Developing Binks

Those were from life, these are the next stage (where this process is leading is a philosophical question):

Josh

Approachable





Yet sinister

The Surplus of Kurt Angles Situation

As some of you may know, I met Kurt recently.









This was fun. Kurt now owns that little watercolour. I think he wanted to put my name on a gold plaque. He kept reading it out really loudly.





Kurt settled as a logical muse between working in a shop and practising cartoons.

He always has been magic.









This one began as a phone doodle.

Nelsoniana

Un Denmis

(That wasn't a typo. That was what I accidentally wrote on the drawing.)

Undennis? Re-Dennis? Non-Dennis. Nonnis.





Sometimes you start with a person then just end up having fun with some shapes. But you can take it back to the person again afterwards.

David

I determined to try to draw the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, but my primary interest was in Mitchell and I've only got as far as him. Webb's face is less memorable, but that shouldn't be an excuse.





He's like literally the physical opposite of Randy Orton. I liked the symmetry of that. He has massive dark brown irises and sticky out eyes. (Click to enlarge)





Some of my experiments were more successful than others

















Here's a bit of Peep Show which is a jolly good British sitcom of Now.



I should mention that I went to see Brian Wilson at the Royal Albert Hall on Tuesday and had a jolly nice time and drew Sir Peter Blake. In front of Sir Peter Blake. Probably some artwork will be forthcoming based around my experiences of this week.

Jump About in Rainbows Birthdays

My computer is not broken any more!

It's good to update a blog, oh yes.

I might do a lot of little honest updates instead of big massive ones intended to wow you and distract from rubbish drawings with better ones. I'm going balls to the wall.

Here are my birthday drawings. I have started trying to draw David Mitchell, and also I got a lift home from a wedding on Sunday and some men looked at my drawings, and the men didn't say very much but I felt like my drawings were quite contained and monochrome, and I suddenly felt like I wanted them to jump about in rainbow pony colours. Even if the colours go through a bad phase, I need to make them jump about and just bite the bullet and do it.





I thought maybe I should do an art movement called Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbowsism.

Moon Expert Lady

I watched the Sky at Night around the time of the lunar eclipse in the UK a few weeks ago, and I liked some of the moon scientist faces when they were explaining things about the moon.

This lady is called Katherine Joy.

Bob's Dental Polygons

I had done some very quick sketches of Bob for my portrait, then i took the idiosyncrasies of the quick sketches and made some Round Bobs. His face is hexagonal or something. I always reckoned Bob's dad has octagonal eyes. These men are constructed of many sided regular polygons.





I drew Bob from life while he was watching Mythbusters or some old man programme. No! Actually it was a repeat of Small Talk with Ronnie Corbett.




Here's Bob being willowy with a more protuberent schnozz.





Bob likes colour coordinating his bike shoes with his bikes. (A cat trod on this one with its mud paws of doom.)

Moving towards controlled playfulness

OK drawings now.

I've been following through on my bats and men, in fact the two things have rather fused in the middle.

Facially, as in the following:






Some of those have a bit of Triple H, the well paid big nosed wrestler, looking kindly, as he often doesn't.

Some bats, I think they're called horseshoe bats, have holes in the middle of their faces. The graphic possibilities are many.

Then some bats like to get intense down at the gym...

Randy and Edge are a tag team now. Unfortunately for Edge, he looks rather a lot like an ordinary mortal man, although his chin is so extensive I look at it and can't quite believe it's all made of face. Anyway he's below on the left.





The bat-man thing got so it was something I had to get out of my system. This kind of had its peak thus far in the next drawing.





While I was drawing that, I was watching Mark Kermode interview Steven Spielberg. They were talking about Munich and Mark thought that it wasn't that great cinematically and that he preferred Spielberg's popcorn fodder. Spielberg kind of said that he made that film to get it out of his system, and that's how I felt about the man-bats. I felt like a ten year old boy when I was drawing them. One they were out, I felt I could move on.

Bless John Cena and his quasi-box-shaped head.





I felt I needed to return to Randy's head to redress some imbalances. I'm still a beginner and I'm learning about caricature as a process, and I've come to realise that if you get in the habit of exagerrating a certain feature it will be at the 'expense' of a different one. Like in recent drawings I had been making Randy's cheeks all massive and rounded, and forgetting that he has a habit of pointing his chin at people and pouting in a distinctive fashion.









One of the reasons I think I return to this head is that it's quite open to interpretation.





I'm still scribbling manically in my sketchbook, splurging thoughts out with only slight coherence. Hey, now I have a new computer, so photoshop won't make it burst. I think I'm figuring out how to aim for where I want to be, in a never-finished kind of a way.





(This next bit also appeared in my myspace blog)

I've been having dreams which take the creative visual excitements from my life and push them deeper into magic.

This is a drawing based crudely on a memory of a dream in which I was at a Stanley Spencer exhibition and there was a painting in it of men in a winding tunnel, clusters of men, with radiant light shining out of their heads which fragmented the surrounding forms with its rays.

You can kind of see where I scrawled 'clusters of men'.






Then in a later part of the dream, there was a special secret library with massive volumes devoted to Spencer, Goya and of course, the famous fish bowl expressionists. That book mainly seemed to be filled with multiple colour variations on the same painting of a fishbowl. But it had special esoteric meaning, the colour, of course.

I have a lot of dreams about book shops, second hand book shops in hidden cities, and the important part is that in them I find the books that I need to find. The special books with the knowledge that takes me where I need to be. Because the thing is, my waking attitude is similar, I do think there may be one or two or three books hidden in the world somewhere that are the books I need to find.

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And this bit didn't appear on myspace, it's an exclusive: I had another dream the night before last in which Marlo invited me to her home, an apartment in a sort of intimidating pearl white castle labyrinth.

But she was kind of a superhero, I think this was directly based on her wonder-inspiring real life drawing skills. It seemed that my visit had enticed some kind of egg shaped red haired begoggled lady archvillain to Marlo's house, so Marlo kindly shoved me down the chimney hole in order that I could hide/escape. I became swamped in soot.

Nipper Eyes

I’m sorry it’s been so long since the last update. I have been painting with a view to getting some things finished. Painting is time consuming.

I’ve thought about posting stuff that isn’t my work, but then I thought that might get confusing and I like the purity of this blog.

I’ll give you some boring updates on things I had already started last time first.

Like I’ve been working on this monster painting with lots of red and green and yellow. I remember thinking when I chose the palette that I wanted the red and green to rub up together in an optically awkward way. There’s too much yellow in it at the moment, I plan to make it more cloudy and moody. Then when I’ve finished it I’m going to do something I’m more in the moment and passionate about. This is a strange exercise in problem solving at the moment, but it is improving as I persevere.

Then there was that pink ink one which I’ve ruined by putting other stuff on top. But it will get better before it’s finished.





And the one with the wrestling and the orc and the by now familiar cat man… This one will look a lot different by the end too. This is more sandy. The other one was more wiggly. It’s got everything and the kitchen sink in this one.





Then the bat one, that has grown. It’s acquired some colour and some new pecs. This is part of my perverse wrestling imagery Chloe revolution reaching beyond the comfort based tyrannically cool school of imagery choosing and reaching toward the transcendent power of enriched vision beyond culture. And it has a bat.






I wanted to get to grips with the somewhat fascinating graceless rectangularity of John Cena, as those of you who vaguely follow the incoherent babblings of my grey blog may know. So I started drawing him, I started the big one in the bottom right corner wanting it to be purely done with coloured pencil since I hadn’t tried that for a while. But I felt I copped out when used watercolour and ink too. Also it looked too conventional or professional or something, not very interesting. Because he already looks like a cartoon or an action figure, there’s nothing clever about this drawing really. If there are elements of him which are unedifying, I wanted to try and make my drawings in some sense edifying despite the odds.






So what I did was I redid that entire page almost purely in coloured pencil, to see if I could take it to somewhere more interesting and uncover my purpose a little bit more.





In the top centre one, in his eyes I made him look a bit like me age three and apprehensive about being photographed. My motherly instincts and compassion seeped out, I couldn’t make him entirely hideous.

And working in coloured pencil took me back to age thirteen when they were my main medium. The memories were surprisingly potent. That was an age when I significantly started developing my own ‘techniques’, which had been a private milestone, I realised. I’m quite soft and gentle with them, which is interesting as a counterpoint to all the other media I’m using in less puritanical ways. I’m re-educating my seeing at the moment.