Fiona and Ross' Wedding Invite

My good friend Fiona is finally getting married after dating Ross for 8 years. So of course I offered to do their invite for her. They are a couple of really fun and interesting people so I wanted it to show in the design.
She really liked the end result, and because that means I don't have to get her a wedding gift, so am I. (Just kidding!)
Congratulations again to Ross and Fiona. I can't wait till the wedding.

Portrait Marathon

Dan and I have been doing quick celebrity portrait sketches in our spare time.

It's been pretty fun to compare how we've drawn each portrait, although I haven't always got it right with some of them - strangely all females)

Click for larger versions

Great actors:

Comedians:

 

Mythbusters crew:

 

Back To The Future!

Inspiring Stories Film Festival Poster

Inspiring Stories Trust is a new organisation that trains young kiwis to become better film makers.
They have asked me to design a poster for their end of year film festival.

I wanted to keep the essence of "inspiration" in the design, but still fun enough to get the young viewers' interest.
After so many different ideas and concept drawings, I finally came up with the design I liked.

And the final pencil sketch

ReignDrops Music Video

While I was frantically packing up to move to another city whilst getting things prepared for my wedding I was fortunate enough to pick up a project to work on a music video for ScholarMan.

Here are some of the designs that were used in the video.

This project was completed in about a month. The employer was always so enthusiastic about my ideas and patient during the times of silence (the fun editing times, which resulted in many computer crashes).

I could not have had more fun working on it. Once it was finished, I had a calm sense of "THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO EVERYDAY!"

Panda Project

"Do As Pandas Do"

A watercolour painting I worked on for Gold Panda competition/ exhibition. Rather than something that was political, I wanted to enter a piece that showed humour. And I'm quite certain nobody had ever illustrated a story quite like this (similar perhaps, but not quite the same).

But I cannot, for the love of god, take good photos of this painting. It was either too bright, too much sun, or too much shadow. And now that I'm sending this away for their exhibition, I will never have a good photograph of the painting. Brilliant.

Some closeup shots of the painting.

 

And pre-painting tracing of the drawing on the canvas

The selected paintings (there are no winners or losers!) will be exhibited in China and sold to anyone interested. The money collected from the exhibition will then go toward the panda conservation. Isn't that neat? I'm doing my part for this world.

Prehistoric

Marylin and Elvis portraits as dinosaurs for my work at dinosawus.com. Done about a couple of years ago for a puzzle game. Thought it was somewhat fitting for the new IF topic.

Art Books for Christmas?

I've been frequenting a very insightful book review blog created and written by "Parka".
Since it's a month away till Christmas, I thought this page would provide some ideas for art book lovers out there.

Here's a list of some of his readers' favourites if you don't know where to begin:
I would definitely recommend Peter de Seve's "A Sketchy Past".

 

 

 

 

  

Another book Parka definitely recommends is The Daily Zoo Year 2.

If you have any questions regarding any of his reviews I am sure he wouldn't be hesitant to answer your questions. In return for publishing detailed reviews with photographs and videos of the books, Parka has a list of his reviewed books on Amazon where you can purchase from and he gets a small commission which goes towards his book stocks.

Sneaky

Recently I found a cool illustration contest site called Illustration Friday.

This week's topic is "Sneaky" so I couldn't resist doing a quick illustration for it.

I thought it would be humorous to apply the notion of being "sneaky" to something that was very static (ie a gargoyle). It only makes sense that the first thing they would do if they could move is to eat whatever was around it. And how convenient that little birds like to nest on rooftops.

And here are some quick concept sketches to see which perspective worked the best.