If you were wondering where Skeleton Boy had got to, it seems he’s been off
on a few adventures. Now he’s back, and ready to tell us all about them.
I’m not bored, I’m just unimpressed by the comedians.
Because Ike hasn’t left the flat in months and I’d never hear the end of it if he didn’t make it to Beerfest.
Random sketchy goodness to distract me from the mediocre comedians at Beerfest. Charlotte has the original. She’s hoarding my art card sketches, I’m worried she’s going to kill me and sell them because they shoot up in value.
My camera is good, but there’s no way it’s going to get a shot of one of the swallows on the wing except by pure luck. So here’s an artistic impression of the little birds in flight.
Sketched and left in Oklahoma in Manchester city centre. Feel free to erase the pencil lines if you find it. (It’s signed and dated, just in case I become famous.)
A couple of pages from the sketchbook. These were done whilst I was home a couple of weeks ago as a test of my ability to draw from photo reference and to try out my new Pentel Brush Pen
Here are a couple of ideas for crewmen of the spaceship which crash lands on Earth in my still unnamed “space comic”. The starfishy fellow strikes me as an engineer- all those hands that can work on multiple problems at once and an ability to orient itself in all manner of ways. Of course the ship would have to have bars hanging from the ceiling of the crew areas so it could get around, but that’s just what you have to do if you have one of these multi-dexterous creatures onboard. The caterpillar thingy with three arms and many eyes looks like a bit of a bruiser, possibly they’re security. That is supposed to be a gun- built for something with two opposing thumbs and two fingers- within easy reach of its left hand.
And this is meant to be the spaceship. It’s meant to be similar to those big container ships which cruise our oceans. There’s a pod at the front which houses the crew, controls and any special cargo (and which has a hold where our human characters will take up residence), lots of containers- each carrying something different- and big engines at the back. I’m going to use a cop-out to get around the questions of the long timescales involved in interstellar travel. There are a series of “ports” into a parallel dimension with different physical characteristics and ships simply cruise between them. If, for any reason, a ship should drop out of this dimension they’re doomed to travel in real space, potentially for millennia, at sub-light speeds to get to the nearest port. Or they can wait and hope someone will come along and build a temporary- or establish a new- port where they are.
Of course, there are territorial disputes in the High Spaces, and pirates roam them. They attack, plunder and commandeer craft and occasionally one is “sunk” back into normal space. Which is how the story begins.
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.
Abstract blocks and piping. Every so often I’ll start doing one of these and let it cascade.
Just a little four armed robot and his cute and dinky stub winged spacecraft.
I have a terrible addiction to collecting note and sketch books. It wasn’t so bad when I could get them from the stationery cupboard at work, but nowadays I have to buy the bloody things. My most recent hit is a Derwent sketch pad, a moleskine by any other name. I never seem to fill any of my dozens of books, either.
So I’ve started uploading some of my sketches to Flickr, so you can see what I do with my acquisitions.
This was an idea for a Frightened to Death by Fairies image. It was going to be “Died after drinking Mrs. Lamplugh’s cordial.”
Yes, the fairy is peeing into the bottle. I’m not sure whether to go with this version or simply have her tipping poison into it.
More sketches can be found in my Art set at Flickr.
