Saturday 23 July 2011

Ian Botham

Saw the documentary on England cricket badboy Ian Botham the other night and couldn't think of why he hadn't hitherto entered my mind as a possible subject for facial foolery. As they said in the doc'; he was a national treasure for a time (while spending the rest of it as an anti-hero)
I originally wanted to draw him when he went through his Paul Calf stage but there were few hi-res pic's to work from. So a later, cleaned up Beefy (albeit with a few extra lines) had to be the subject material.

Tuesday 19 July 2011

Web Site Updated!

Just to say I've been working behind the scenes updating my caricature site. There are now pages for digital pencil work as well as extra pages for regular pencil work and vector. With well over 200 images within the site it now comprises a better 'one-stop-shop' for viewing (nearly) everything so far.

The only area not covered at present is digital paint, mainly as I have so little that falls into that category. As soon as a few more pieces have been created then a dedicated page will go up.

It seems there are two schools of thought when showcasing artwork online; one: put up a small, select gallery of your absolute best work; and two: put up a large selection of everything and have your web site more of an online storage depot. Having spent a few years in the former camp I'm now trying out the latter. I've still left out the real scrappier stuff although I may add a page in the future for sketches and roughs that I think have merit. I've trawled back as far as I dare go and the keen-eyed will see a progression (of sorts) especially in the early pencil sketches from 2006 up to the digi-pencil stuff I'm currently doing.

My real problem was how to add pages without adding loads of buttons and cluttering up the place. I went  with a system utilising the usual up-and-down 'tree' system that branches out from the home page but which also used a side-to-side (or left and right) approach once you landed on the first page of the gallery.
For instance, by clicking 'vector'  this will take you to page one of the vector section of the gallery. To then see more pages within that vector section hit the left and right arrows situated within the flourished border and these will take you through the dedicated pages within that section. The same principle works within all the various sections of the galleries. Not only does it sort out the problem of not letting the buttons become more numerous and overcrowded but I can also add future pages which will slot right in without having to fundamentally re-structure the site.

With so many links, etc I've checked and double-checked that everything's working, that all the links are taking you where they should and that there are no spelling errors, but if you discover anything erroneous then you're welcome to hit me up so I can then sort it.

Hope ya like it!

Friday 15 July 2011

Billy Bob Thornton


It's been interesting to notice how time spent doing caricatures is affected by the format - especially when the formats are similar. For instance, the above pic of Billy Bob took me: 2h 20m. I found that on average I would only spend an hour to 1h 30m on real pencil drawings - for a similar overall effect. The only theory I have is that with the digital pencil I'm probably editing and trying different things along the way - sometimes scrubbing out whole sections of an involved piece. With real pencil I'm committed - but I do a lot of screwing up of paper.

Wednesday 6 July 2011

Cy Twombly

The artist Cy Twombly who died yesterday.

Can't sleep, so I decided to finish this up. Gotta be the latest upload I've ever made. Or do I mean the earliest? Either way, I'm going to pay for it later.