How To Train Your Dragon Widget

Yeah I totally jumped on the BANDDRAGON! Aaahaahaa... Grabbed the widget from Terra's blog (dappled studios) :D
Hatched! My dragon is now called DAFFY NIGHTMARE.




Oh but anyway I saw this movie on Friday and I was very surprised to be that visually stimulated, entertained, and just basically to NOT have to sit through a crappy Burger King toy advert.
Again, it's not Meatballs but it's still easily the best Dreamworks digitally animated movie. (When am I going to stop bringing up Meatballs?!)

The story is extremely simple but at least it made sense - not something like "if you start out as a total loser but you get your ass kicked long and hard enough, you become a kung fu champion." It's just a kid trying to get acceptance, realising that he can't agree to the things he has to do for that acceptance, and it is up to him to do what he believes right - whatever the downside.
On top of it others end up seeing things his way, which is more of a stretch (I would have been pretty happy with the first part of that as a movie plot) but smooth, not grating, and hell who wouldn't want what those lucky, lucky SOB's get for their "happily ever after"?! I have nothing against a good dose of wish-fulfillment in my movies.

Most things on my cons-list are quite inconsequential, and I'm so shocked to have liked this movie this much that I'll let them slide. Except Baruchel's voice acting. I can't really call that inconsequential. It could have been a lot better, but in "serious acting" sequences - in a pivotal argument with his father, threatening situations and so forth - he was great and I totally felt his panic. Everything else was so flat I could have sworn it was a Kaurismäki film :P

Backs are ...back

We had one of my favourite models in class yesterday, had a wonderful time.

But... Why can't I do ANYTHING except lifedrawing?! OMG yeah that is so going to impress the Pixar people D: NOOOOOTTTT

Although I just realised this is like my 12TH post this month and only 4 (!!) of those posts including this one are lifedrawing! So I'm starting to branch out noticeably!

Return of the Space Kid & some enjoyable influences

I finally finished painting my first maquette. It's been over a frikkin year!
"Holy crud there is a giant cat outside the window!"

He's laughing at you, not with you.



For better or for worse, I stole the colour combo from Tove Jansson's Moomin picture book "Kuinkas sitten kävikään" ("The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My").

To phrase it diplomatically, Jansson's books have influenced me in artistic, literary and the-devil-knows-what-other ways since ...always. "KSK" had an electrifying color scheme, in which the combination of purple, orange and black played a major part. And which I've often shamelessly copied since then.

That reminds me of another artist without a blog or site to speak of who inspired me as a child: Jean-Jacques Sempé. He's mostly known for his few-worded comics, his work for the New Yorker, and (my particular inspiration) his illustrations for the "Little Nicolas" -books written by another hero of mine, René Goscinny.
Goscinny, for his part, was the writer of the comics "Asterix" (original artist: Uderzo) and "Lucky Luke" (original artist: Morris), two other MASSIVE influences on me.

Did you miss out on childhood? Or did your childhood suck? Good news: it's never too late to get one. A GREAT one.

Don't let the lack of an internet presence discourage you from checking out these people's work if you have a little time to spare for book-searching. Especially if you like good children's books.

Klaus, the first fetching goldfish

(...at least he was going to be... I won't go into the tragic details of his demise.)

Berg and Klaus in intense training mode.
This is 2GAAG fanart, and I am at this moment being physically restrained from typing - as the only measure to stop me from going on a ramble about my deep, irrational love for that old show.

(Here's the sketchbase for this.)

Life drawing was great this week

Coloured characters

...differently. Not perfect, but those previous colours just annoyed me to no end.

Pope-icide

I GOT A TICKET TO CONAN'S VANCOUVER GIG AND I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TO ASSASSINATE THE POPE FOR IT
OMFG

Burlesque and nudesque

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That's right that's right...

I must be pretty annoying with all the fandoodles... [Edit: slapped some colour on]


A few days ago I finally managed to hunt down the movie All Over The Guy online. It's a romantic comedy about two gay men falling in love when one of them is trying his hardest not to.

AOTG is not spectacular by any means: it is a very typical romantic comedy apart from the main couple being gay. But weirdly, even most of its flaws were kind of endearing and definitely added to the amusement. (Just for one example, the other half of the couplet, Eli, is an X-Files nerd... Who can't use the internet. You really gotta see this to believe it. He's even a reporter, Chrissakes! And it's the 00's! AND ELI DOESN'T USE THE INTERNET!! When I first started peeking around the web - which I seem to remember being middle of the nineties - the first thing I ran into were X-Files nerds.)

Not to mention the nostalgia. The movie came out in 2001, when the world was suffering from a tragic Richard Ruccolo -shortage due to the fact that the once so lean, mean, and (for the nineties) surprisingly obscene "Two Guys and a Girl" had fizzled out into a misshapen "gotta-please-everybody" ending that absolutely nobody watched. Following 2GAAG the world sat up as one and took notice of Ryan Reynolds, who was every bit as funny as Ruccolo and a tad more conventionally handsome. (And good for him - everybody from that show has a special place in my heart.) Leaving Ruccolo to star in indie movies with gay themes, I guess. Anyway my point is he simply isn't in enough movies and TV, not enough at all. Which is why I was trying to find this movie for so long.

So considering the cast, I fully expected to love it and I did. It made me feel really warm and fuzzy, and no matter what any of you say, you KNOW you all like to feel warm and fuzzy. It's in that wonderful group of movies just like In The Bleak Midwinter and Mixed Nuts and stuff; can't be called must-see for everyone I know, but they're personal classics to me.

Lighting...

Colour studies

The world deseeerrrves to see these. :P Landscapes first





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This is the HELL EGG! The devil egg, if you will (hah!) Why? Because after all the work I put into getting the colours of my watercolour remake right, the scanner will not make them look the same and even adjusting in Photoshop won't help! Now it appears as if I had no idea what I was painting, even though seen in real life it looks pretty damn close. Argh:

Original photo: National Geographic, by Joel Sartore at University of Nebraska State Museum
So, we had to reproduce a photo three times: once a tonal drawing in pencil, then a monochromatic watercolour (I think the watercolour paper also had something to do with why they all scan with so darn different results) and finally a full-colour copy, once again in watercolour.

The copying was done before the landscape assignment, so I wasn't as in control of my watercolours with the egg.

Coloured layout

EDIT MARCH 12th: This should be my final version. I spread the lamplight a little bit but that was it.

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[Old post]
I might still change it - I didn't ask around for any feedback on this yet.


I learned so much during this colouring process though. I almost can't wait to tackle another one.

As curiosities, here are my first tonal doodle for the layout and the final tonal sketch I did after some awesome critiques from our teacher:

Attention pls + hasty designs

I joined deviantart. I'll be adding people I have a special interest in (either IRL or artwise) to my dA watchlist in the near future - so if I know you, at least you have that to look forward to! OR, if I don't know about your presence yet, you can look me up at kelipipo.deviantart.com !

This is supposed to be final project stuff ...ALL I CAN DO IS LAUGH :D





You got it, it's Narnia-related, woot