Friday 17 June 2011

Facebook!

I thought I should make people aware that the Facebook page has suplanted this web-blog!

You can find us here:

BULL-PEN

Wednesday 4 May 2011

Star Trek - Arena


One of the most loved and most laughed at original Star Trek episodes is "Arena." As a kid, I loved the tense drama of Captain Kirk being hopelessly outmatched in his man-to-man mortal combat with a big rubbery lizardman. These days, I find the episode hilarious and awesome at the same time. So I thought it was good subject matter for some Bull-Pen treatment.

Monday 25 April 2011

Lost Bounce!


Mike The Knight warm up doodle. Done this morning, I had started some of the inks for the boards but felt things were a bit flat so decided to have a little doodle, which acted like rotating a crank-handle! Now I'm back into the inks with a little more bounce in the lines.

When working I can often feel like I'm just going through the motions and as soon as I recognise that I have to re-engage as a loss of connection to the work is a loss of intimacy, which shows in the work. That's why sometimes I feel I really -have- to take a step backwards in order to get further forward.

Sunday 3 April 2011

Metroid


I started this out as a bit of stylistic fun to road-test some ideas for the Bull-Pen. I may have gotten a bit carried away with it, which is often a good sign.
I had to set it aside for a month to meet some deadlines, and it felt really good to sit down and bang out the finishing touches this weekend.

Friday 18 March 2011

Poses.

Most of the time I sit and figure out what pose I'm after by doing variations on the pose. Then there are those times that the pose comes to you pretty much all there! This is one of those.

I had an incling of an image in my head of Antman vs and Ant-eater. Antmans pose pretty much dropped right out of the pencil as my second option.

My two thoughts had been just before the leap and swing and then this one of the mid-swing. Mid-swing won by a mile and was just way more involving and dynamic.

One of the great things I enjoy when looking for a pose, even in an instance where you get a good one off the cuff is looking where to tweak it in order to get the clearest outline/sillhouette from it. Here in the sketch you can see the camera left leg has been moved. Originally I was looking at having it more towards the camera/viewer but the killed the movement. I drew the arm up by his face as part of the swing first but started to wonder if an extended arm might give balance to the pose and quickly realised he needed to look coiled and that the straight arm tipped his centre of gravity the wrong way for the eye movement through the image.




Saturday 12 March 2011

Saturday's Warm-up Challenge.

Draw a baby version of a DC character or a version that is cutesy enough to be Baby-friendly ;)


Wednesday 9 March 2011

Attack!


An initial design for an in-house piece.