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‘Trychfil, Servant of Death, and a Hapless Grub,’ pen and ink, brush pen and Sakura Microns on Bristol Board, 6″ x 9″
Trychfil is the servant of Death and takes the form of a large mantis like insect. In this image, Trychfil has come to take a poor grub to the underworld.
Even prickly monsters like tea…
I finally managed to enter this weeks Illustration Friday (and get something new up on my blog). I really enjoyed working in pen on the piece for ‘Hello Sunshine‘ so I decided to create another pen and ink drawing. Instead of simply using Sakura Microns, I used pen and ink to create more line variations with different sized nibs.
This piece is 6″ x 9″ and was created with Higgins India Ink and pen, and Sakura Microns (for some of the little fiddly bits).
In the photo below, you can see my collection of nibs.
Have a good weekend.
A cat on a rocket. Created with acrylics and pens on Bristol board, 9″ x 9″.
I struggled with this painting and repainted areas several times. I think I struggled because I tried to do some things differently with this piece. I have rarely used black paint so the black cat was something different for me. I hoped too that by using black it would force me away from my reliance on using pens to add detail and line work and that instead I would have to paint my lines.
I’m really trying to improve my brushwork, especially when it comes to laying down fine lines and details. I even bought some new smaller sized brushes, a mix of liners, spotters and rounds of size 1 through 000 (seen below).
Have a good weekend.
The above piece is 4 3/4″ x 6 1/2 and was created with acrylic, gouache and sakura pen on watercolour paper.
I was excited by this weeks Illustration Friday topic and so decided to create something. I have always loved the sea, I think in part because I grew up in a small seaside town in Wales (the town is called Burry Port and you can see some pics of the harbour here, Burry Port on BBC Wales). One of my fondest childhood memories is of going to the Burry Port beach with my Gran, my brother and our Gran’s blue bucket. We would go to the rock pools and my Gran would turn over the stones for my brother and I to catch the crabs which we would unceremoniously place in the bucket and then swish off home…
I also thought that having a specific topic might help me push my color choice in a new direction. If left to my own devices I tend to repeat my colour palette. So I spent some time researching in some of my National Geographic mags until I found these two images. From these images I settled on a blue/orange colour scheme.
From here I spent some time drawing and came up with a tentative design, as shown below, top left.
If anyone has any suggestions and/or tips on how they push their colour palette, please let me know :)
Have a good night and weekend.
Some orange robots I made as an image for my website. Made with Illustrator.
Created with Sakura Microns, coloured pencils, watercolour, gouache and paper collage.
Here’s a pic of the Sakuras I use :)
I’ve been itching to make a poster so I decided to make one for a band I like called Bloc Party. The poster references the song ‘So Here We Are’ off the album Silent Alarm. I created all the line work in Freehand and Illustrator and then coloured the design in Photoshop.
To find out more about Bloc Party you can check out their official website at www.blocparty.com.
This is my Christmas Card design for this year. I began the card design with acrylic paint on watercolour paper. I haven’t painted in a while so this project seemed like a good place to start.
The image below is the original acrylic painting.
I wasn’t really happy with my colours or edges in the original painting so I scanned the painting and reworked the design in Illustrator.
Here’s the opening adventure of Marmaduck.
This is my first finished comic style illustration of a character from my sketchbook. I tried to keep things simple , hence no text bubbles and only four panels. I have always loved Double Fine’s comics (go to www.doublefine.com to view) and thought that their four strip panel sets were a good minimum number. Despite keeping things simple it was harder than I thought, but I really had fun creating the Marmuduck panels and it was an excellent new challenge for me. If anyone has any advice on how I can improve my comic skills for the next set, please let me know.
I was also inspired by Pete Fowler’s great little comic strips from his ‘Ken’s Mysterious World’ series. I’ve included a scan below.
I actually created this comic panel for my redesigned web site (which you can view at www.gilestimms.com, though it’s still being updated). I thought that it might make the home page more interesting to have something different every so often, hence the comic. Hopefully I can create a new set every fortnight, especially if I keep things simple with the vector format.
Anyway, this was entirely created in Illustrator.
These are the designs for my Christmas labels (for presents). The owl was drawn with Freehand’s Calligraphic brush tool (I think I really like this tool) and then color was added in photoshop.