Wimbledon

In three short days I've become absolutely hooked on tennis like never before, and since it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of sport I thought I'd practice drawing some of the movements. I also added some colour digitally..

So, for the next week and a half my posts about tennis will probably be numerous.. Particularly if Andy Murray survives to the final :-)

I ate too much today

Had a lovely day with my aunt and cousin at my old primary school's summer fête.

I figured sketching out my summer days out is a good excuse to draw, so here's a little rough sketch of part of my day diary. 

It's my 7-year-old cousin eating a hotdog (just part of the large amount of food we consumed today).

The degree sure is paying off...

Somehow I always manage to get roped into doing 'artistic' things for members of my family. Tonight's endeavour was none other than a icing-sugar cake-topper replica of the school that my Mum works at to celebrate 60 years of the school occupying the building - apparently there's always a reason for cake!

Nightmare. "Do a lovely painting of it in food colouring" - was the direction of my Mum. Simple. Urgh, totally not my thing, I knew it'd end up a wishy-washy mess and whenever I agree (I use the word 'agree' lightly, I definitely don't remember being given a choice in this one!) to do something, the perfectionist in me always comes out.  

Also, I saw it as an opportunity to work on my line-drawing skills to some extent. 

Which was all fun and games until I looked up and realised it was 10pm and I needed both sleep and to get this done for my Mum for tomorrow.

So there it is ^ As mentioned before I claim to be a perfectionist, and it irks me strongly how there's some very obvious faults in it. But it's going to be eaten in less than 24 hours, and as fun as the first 4 hours of sugar paste and icing is, it starts to wear thin when you've got sugar in your hair, I'm now a sticky sleepy young animation student. It's almost 2am, so, time for bed Zebedee!

Also, this was the mess I left for my Mum to clean up tomorrow as payment..

Only joking, it's squeaky clean. Not a sticky surface in sight :-)

So, it's finally done..

Pretty much, though I'll probably stay up 'til 11pm building up more shadows and stuff.

But it's gone from this..

Via this..  

Finally, to this:

-Exhales-

Getting excited..

Because basically, I've started adding colour into my layout, and now I'm just tweaking and cleaning it up and attempt to get rid of that fluffy/blurry quality that the first brush I used gave me. But it's cool when something in your head starts to become a reality. There are still major flaws in this piece but for a first attempt, I'm pretty happy.

(A little bit of the final layout)

Also, last night I read the whole of Kick-Ass (1) and it was pretty damn cool, so now I just wanna read more comic books and draw my own and shizz - bring on the first day of the summer break!

Getting back on the graphics tablet thangg.

After handing in my essay at the start of the week I've been able to finally focus solely on my layout project (rejoice!), which also meant having to quickly reaquaint myself with my beloved graphics tablet that served me so well all the way back in my GCSEs and BTEC, really it's one of my oldest friends (techology-wise it is Paul McCartney - old but still great).. Anyway, turns out I had managed to forget some of it, and I did hit that I-can't-do-this wall a few hours ago, and it's only now (at 00:49am - now, friday morning (yikes)) that I've started to get back into the flow.

Anyway, after numerous "development" drafts and redrafts of my final idea I've final settled (I think) and started to paint it:

.. That's a little bit of it, still got a lotttt of work to do to make it less fluffy and blurry, but it's finally heading somewhere.. sort of.

Also, I'm excited because my parents will be in Bournemouth in less than 11 hours (eep!).

And also I'm currently dressed in my Totoro poncho that arrived earlier today..

.. And I'm currently feeling the bite of eating too much Nutella-spread-inside-Oreos, so sleep, what is sleep right now?

Toodles!

Essay week

So it's 1am, I've been sat up watching The Muppets and mooching through my awesome course mates blogs, and I kinda feel inspired to start making my blog more personal, not just the occasional badly drawn naked guy.

So I got to thinking, and I ended up doodling out how I thought this week would go and then how it actually went, I might start doing it more often, it's safe to say that if I'd done this week as I hoped I'd have saved myself a lot of stress and lack of sleep by the end of it.