Speeding into '17

Happy New Year!  Hopefully.  And with the New Year comes the inevitable New Year resolutions.  One of mine?  Blog more, as I've been terrible at it over the last 12 months (you may have noticed).  'Blog more' is a bit vague though, so perhaps 'Blog at least once a month' works better.  Other ones are 'draw more' and 'draw/paint worse' (I'll explain that one in a future post, but it boils down to me doing more quick experimentation to improve, without always worrying about the end result as much, so it's more enjoyable).

So, here I am blogging, with actual art, for the first time since July.  Ugh, that's terrible!  Some of the upcoming posts might be about things I did a year or more ago, because I didn't mention them at the time, and in some cases I'd almost entirely forgotten about them until I stumbled across them on Facebook (or whatever).  Since the blog is as much for my memory as for your (possible) pleasure, I should probably write a post covering them.  This is not that post - this is a speedpaint post.

A Change of Speed

Time to start catching up on the Speedpainting for the last couple of months. So far this month I haven't painted any, which is a little miserable. Not that I've done no art at all, just nothing that I can show, and even if I could it wouldn't be very interesting. This also means I've not really started on going back to the fundamental studies I set as a new year resolution. I've done a little, but not at the concentrated level I'd conceived. Early days - January is often a little chaotic, and this year more than most.

Anyway, this post takes us all the way back to November, which seems like a year ago at this point. I'd better get on with writing it, or it will be a year before I finally cover December.

Fumbling the Speed Ball

It's been a while!  Over a month since I last posted I think, which means I never posted the Speedpaints for October during November.  This is not caused so much by laziness on my part (though as ever, it's a contributing factor), so much as I usually post on weekends, and the weekends were full.  Obviously Thanksgiving was in there, but also two weekends of travel (to St. Petersburg) - the most arduous trip I've ever been on in terms of actual travel, but the most surprisingly pleasant time once I got there.  Not the best trip I've ever had, but perhaps the one I'd most want to repeat, if I could do it without the jetlag.

So that's three weekends accounted for, and I can't honestly remember why I didn't post on the other ones.  Some form of busy or other, I'm sure.

So, since the following were mostly quite some time ago I'll write what I can, but it might not be much.

Sketching - October to December '14

It's a bit ridiculous that I simplified posting sketches so I could more easily keep up with it, and then haven't posted any for 5 months.  I shall post now, although this still puts me a year behind.  Same rules as last time - Scan page, adjust levels, post image.  Edits allowed for rotating something so you can see it better, or cutting something out you're not supposed to see (for work or whatever. Not because it's bad - you get to see the terrible stuff, or there wouldn't be much to see). So, let's see what I was up to a year ago...

Not So Innocent

Well, this has been an odd month.  Not the number, obviously October is an even month numerically (but with an odd number of days... why am I typing this?  You know this).  No, it's been odd in a "things that I have done" sort of way, which is that I've been really quite busy, but don't have a whole lot to show for it.  I dislike that - if I'm going to be busy I like to have something at the end to say "Yes, I was busy, here is what I did," Instead this month has been "I've been really busy, but I'm not entirely sure what I was busy with."

Still, I'm finally managing to write a blog post, and it's Halloween!  Fortunate then that I have a creepy picture to share today.  That I finished a month ago, but haven't had time to blog about really (and may not today - there are halloween things occurring outside the webosphere of course).  Let's start; see how far we get.  You can, as always, click the images to see them enlargerized with Embiggen-O-Ramavision.

Gimme More Speed!

So my New Years Resolution was pretty simple - do a speedpaint a week.  There were some more details in there, but the rest of it was just icing - the important bit was actually doing the painting. One a week should be easy!  I know one guy who does one a night!  I've said that before though, and you'll note that in all the time I've been working on the blog I have yet to crank out 52 speed paints in a year.  Time will tell if I can keep the resolve and get it done.

I did say I'd be away for a while didn't I?  I've not been idle though; mostly I've been sick, or on vacation, and at one point both at once.  I did get a speedpaint done each week this month though - except the first week, but it only had three days and I was away for most of them, so the resolution came into effect on the 4th.  I had one left over from December though, so you still get 4 in this post.

Sketching - October to December '13

Yes, I've managed to go almost another month between posts, and in all honesty I didn't get as much done in that time as I would have liked in order to share with you over the next one.  It's not that I've been doing nothing, just that not much of it is the sort of stuff this blog covers.  One thing that is related though is that I've been doing some general 'housekeeping', and I'll get into that further down.  Part of the housekeeping has been to actually start compiling the 8 months of sketches I'm behind on sharing, and that's the focus of today's post.  There are also some speedpaints for me to share, but that will probably be next week's entry.

I'm ditching the usual format of these sketching posts until I get caught up.  Usually I compile all the sketches for the time I've been lax and they're organized into different images by what they're of.  This time there's one image per month, with everything lumped in together.  It's marginally more manageable this way, so I'm more likely to do it.

Painting Class: Painting Still

Well, I'm sort of amazed how fast the last few months have gone by, and how little artwork I seem to have done in that time.  I was worried at one point that I was slipping back into the mode I entered that eventually led to the creation of this Blog - that of not being fussed to do any art, a state that lasted close to 10 years.

Thankfully though I am doing art - less than I probably should, but vastly more than I was during those 10 years.  The stresses of the last couple of months are wearing off too, so more is likely to be forthcoming.  After this post I have one more planned before the end of the month (possibly 2, but the other will be quite personal and have no art in it, so you likely don't care).  Which brings me back to this post, and why I'm commenting on how time has flown:  It's an art class post.

The last post I wrote on the subject was after my last class waaay back in August.  It doesn't seem that long ago, yet it was almost 3 months.  I started another class about 10 weeks ago and just finished it.  I didn't attend all 10 sessions (I think I missed 3), but I painted a reasonable amount in those sessions I did attend, and at home when I missed one of those 3.  As a result I have 5 new paintings of vastly differing quality. They are all on canvas board, painted in Acrylic, but the sizes vary.  Incidentally, all the photographs but one are from angles other than that at which I was painting as I took them as an after thought rather than during the process.

A Psychochronography in Red, White and Blue

And here, sooner than planned, a new book cover.  This time though there's a twist - despite the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who being in less than a month, this is not a Doctor Who cover.  In one way it was far simpler than those, and in a couple of others gave me some pause for thought.

While not a Who cover, it is a cover for Dr. Sandifer (or Phil as he's known to his friends (I assume - I've never actually spoken to the good doctor except via i-correspondence (that's email to you (and yes, I did just do, and am still doing, a run on sentence with four sets of nested parentheses - hardcore). It's for his latest exploration into psychochronography, titled A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman.

Which subject led to the first pause for thought: Given the legendary litigiousness of the US comics industry, how do you do a cover for a book about Wonder Woman without actually featuring Wonder Woman on it?

Read on oh truthful reader, and discover the answer, and more...

Grave Yard Haunt

There is a saying, allegedly of Chinese origin, that goes "May you live in interesting times." It's thought to be a curse rather than a blessing. I've had an interesting month.
Nobody has died (yet), or ended up in hospital (well, once, briefly), or lost their job (That I know personally), or have gotten a divorce (thus far) but a great many things have occurred to lower my priority on updating the blog. I can't go into all of them, so I won't go into any of them, but this is the reason I've not updated the blog so far this month, and why I've barely sketched at all recently.
That said, I have painted a second commission and I'm working on a third - This entry covers the second. It's not a particularly mature subject, but you should be warned that zombies walk below.

And a Happy New Speedpaint

I haven't posted a speedpaint in quite a while, which is partly because I haven't painted many. I'm back in the saddle now, but back around October I'd hit the dry spot I've spoken of (lots of sketching, minimal painting) and hadn't really got back into doing them for a while. I said last time I'd post fewer speedpaints more often, and I thought that since I hadn't done many I'd only have a handful to post now. Wrong! 12 of them (10ve if you want to get technical). Curses, so much for my short post.  Better get on with it then eh?

"Daddy, Can You...?" Episode One

In what is likely to be a very occasional ongoing series I bring you some of the wild and crazy things my Son has asked for that I have needed to build, draw or otherwise create. Usually at the drop of a hat.
Yes, I could be posting some badass Halloween picture I drew last night or something, but I didn't do one. What I did instead is right there to the left of this paragraph. And yes, I think that's the first photograph to ever appear as a thumbnail for the blog, and I didn't take it (my wife did). But more on that later...