Spencer Tunick is known for creating art installations involving hundreds of naked people and photographing them. He’s done them all over the world, and now he’s coming to Manchester and Salford. Sign up through the Lowry to take part in the two day event, Tunick’s first multi location shoot, which has been inspired by the art of L S Lowry himself.
I finally got off my arse (metaphoricaly, I had to sit down at the drawing board) and made a start on Point of Contact. This is the rough pencil of page 1. Don’t be too impressed by the anatomy, it’s all traced from print outs of Poser work. Next I have to tidy up the middle and bottom rows and add some background details, then ink it.
This was taken in low light using my phone, the panel borders aren’t really that distorted.
To limber up before starting work on Point of Contact I’ve done a short erotic tale. It’s called An American in Paris, and this is the splash page.
The tale is a flashback featuring Kerry, one of the characters from my previous naughty comic Shall We Take A Trip?, who’s reminiscing about the time she met her penpal in Paris. Can you guess what happens?
Looking at it now, it appears Kerry (on the right of the page) is about to fall over backwards. I knew she was leaning a little as I drew it, but I had to look at it from a distance to see the problem. That will be remedied in Photoshop tomorrow.
After putting out a call via Facebook and Twitter for volunteers I had a few people willing to give their family names to characters in Point of Contact (previously referred to as “The Space Comic”). Moody won the coveted position after four of the character names through being suggested first and twice (that’s a little unfair on everyone else as I think the Moodys are the only siblings in my friends list, but that’s the way it goes). Please bear in mind I thought of the forenames before putting the surnames out to tender.
Dan Moody. I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I? Dan is married to Alice and father of Sally and Martin. He starts the story with a broken leg, which is one of the factors that decides the roles everyone else plays. However, I may never explain how he broke his leg. I know what happened, but it may not need revealing.
Alice Moody- wife of Dan, mother of Sally and Martin. This is the design I’m least happy with. I’ll get better at drawing her as the series goes on.
Martin Moody. Martin becomes the leader of the quickly formed “away team” in the first issue. A geek, but also into stuff like parkour.
Sally Moody. It’s been all I can do not to make the whole story about Sally and have her making all the cool discoveries and inventions. Originlly she was going to be sixteen, but I’ve aged her to just turned eighteen because there’s this solier she really fancies.
Geri Webster. Martin’s girlfriend. Shares a fascination with blowing things up with Sally, which means they’ve bonded when none of Martin’s previous girlfriends got on with his sister.
George Savage. Martin’s best friend. Martin’s had a falling out with his parents and they don’t talk much any more, so he spends a lot of time woith the Moodys when not at university.
There are a load of support characters to be designed, but I have the core and I have the layouts for the first twenty two pages. I really, really should get started.
The Armadillo started life as one of the thousands of trailer homes purchased to house families displaced by HUrricane KAtrina and other natural disasters. Now it’s a mobile composting and permaculture centre, with water catchment and a vertical garden.
Technorati tag: EcoHouse
When Andy died I was given his rather large collection of Transformers and GI Joes and told to find something creative to do with them. Since then around 200 of them have found new homes all around the world through bot-crossing, but that still leaves a very big pile of them sitting in my studio.
The Transformed and GI Blues pictures are images of the jumbled robots and soldiers inspired by a shot I took whilst emptying Andy’s flat. They’re available to buy as prints.
Half of any profit I make will be going to Manchester Rag, an organisation Andy was closely involved with and if anybody who knew him would like a print I’ll try to get them one at cost price.
American readers can get prints through devintart- Transformed collection, GI Blues collection.
British and European readers can get prints through Photobox- Transformed album, GI Blues album. If you want to have a canvas print, or any number of other interesting things, click on the Create Product button and it will tell you if the resolution’s good enough and let you crop the image to fit if necessary.
The naughty gift boxes I mentioned last week are now avilable in my Etsy shop.
Thomas Doyle makes surreal mini dioramas, usually under glass and often playing with the fact that they’re under glass, repurposing figures and buildings from model railways.
Technorati tag: Scale Models
This is a worrying tale for anyone who creates art (or any other “intellectual property”) and posts it on the internet. Graphic designer Jon Engle is being sued by a site that sells stock images for stealing from them. The problem is, the images he “stole” are his own works and the person or people who submitted them to the website stole them from him. He has time stamps for the creation and uploading of his originals that could be checked against the images he allegedly stole from. But the site and their lawyers won’t release that data. Which, to me, sounds like the actions of folks who know they’re in the wrong. To try and distract from their dubious behaviour they’ve started contacting his clients and repeated their ill-founded assertions to sour his working relationships.
There’s not a lot that other creatives can do for Engle apart from publicising his plight and maybe Google bombing the lying, dodgy site that is suing him.
Jake and Dinos Chapman have rebuilt Hell, making it even more twisted and horrific than the burnt to a crisp original.
I have an urge to do something similar, albeit on a smaller scale. A pastiche with clowns, or a mega mini orgy with the 1:87th lovers you can get for model railways.
I have a bad art product addiction, buying loads of sketch pads which are only ever part filed. Maybe a Nintendo DS and the Colours app could replace them.
New at Etsy, two Be Your Own Valentine cards. The outside is simple enough-
But open it to reveal one of these two images-
They can be read either way- sex positive celebration of being single or “I’m really not that into you, try this.” Order them now to get them in time for Valentine’s Day.
Update A variation on the design is now available on Cafe Press. It’s available individually, in a 10 pack or in a 20 pack.
Further update Someone at CafePress thinks vibrators may be against their Questionable Material & Prohibited Content Guidelines and those cards aren’t available until they make a decision.
A series of minimalist expressions done on artist cards with a Sharpie marker. How expressive can a few lines be?
Skull and cross bones greetings card.
Abstract rectangles greetings card.
Get one or more of the cards for yourself at my Etsy shop- www.spinneyhead.etsy.com
Here’s the page he was working on.
I should reinstall the time lapse script onto my camera and do this for one of my pages (a clean one, of course). The process shown in this video is very similar to the one I go through, but, apart from the finishing on the computer, the techniques are different. My layouts are generated on the computer using Poser (I’ll get away from that with my next project, honest.) Then I do a basic pencil page, adding clothes, working out where the speech bubbles go, putting in some extra details. I do this by laying tracing paper over the layout, rather than using a lightbox. I then do a second, more detailed pencil page on tracing paper over the first, then I ink, with a dip pen, on architects drafting film. The inked page is scanned in, tidied up and has tones added.
As a bonus, here’s a comic book cover in a minute-
Launched by the Love Cannon Parade.
