. I got typically obsessive and has a nice mental jaunt back to being 12 for this one, when I maintained the worry belief (if only for a matter of weeks) that the presence of a massive number of toads in the garden every year must mean that some hideous Emperor Toad must be squatting out spawn in the hollow space under our garage, or in the many odd cavernous bits that appeared under the grass from time to time. The project was a two-weeker, which was nice, although I'm not exactly sure we needed two weeks. I used most of that time obsessing over backstory elements.

These designs were then put onto contact sheets, because, after all, a stamp has to work small. These ones are around 35mm x 37mm. I used the sewing machine, on a low stitch-length to perforate them and now they tear just like real stamps. I got overexcited by this, and firmly wish I had the money to get them turned into functional stamps.

The initial design elements were sketches, and crappy ones at that, then I took everything into photoshop, filled it out and played with the compositions.