Skullbot!

On Friday I rocked up to a house party hosted by Dan Boaden of Synthdromes fame; though there was a terrible bargain to be made at the door. Entry into the dark, damp, womb-like enclosure and the harmonious howling of electro dnb music it contained cost you the hefty price of your soul.

And by soul I mean the ethereal spark within us that leads to art and higher understanding - or rather, if you don’t believe in that stuff - creativity. In other words, you had to bring a house decoration. I should also note, out of politeness’ sake, that his house is neither damp nor dark. It’s very lovely actually.

I decided to do a painting based on this sketch:

The idea being that it’s some sort of... robot, with a... skull... and vinyl. So I sketched it up on a large piece of hardboard, and after pondering whether or not to simply go over it in black pen, I decided to go all the way and paint it in acrylic. At this point I should note that I’m not actually any good with acrylic, as rigorous testing beforehand proved. But, out of laziness and foolish optimism, I decided to just attack it with the brush anyway and hope everything went well.

In short: it did. By being careful and trying really hard I managed to make it look suitably shiny and robot-like. You can see some of the stages above. The finished piece is here:

And I’m pretty proud of it. I’m not sure what it represents exactly – perhaps it demonstrates how Dan’s brain could be salvaged after his death and combined into some crazy four-armed DJ machine, trapped eternally in a cycle of swapping tunes and dropping beats?

Anyway, they took the bait and I was let into the party (though I was pretty worried they’d find fault with the shading and throw me out on my ass). It turned out to be super awesome. Highlights have to include Mitchell's Non-gay Lads Bike Room, described in the invite as being a place to hang out, “talk about weights, bikes and paxing a man with the side of a mic”, though in actuality it turned out to be an empty room with horrendous porn plastered up and down every wall. Definitely a strong par. The DJ lineup they had in the main room was absolutely epic too – in addition to Dan B and Ed Key, fellow DJs took to the set and really tore the place up. Here’s a picture of the main room:

You can see me in the bottom left with my hood up, looking monged off my face. I also managed to nab one of those “Junk” posters, which my bedroom wall is very happy about. The artwork’s done by Ed’s brother, and I really love it. The mix of grotesque inking and clear colours really works well..

Alright, that’s enough from me. x

Beginnings

Heya. How's it going? I apologise about the state of the place, I was having an imagination block and, for some reason, decided that taking a picture of a snapped pen and superimposing words onto it would look cool. Evidently I was mistaken. Perhaps I'll produce something pretty for the site later - something with garish primary colours and simplistic swirly lines that means nothing and reminds you of every crappy club flyer you've ever refused from a fashionable person.

Anyway, here's some artwork I've done. I use the term 'artwork' loosely; mainly because it's quicker to type than 'amateur Photoshop scribblings". They were all made digitally with my somewhat inadequate graphics tablet, and while they're pretty simplistic at the moment, I'm working on improving my style. That hasn't happened so far but I'm guessing it's only a matter of time, right?



This was a cover I submitted to Forge Press (my university paper) because they needed a cover for their FUSE pullout. It was about directors, as you can no doubt guess. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out - especially as it was my first attempt at doing a big photoshop drawing - although the paper didn't actually use it.



This was the first FUSE cover I did which was actually published. I like the way I used colour in this one, although I was getting extremely tired by the end of drawing this and as a result the detailing of the little people (I bet you can't even tell they're people) around the Sheffield buildings is appauling.



Another FUSE cover, which was about the GRIN comedy festival in Sheffield. First person to guess who all the comedians are wins nothing. I'm experimenting with nihilist prizes, you see.



The latest FUSE cover I've done. It's depicting the London Eurogamer Expo, or rather, what the London Eurogamer Expo would have been like if the consoles on show had relinquished the limitations of their binary technology to become sentient beings, spawning abhorrent lifeforms from the nether which were inadvertently manifested through their distorted, subjective view of reality; videogames.

I tried a different method of drawing this time around. Rather than inking the picture with simple lines, colouring it, and then shading it with additional colour, I incorporated the shading into the actual inking process (resulting in comic-book style shading). I'm not really sure whether I prefer the results. What I AM sure about is how much I hate the bland blue background. Perhaps if I were less lazy, and actually pencilled the whole drawing beforehand instead of jumping straight in with my crappy A6 Wacom, I'd have been able to manage the space a bit better. Ah well.



Some artwork I did for some friends a while back - must have been a year ago by now. Looks okay, but the background's pretty simple. They're both DJs who met at university, and after they recovered from the shock of realising how incredibly awesome each other were at their chosen craft (that is, the craft of audible bliss), they decided to collaborate. The spawn of such an unholy alliance was called Synthdromes; a name which, I believe, refers to the synthesis of dromes.



This is some artwork I recently finished for Synthdromes' new Winter Mix. Drawing flesh being torn away from a tormented skeleton is about as much fun as you can have with a graphics tablet. The skeleton is actually an edited acrylic painting I did, which pretty much proves how terrible I am at acrylic painting. You can see a couple of the layers I used here, which I uploaded for... y'know, kicks. While you're at it you should also check out the Winter Mix itself; you can grab it from the Synthdromes MySpace page or from co-member Dan Boaden's blog.

Anyway, that's enough from my thrusting pens for now.

Ciao x