Posts Tagged art

25 results.

Past glories

by on May 30, 2014 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

I’ve been digitally leafing through my folders full of old comics and whatnot, from way back when. I’m talking 2009 way back when, before I did proper anatomy, before I’d really honed my skills, before I really knew how to write a story. Most of the stuff I’m finding is nice from a nostalgia point of view, but is utterly cringeworthy in terms of quality. And yes, I’m even including early Elf Blood in that category!

And then, there is NeonPOP!

NeonPOP! was, once upon a time, an idea for a news and culture magazine I tried to piece together at university. It never really took off as a concept, but I did manage to spin it into a weekly comic! It started out as a full page of comic art, but when I switched to doing Elf Blood twice a week I had to change the format to a single-panel gag because of time concerns. Eventually, when I moved down to Manchester and started working full-time, I had to give it up, again due to time concerns. read more

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

Artistic cross-pollination

by on April 18, 2014 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

ART SHIFT!

It’s a little crude, I’ll admit, but I’m quite pleased with the effect granted by illustrating the goddess figure in a completely different style. As you may already know, I’ve been doing a lot more acrylic painting recently, and I’ve been picking up a lot of good tips and tricks along the way. Key of which is to hold one’s nerve, and not to panic when things go wrong; if you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world, you can always fix things by painting it out or letting it dry and painting over it. One video tutorial I looked at (and then abandoned because it was really more of an extended advert for the artist’s work) summarised the experience well,  saying that when painting using acrylics, all you’re really doing is pushing paint around the canvas. read more

└ Tags: , , , , , ,
4 Comments

Well, that went reasonably well!

by on April 11, 2014 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

Another week, another experience!

All this week, I’ve been trying to sell my paintings at work, to my ever-tolerant colleagues. I’d set it up as a blind auction, so that I could garner some information on how best to price my artwork. The conclusions I have come to are as follows:

  • It’s a lot more difficult to sell art than I initially anticipated!
  • Many people, while they may appreciate a painting and have kind things to say about it, may simply not be in a place where they want to purchase one.
  • When you have no cachet, as an artist just beginning the journey, your work is worth a lot less than what you might envision in terms of real money. That does NOT mean that your work is any less VALUABLE, but you’re not going to make all that much more than cost + time if you want to start building up your reputation and credibility.
  • You may have to be prepared to let a painting go for a little less than cost + time, if it’s going to generate more business or goodwill; ye olde loss leader. Just be sure that you’re not being taken advantage of, and I suspect that’ll be a completely separate lesson.

Having learned all of these, I have received two bids for two of my paintings, which is nice! I shan’t announce the details, as I believe to do so would not be proper, but I now have a baseline to gauge my pricing around; My 8×8 in pieces should go for an average of £50, so I now have real data to refine my pricing model. read more

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment

Keeping up the work.

by on March 28, 2014 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

Even though work and secret-project-x (not nearly as exciting as it sounds, unfortunately) are keeping me incredibly busy, I’ve been able to start ramping my creative output up a bit more. While I’ve not quite reached the same levels I used to be able to, I’ve definitely been doing a lot more this week than I have in recent months! Let’s take a look;

Storywriting: I’ve been picking away at a short story, and tweaking my novel (again). Again, it’s not a massive amount of work, but I HAVE learned some good lessons about the conservation of detail, and pacing. One of the impacts that working mainly in a graphic novel format has had on my writing is that I have a tendency to do a lot of visual description and info-dumping up-front rather than allowing the physical universe of the story to evolve. read more

└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,
 Comment 

Exciting New Developments!

by on March 17, 2014 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

Aloha, everybody!

Even though I’m MASSIVELY busy at the moment between work and secret-project-X-that-a-lot-of-people-know-about-but-I-can’t-really-talk-about-it-yet, I’ve been working on improving myself as an artist. Not through improving the actual quality of my artwork, however; one very important facet of attempting to earn money off your artistic endeavours is managing your own brand, and marketing yourself.

To that end, I’ve made a start on my own brand; In a couple of weeks’ time, I will be the Artist With an Engineering Degree! This will be the chronicle of the creation of more artwork, and will also play host to my methods and concepts. One of the first things I’ll be doing is showing you the lifecycle of one of my illustrations, specifically the one that you’re seeing today – I’ve been recording myself as I produced it, so you’ll get the chance, hopefully next Monday, to watch how I bring my characters to life! Then, time permitting, the week after that I’ll be kicking off the first AWANED with a video discussing city skylines, with accompanying artwork! read more

└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,
 Comment 

Paintings!

by on March 14, 2014 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

As part of my constant drive to develop my personal skills, I’ve been exploring forms of artistic expression other than comics illustration and writing!

Over the last few years, I’ve focused mostly on my lineart. Obviously this is mainly due to the requirements of the comic artform, but it has rather had a knock-on effect on the rest of my art. I tend to think of scenes as collections of outlines first, and fill in the colors later on. While this is fine for pencil or ink work, it has its limitations when dealing with painted media. My first forays into acrylic (which I chose for its ability to convey highly saturated colors) were absolute messes, adhering rather slavishly to depicting the edges and outlines of the scenes. read more

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
3 Comments

Gong hei faat choi!

by on January 31, 2014 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

Gong hei faat choi! Happy new year from me to you, and I wish you a prosperous and auspicious one! If you’re celebrating, I hope you have a brilliant time and get to catch up with friends and family alike. Eat plenty, make merry, and have an awesome time in general! I’m looking forward to this year’s celebrations in town; I missed them last year due to illness, so I’ve got some catching up to do!

Joi gin, bai baii!

M.

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
3 Comments

Brace Yourselves!

by on January 6, 2014 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

Welp, back to the grind now, unfortunately! But I’ve got some big plans for 2014 – More details on Friday when I’ve done a wee bit more preparation!

As for Elf Blood, what I want to do is improve the artwork; To this effect, there might be a few noticeable changes over the next few weeks, and there may be a fair bit of inconsistency. Please bear with this, as it’ll settle eventually and will hopefully make the comic better! Feedback will be much appreciated during this period, so let me know what you think! I’ll be sure to list the specific changes I’ve made each week, so it’ll be fairly obvious what it is I’d like comments and crits on. read more

└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

Finding style

by on November 25, 2013 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

So, recently I’ve been thinking about my non-comic art, and how to develop it further. I’m fairly proficient at landscapes, while my human representation could definitely use practice. What I’d REALLY like to do, though, is to turn my skills towards the fantastic. Rather than simply take the landscape and transfer it to medium (in my case, mostly ink-on-foamboard), what I want to do is exercise my imagination like I do in my comics.

However, I’d also like to work towards being able to sell off pieces. With landscape art, audience is relatively simple; Illustrate famous local landmarks or iconic scenes, market them to locals looking for recognisably local art or to souvenir-seeking tourists (neither of which, I should point out, I’ve actually done – save for the illustrations of Hong kong I gifted to my parents). While my skill level on these may be reasonable, it just doesn’t feel that these pieces really give a massive amount back to the (potential) buyer. Whereas, with a more fantastic subject, you can incorporate more in the way of story, or symbolism, or subtext. Or hell, just do something appealingly weird. read more

└ Tags: , , , , , , ,
 Comment 

New medium, new art!

by on June 10, 2013 at 6:00 am
Chapter:

Hullo everyone!

It’s a bit late, so I’ll only put up a little post today (I’ve been reformatting a script for submission; that and giving myself the fear about trying to break into the industry), and I promised you an experimental piece last week, so here are the results!

This is white gel pen on black foamboard. There’s also some red and purple gel pen, but they didn’t show up at all on the black background so I tried to hue the white ink with them; It didn’t turn out so great. read more

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments