This is what else I've been up to...

That renovation bug must've been biting again...
With the impending birth of our second child, we were going to lose the room that currently serves as our study, so we thought we'd made a room out of our roof space which'll serve as the atelier. Amongst all the other work I've been up to, with a builder I got into a bit of manual labour. I'm gonna need a BIG rest soon.

Here's the space with the chipboard floor laid down.
The attic ladder installed in the passage, and the little mountain goat discovering a new toy.
Bringing in the plasterboard sheets for the walls.
Putting up the plasterboard sheeting.
All the plastering done, new window fitted and lighting installed.
All painted (except the architraves), including a feature wall- had to continue the theme.
Underlay (areeba, areeba) laid for the floating floor.
Floating floor partly laid and being supervised.

Ta Dah! All done (well, almost) just gotta fit the skirting and paint the architraves....then we fill it up with clobber.

I need more hours in the day...

I'm going to end up looking like this the way I'm going at the moment...Either that, or this'll happen...
Lots of stuff going on, and not enough time to do it all between work, freelance work, an attic renovation and a baby coming very soon.

Baby news

This one is for all of the ex-Disney Sydney guys, and a bit of a nod to Toby as well.

More Creature Concepts

This is turning into a bit of an alien-o-rama...

Caricatures pt 4

This one was a tough assignment. My parents asked me to do a caricature of them as they had recently moved house, and after seeing the change of address forms that I had done previously, they wanted something similar. I thought "oh my gawd!", I was as nervous as hell. It was like having the most brutal critic in the world, say "okay, produce something for me". The pressure was on. I don't think I'd actually drawn a picture of them before. They had been at their last address for 15 years, and the previous one before that (just down the road), for about 20, so had accumulated a lot of stuff, despite all us kids having moved out. Some of us had left assortments of stuff behind, but nonetheless, they had a lot of boxes to move which started to become a source of friction.
Here's my crack at having some fun with the situation.

Here's the real Mum and Dad.

I think I got Mum pretty well, but Dad was off a little bit- I think I made him too skinny. Then again, my wife thinks my Dad is the more accurate one. Regardless, they were happy with the job.

Not long after doing this pic for Mum and dad, I had the opportunity to do a "live" caricature. We'd gone away for the weekend and staying with us was my wifes auntie and a friend of her who made these cute copperwire bugs. I'd taken down some of the storyboarding I was doing to do in the evenings (yeah, work, work, work) and this friend asked if I'd draw a picture of one of her bugs. I figured that was rather boring and decided to do a caricature of her instead. Unbeknown to her and everyone else in the room except Nik, I discreetly studied and knocked out a caricature while she was busy working on one of these bugs. They all figured I was working. It proved very entertaining when I presented the finished picture (unfortunately I didn't get a copy of it). It had been a while since I had done one with the subject in front of me, but it was great fun, and with the model in front of you, you can explore different angles, and see different expressions to figure out the best result.

Caricatures pt 3

As mentioned in the last post, here is the caricature of me at work by the great Andries Maritz, former Disney colleague and master caricaturist. You can also check out his recently discovered blog here, which has more recent work. Actually, I'm surprised I haven't been drawn with the animator's hunch here.

Okay, back to what got me started on this whole caricature topic. Up in Sydney a few years ago we moved house and were going to send out change of addresses to everyone when I had the brainwave of "why not make a personal one and include a caricature of ourselves". This pic below is from when we moved back to Melbourne, but everyone loved the earlier one I did, and it seems to have become a popular request when someone else is moving house. I tried to keep them fairly simple without a lot of detail 'cos they were going to be included with some text on an A5 sheet (about 210mm by 150mm).
This one and the one further below were drawn with black biro and coloured with colour pencil. I've used black biro for quite a while as my choice of tool for inking in, as I can get a lot more subtlety out of it than a felt tip pen. I found that the felt tip pen has a bit of bleed and it won't feather-off particularly well. The Black biro has a cleaner line that doesn't bleed (but can smudge unfortunately), plus I can get some lighter variation with it for grey tones that I may be after.Here's my Brother-in-law and his girlfriend from when they moved into their new house. As you can probably see, I find women (and particularly young ones) hard to draw. There was something I didn't quite get.
And here's a later photo of the real couple for comparison.
More to come...
I'll probably do two more posts on this topics with some work of others I've worked with.