A Four-Colour Psychochronography

I 'complain' that I'm busy a lot.  This is mostly because I am often busy.  I'm not always busy with art, or with my day job (although of course these two things combined account for the vast majority of my time breathing), but other things as well, like relaxing in front of the TV, trawling Pinterest for references, keeping on top of my messages (in various places), video games, reading, eating, and sleeping.  You know, life? It tends to add up. Fairly low on that list of priorities, but still a priority, is writing blog posts.

Phil Sandifer on the other hand, has blog posts as one of his main priorities.  Blogging, and subsequently making books from those posts (with many additions and edits of course), is his day job, so he blogs a lot.

Previously I've done book covers for his collections based on his still ongoing TARDIS Eruditorum series of blog posts, and also on the book he wrote about Wonder Woman (A Golden Thread), which didn't appear on his blog.  A series of books and a blog covering every episode and a huge amount of tangential material of the 50 year history of Doctor Who (with some of those episodes being covered in 12,000+ word essays) is not enough for Dr. Sandifer though.

Yes, he actually is a Doctor, in English, and possibly in awesome.  A doctorate of awesome would be a useful thing to have, come to think of it, I wonder where you'd get one.

With his blog rapidly approaching the present time of the show he's cast around for something else to cover when he catches up, and found it in the form of the passive feud between writers (and self proclaimed magicians) Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.  Now I can't pick sides there as I'm an enormous fan of both their works (though not enormous enough to have read everything by them), and Phil doesn't pick sides either.  His work is presented as the history of a war distant enough that there are no stakes in the winners.  Not dry and dispassionately though, but with a wink and some dry wit and humour.  The 'war' is really just a framing device for a vast and sprawling canvas; the actual chapters covering topics as diverse as the influence of J.G. Ballard, Robert R Crumb, and Edward Blake, to the narrative structures of aristotelian literature (and so on), as well as the works, and influence upon them by 'the war', of other writers, such as Neil Gaiman.

It sounds insane.  It is insane.  The good Doctor is a self proclaimed Mad Man With a Blog after all.

Writing blogs doesn't make money though - as a Day Job it's pretty low income stuff, unless you have a huge and sprawling readership and lots of ads.  Phil's blog has minimal ads, and a moderate following among a certain type of intellectual nerd (as well as less intellectual nerds like me, who just like his writing style), so he's running a Kickstarter to fund it.  And since (to paraphrase C3PO) he's worked with me before, he asked me to knock him up a nice banner for the jam-jar shaking.

January '13 and (December '12) Sketching

They say it never rains but it pours. I don't know who 'they' are, but they've been saying it for an awfully long time. Right now, with the rain streaming down the windows this seems a particularly apt term, as I do seem to have rather a lot to be getting on with after a month of relative artistic calm. Much of this comes from work, and so you may never see it dealt with here (though it's not out of the question eventually), but some of it I'll be dealing with here eventually. Eventually is an important word there, as I won't have much time to update the blog or do side work to show for a little while, so if this is the only post during February I hope you'll forgive me. But you're not here to hear me bemoan my work load, you're here to see art (come to the wrong place I suspect), so lets get on with it.

A Welcome Return to Speed

It's been a crazy few weeks. I didn't mention this in my last couple of posts, but the company I work for filed for bankruptcy and put most of it's assets up for sale. I won't go into the details (You can look up THQ bankruptcy if you have an interest), but suffice to say it was a stressful time all round, and while I still have a job (under a different parent company, but still with the same team in the same place), many people didn't, and that makes me very unhappy.
And given all that stress art has not been at the forefront of my mind. Even so I've sketched more this month than at any time since September, and given how little I'd drawn in December I felt I may as well hold onto that for a post in early February.  Which leaves us with the few speedpaints I've managed to cobble together over the last two months.  My last speedpaint prior to this was also in September, and I have no interest in leaving it that long again as the quality level drops sharply if I don't do them for too long.

The Best and Worst Sketching of March and April

So this post took longer than planned, but it's taken me two weeks to work through all the sketches I did in the previous two months. As usual I had vastly underestimated the number of sketches I'd managed to do in that time.
April had very few sketches of course, which you could have guessed since I was away for a good chunk of it, and what I did while I was away was covered in the previous post, but March had far more than I expected. I could have posted something else I suppose, but in all honesty I had nothing else of interest. I have some stuff in the works, but I wasn't (and I'm still not) in a position to write them up yet, and while it was the blog's 2nd birthday the other day I was too busy to do anything for it - maybe the next post will be a belated birthday post.
But for now, to the sketches...

Two For the Price of None

So I thought at one point that this month was the death knell for my production of art.  Nothing I was producing pleased me in the slightest; I thought it was all dreadful (mostly because it was all dreadful).  Then I did that Iron-Man speedpaint from the last post and things started to turn around again.
Todays piece was started in January, but finished in February (in fact the final piece was painted entirely in February) and like everything else from the first chunk of this month I'm really not happy with it, but I concede that it's way better than it had any right to be, as you may see upon reading the tale behind it. Before that though, let's take a look at the final work...

And a Small Hat

It was only supposed to be a speedpaint, and turned into my favourite piece so far.  You may not agree, and that's entirely fine, but I'm really pleased how this piece worked out.  It's not perfect of course - there are aspects that make me cringe, but as an overall piece this, in my opinion, is the best I've done.  The major problem with it is that it's quite small, because I usually do speed paints at screen resolution, so when you enlarge this one it might not enlarge as much as you'd expect - that said, it will give you ample scale to see my wonky brushwork.  After all that build up I suppose I should show the piece then eh?

A Conglomeration of Ineptly Placed Lines

I've been putting of writing this post for far to long. I would blame the rather excellent new Deus Ex game, but that's rather like patting my large Budai like stomach and saying "but it was entirely the fault of the pastry chef!" Clearly the truth is I'm just a lazy schlub. The odd thing is that despite my putting it off I've had the post "prepped" for a while, and prepping is by far the most time consuming thing about making one of these posts. It's not like the writing has any time spent on it (as I'm sure you'll have noticed). Well, let's go and see what all that preparation has to show for itself (and more on what goes into it a little later).

More Speed Paints, Less Exciting Titles.

Given how busy I've been of late I didn't think I'd actually get another post done until next month, but here I am tapping away at my keyboard once again. As you may have gathered from the title of the post this one is another round up of speed paints, this time with an emphasis on "Speed."

You may recall some of the the Christmas Paints I did back in December that strayed over the self imposed line I had designated for Speed Painting, taking longer than an hour. Since then I've posted one more set of speed paints which varied wildly in the time taken, but did seem to hover around the 45 minute mark. Well, this time around I decided to deliberately step on the gas, and with a couple of exceptions these were knocked out intentionally faster than usual with a limit of 30 minutes. How were the results? Well, have a look and see for yourself...

Sketchy Von Sketcherson

I've been putting off updating the past few weeks because I didn't feel I had enough to warrant a post. Eventually, yesterday, I thought I should probably just gather what I could so it didn't look like I'd gone to Bermuda and been lost in the Triangle. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a huge amount of stuff to post. Well, alright, not huge, but far more than I've happily posted alone in the past.

A further surprise was discovering that very little of it was all out bad - this is funny because while drawing it I thought most of it was dreadful, and bemoaned losing my mojo to sickness. Perhaps I just lost my perspective... Or perhaps I've lost it now because I'm sick, again (I know, this winter's been crazy for teh sikcies). Either way, there's no good or bad this time, just "Not so bad" and "Not so good".  I'll start with some portrait sketches.

Social Profiling № 2: Steve

Quick recap: Painting four profile pics for four of my Facebook friends.  You can see the first here; along with a better explanation. This is the second.

Since that first post I've managed to crank out the third in the series, but I'm still only at the point of writing up the second.  Will I get the third written up tonight? Unlikely, but possibly tomorrow (more likely next week).  But what of the second? The one of Steve? The one I'm supposed to be talking writing about now?   Well, if you'll stop interrupting we'll get to see it.

Okay? All done with the fidgeting? Good, let's get to the pic.

Full of Christmas...

There's a little tab in Blogger labeled "Stats".  It's a fascinating button and gives all sorts of anonymous info on who's reading the blog, and when, and where (very roughly speaking - I don't have your address - well, yes, I have your's, but that's because I'm related to you, but I don't have your's, because I'm not...).  Anyway, it does show that my Wife is no longer the only person who reads the blog, and it also shows that the blog is surprisingly popular in Poland and Russia.  It can also show where the hits from the blog are coming from, and while most of them make sense (A Google search for things related to uDraw will often get you here eventually) some of them don't.  One of them is a renovation contractor in Russia (I had to use Google's translator to find that out, and the other is a porn site.  I've been to both (hey, I'm no prude, I just want to know why I'm linked to from a porn site) and can't find any logical reason why they'd be leading back to me.  It's very odd, but I shan't complain; a hit is a hit no matter where it comes from :).  Anyway, this is all beside the point!  I just wanted to get it off my chest that I find this fascinating (Especially since my only commenter's are all people I know personally).  Back on topic!

Shortly after December began I decided I should do Wintery/Christmasy speed paints.  Somewhere along the line these ceased to be particularly fast, so they ceased being speed paints and became Christmas-Paints instead.  Some of them worked out reasonably well, others were dreadful, as you shall see momentarily.

Wanderers in the 4th Dimension

You may, by this point, be of the opinion that I rather like Doctor Who. You would be wrong. I frickin' love Doctor Who. Or rather I don't. What I do is enjoy Doctor Who as it airs on TV, to varying degrees depending on who the writer or director of the current episode is. What I love is what Doctor Who represents. What he represents, much like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond and The Bash Street Kids and (the British) Dennis the Menace is a Britain that doesn't exist, but which everyone really wishes did, and the show has represented that wondrous escapism for 47 years.

A Musing 2: A Right Mickey Mouse Job

Yes, I'm still here. Things have been a little crazy lately, and what with one thing or another I've A) not been drawing much and B) been posting even less. Things are on the way though, you'll get to see them soon. For now it's time for me to gibber on about things I don't really understand in an effort to understand them better. You, if you're brave enough, can come along for the ride.

Fantastic!

If I were smart (and at this point we may as well all agree that I'm not) I would be doing something constructive right now.  I could do some gesture drawing, or figure drawing, or practice drawing the head, or sketch out another Doctor caricature or do a sketch of Wolverine, or just draw/paint something else that takes my fancy.  This would be a good time to do it because my wife has taken my Son to the store to buy paint for the table she's building (She has her own blog if you're interested).  Since we have now established that I am not smart you shouldn't be surprised that I'm writing a blog post instead.   OK, after all that I've practically forgotten what I was blogging about to begin with...  Oh, yes, another picture of the Doctor!

Bow Ties Are Cool

I neglected to mention in the previous post as to why I've not done all that much work lately, and I also recall that some time ago I would explain why my Dad's Birthday sucked and why October 5th is the worst day of the year.  The answer is that it's the Anniversary of my dad shuffling off this mortal coil.  I am, and have been for the past 18 years, a complete wreck during the last week of September and the first couple in October.  OK, are you all depressed yet?  Well, look at the picture after the break, Matt Smith's not looking to jolly either.

Allons-y!

So I've been terribly unproductive for the last week or so, so no new "traditional" work to be seen (I've done some, but not enough to be worth a post yet) which means you're stuck with more Artrage work.  For the next couple of posts in fact, because I've done a set.  I have no idea what inspired me to decide to A) try some caricatures and B) pick David Tennant as The Doctor for my first effort, but I did.  I was really quite pleased with it - at the time.