Mwee

Noticed this meme going around?

1. Draw yourself & yourself as a teen.
2. Have a good laugh.

I can’t really take credit for the cockroach design - I adapted it from existing illustrations for Inger Hagerup’s poems. Still, it’s a pretty fabulous cockroach!

For a while I drew almost exclusively digitally; In the past year, however, I can’t seem to get comfortable with my drawing tablet. It occurs to me there might be something wrong with the stylus, or the tablet may have become annoyingly scratched during travel; or, most likely, I became spoiled my my first tablet, an a4 sized first-generation intuos, and haven’t really managed to adapt to my currrent a5 intuos3. However, friends asked for my assistance in making a poster, so I tried to re-gain my vector brain, or at least a little of it.

And because I think it’s cool to see other people’s “how this is done” posts, I thought I’d show you a glimpse of the process behind this one. Yeah? Yeah.

First I look up some reference photos and jot down some scrambly lines. Then I add blotchy colour, because I have to show the basic idea to my friend, and need him to be able to see what’s what.

He says “Cool”, so I set to work. I delete the blotchy colours, keep the lines but turn them into a pale colour, and start ‘inking’ in a new layer. (I have had people asking me about my lines in vector images more times than I can count, and for some reason half of the people who ask fail to comprehend the answer: it’s not a brush. I draw my linework as full shapes, using the pencil tool with a black fill and no outline. Yeah? …Yeah.)

At this point I should have made a screenshot of my layer palette aswell, firstly because good layer organization is a nice habit to have, secondly because, for this image, the layers were named thus: “retard in front: lineart”, “retard to the right: colours”, etc. (I am pleased by any chance to demonstrate my awesome political incorrectness.)

Blah blah, I finish inking and add colour. End result, before random text was added at the top and bottom:

I actually have no idea if the image suited its intended purpose at all, as the people involved were all too busy to give me a whole lot of feedback, apart from the comment “I like the retard expressions! Link looks like Mrs Pacman!”

So I’ve decided I need a Summer Project. Apparently this involves painting a lot and hoping to gain talent for it somewhere along the way. Here’s a quickie sample;

Two months of absolute school assignment freedom! But I have nothing better to offer than a doodle from last time there was a party across the street. Playing the Macarena loudly at 4am is bad enough by itself, but when the culprits are too young for it to be some kind of nostalgia stunt? No forgiveness.

Besides, I like chainsaws.

Continuing work with linoprinting, the school assignment asked for a poster to promote a piano concert. They asked for abstraction and something aimed at a ‘grown-up’ audience (a not-so-subtle jab, I suspect, at my tendency to turn everything into rainbows and kittens).

Here’s the linoprint, a vague attempt at turning Norwegian nature into something sufficiently abstract:

And here’s how the poster turned out, complete with inadequate typography and colour (because colours, as it turns out, was another requirement):

This was the last assignment this semester, meaning I am near the end of my first year as a lazy illustration student - just some frantic final portfolio work left to do. Bring on the coffee!

Lino printing is so awesome. My fingertips are bleeding due to clumsiness with the cutting tools, but I had so much fun! I’ve never done any kind of printing like this before - now I’m excited that I get to spend all of next week working with it. I would devote the whole weekend to it, if I hadn’t made plans to go spend my birthday with the Clever Smut Poet and other friends.

Here’s the doodle I doodled! Or, actually, carved into a piece of linoleum, then threw paint on.

Just a quick one for the Illustration Friday topic, “electric”. Apparently, electric cats dream of electric mice.

School assignment; a cd cover for a local band. The whole thing was a sort of musical about suns and moons and hearts and trees and blah blah blah. They were looking for “naive and cartoony”.

This thing is meant to be folded and stuff, so just the bit with the girl sitting on the branch would be the actual front cover. No typography because I dread it!

From sort-of-absurd conversations with others, quick doodles.

Anti-marriage poster. “Flirting leads to marriage. Stop flirting.”

My friend Nik had a dream in which we were housemates, and there were futuristic skyscrapers and purple robots all over the place.

I love coffee. Some people, however, insist it tastes like python. You know, snakes, not code. Kind of a lost-in-translation thing, unfortunately. I said a python would be more difficult to fit in a mug; they said the trick was to catch them while they’re small.