Sarah Kerrigan Sculpt

Back doing clay sculpture, I had an up until now an unused massive cut and pasting board (a relic from a bygone era used in magazine and newspaper production before computers put it out of work.)

It's now occupied with all my old sculpting and moulding gear taken out of storage and dusted off. I decided to create something new. So I decided to make a 3D pin up of Sarah Kerrigan from Starcraft 2.

A collection of my action figures.

I had the paint brushes stuck there as a mock up for the addition of the wing blades which I'll be including later on.

Supanova Sydney 2014 and an assortment of other gigs.

Naturally my chance to sit back and just blog does occasionally get hampered by me simply being out and about doing stuff, so it's great to get some photos while on the road.

New Booth Set up July 2014

Love my job :)

 Since drawing live at Melbourne Oz Comic Con, I've picked up some tips and tricks. I figure since my booth at Luna Park is basically a similar set up why not make it look more like the convention tables I've held in the various Artist Alleys across the country.

Not only the table itself, but the table cloth and the drawing board are new updates.

Alls well that ends well, after a bit of polishing I retired the old aluminium cafe tables and chairs.

My new trestle table to replace the old ones I've had in the booth since 2007.

Caesar from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

It seemed fitting Caesar would be motivated by a banana.

Played masterfully in a motion capture suit by Andy Serkis, the rebooted movie franchise does away with most of the practical effects to bring us more from the depths of the uncanny valley.

New studio format, new digital caricatures.

No sooner had I updated my studio space the new commissions came in, the initial idea for the wacom 21UX was it was going to be part of a digital caricature revolution and this was one of those "it looked great on paper" ideas I kept it and a massive A3 printer at the booth and due to the nature of the place proved to be impractical, due in most part to the fact I was somewhat unfamiliar with the tech.

I picked it up second hand from ebay, and with a few extra bits and pieces (it was missing its stylus) bit of fine tuning (a quick download of a driver) and a decent computer to run off I began a beta test.

  

This was the first official digital commission done solely on the wacom 21UX

 Not a bad test phase win, given the 24 hour deadline (they pop up from time to time) which honestly I do love the challenge of but I now have a much needed new way of working.

An over the shoulder selfie of me at work teaching myself the old/new tablet. After a bit of wrangling, wherein I basically packed the delicate (and way heavier than it looks) technology into my travel suitcase, I set up in the spare room.

Life Hacks for the Illustrator

Back up everything, and I mean everything. This caught me off guard as though I've invested in some sturdy, reliable external hard disks the humble USB drive is also a bit of a worry.

They're cheap to make and therefore, cheap to break. Not to mention lose and corrupt your files. Spending a little bit extra on a more trusted brand name is the better way to go I've found, however NOTHING WORKS BETTER THAN SAVING IT TO A HARD DRIVE.

The only surviving version of this fan art piece I call Calvina and Hubbz.

 The original picture was lost when the file it was saved as scrambled the data like an egg in a paint shaker however I took a progress glamour shot of my laptop screen with my phone- little did I realise it would be like that last fateful photo before disaster struck.

I normally never draw straight up digitally, there's almost always a hard copy on paper laying around which is scanned and worked directly from. This time was not the case.

MURPHY'S LAW: If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. 

This can be applied to every aspect of life, and it helps to be somewhat zen about it but experiments are what they are.

Let it grow, Poison Ivy/Frozen fan art piece

It's probably not all that hard to see where the inspiration came from for this one, that's right, Batman!

I've been drawing a lot lately, it's weird when you get into a rhythm and ideas just keep coming, this one is kind of the organic process pretty much how I work. It's also one of the reasons I'm grateful to have a phone that I can put notes in, it's like being bombarded all the time from within.

Since everyone and their dog has had a shot at the classic Frozen song  'Let it go' (aka this generation's Hakuna Matata) I figured why not, in my typically fashionably late fashion do my own version. As I'm not much for singing I felt drawing something would probably be more appropriate.