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...

Trains, Planes, Cars and a Boat

There, that wasn't so bad a wait was it? I'm back, obviously. Where've I been? The UK, again. Usually there's quite a gap between trips, but this one was a mere 7 and a bit months. We went again so soon because of my Cousin's wedding, and it turned out to be one of the most mental trips I've ever been on. It'll be a while before I go again unfortunately, but next time we plan for it to be a little more relaxing.

This post is going to be a little different from most as I want to get down things that happened on the trip so I can remind myself just how crazy it was compared to the usual ones (which are rarely boring). I'll fit in the sketching I did first though. I don't really care if you don't want to read all the text - this one is for my own benefit; feel free to check out the pictures and ignore the text if you want to.

Such Speed and Tom Foolery

Yeah, it's been a while, and last month only had three posts rather than the four I'd rather have, but things got a little hectic what with the space-alien abduction and my son building a particle accelerator in the basement (blew all the circuit breakers!). Oh, and my wife finally took the time she'd been meaning to in order to build a shed that looks like the TARDIS, except it actually works and now every time I see her she's six months older and has an alternating tan.
Other than that though it really has been a little hectic in work and at home, but I have found time to do a handful of speedpaints, which I shall present to you below (and no, there's no more April 1st 'humor' in the post, promise).

A Bit Like William Hague

So this one, like "And a Small Hat" before it, started life as a speedpaint. Unlike the previous piece this one was finished and posted before I decided to go back and fix "just that one bit." In fact you've already seen the speedpaint in the previous post, but you'll see it again below.
The end result of all this was one of the best pieces I think I've ever done, it just worked out really well.

Point Five Past Lightspeed

Here we are again with another round of speedpaints. Let me warn you that herein lies some of the best speedpainting I've ever done, but also some dross that will burn your eyeballs and make you revise any opinions you may have of me as a "good artist" (yes, I've awkwardly been called that two or three times in the last week).

Consider yourself warned anyway, and proceed with caution for what is seen cannot be unseen (and so on and so forth)...

The Best and (Mostly) Worst Sketching of February

Well, I suppose it's time I just suck it up and post. I actually prepped all these for posting last weekend and I've been putting off blogging about them because I'm not terribly happy with... well, most of them really. There are a couple of nice pieces though, so I may as well share them. Prepping them took a lot of time last weekend, which was funny because I thought I hadn't been terribly productive last month (I didn't sketch at all for at least a week as I was so disappointed in what I was producing). Turned out I had 12 fairly densely packed pages to scan and sift through. Shame most of it was dross...

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...

Right Up To Ludicrous Speed

Keeping fairly true to promise for a change, here we are again with another round of speed paints. Less of them, but more often. Despite the post's title I've found that my speed painting is slowing down. They quite regularly take more than an hour now, which is just not cool (the occasional hour+ piece is fine, but this was more often than not). I'm making a concentrated effort to do them faster again now I've noticed this trend, but this can mean that some of them are only partially complete or look very rough. Such is the nature of speedpaints.
So, let's take look at what I've done in the past month or so...

The Best and Worst Sketching of January

I shouldn't be posting today really, I'm off work sick, so by rights I should be lying on the couch with a book and groaning a lot. Unfortunately my Son has a friend over to play and he's terrified of me. I mean really scared, like run screaming from the room whenever I show my face scared.

This is odd as I've never been anything but nice to him, so I'm forced to conclude that his parents have told him that the bogeyman is a 6'4" Welshman with a deep voice and a gut and he's made the connection.
So I'm banished to the office until he goes home.

But enough about me, and more about the sketches...

Eat, Swim, Make Little Sharks (Before The Blog - 1)

Shortly before I started the blog my hard drive died an ugly and unceremonious death, and of course being the tech savvy person I am I hadn't backed anything up. Smart right? Thankfully for this post some lower resolution stuff had ambled its way onto my flickr page, and it's sat there ever since. I'd never thought to post it on the blog since it's not really what the blog is about (but in a way it's what sparked of the notion that led to it, as you can read about all the way back at the beginning - You'll see one of this posts images there too). But since this month is going to be fairly slow it's time to start dredging the archives. Skip to the end? OK, to pictures!