A Quick Warm Up Sketch

James Charles On Main

I recently designed a logo and some business cards. I'll post the website when its done too.

Nursery Paintings

A few weeks ago l ventured back to a place that l dont dare travel to very often. It's been a LONG time since l finished my illustration course, and since then l've worked almost exclusively digitally. Its just so much faster to work digitally and it has a couple of great features that traditional mediums simply dont have. 'Undo' is an obvious one, and for me the ability to fine tune colours endlessly makes my work look far better than it otherwise could.

But with the arrival of our baby approaching l wanted to get some "real" artwork up in the nursery. To cut a long story short, painting these canvasses was the first time in a long time that l've enjoyed painting again away from the computer. They actually turned out exactly as l'd planned them ..... apart from one minor oversight .... l forgot to paint the elephant's tail. Oh well.

Ellwaste Booklet Cover

This is a cover for the Ellwaste Company Information Booklet that l recently did. I've also just completed the Ellwaste Website in the last week ... only took a speedy 3 years to complete!! Check it out at www.ellwaste.com.au if your interested.

We've Had An Upgrade

I thought the blog could do with a bit of "foofing up"

Go Girl

This is 1 of 3 tender illustrations l did for a childrens book not too long ago. The other 2 didn't turn out as well as l'd hoped (even though it was a quick brief), ... but l don't mind this one.

Girl

There might be a job on the horizon where l'll need to improve my rendering skills of the females. This is a snippet from a test illustration l've done recently to try to get myself back into the 2D swing of things.

Meet the Author

The main purpose for this post is below, but l couldn't go past putting an image up. This one's a snippet from a test illustration l did for my Children's Book idea ....


Now for the important stuff, Leia has kindly tagged me so its time for me to answer a few questions. Here's the deal.
A: The rules of the game are posted at the beginning.
B: Each player answers the questions about themselves.
C: At the end of the post, the player then tags 3 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog

10 years ago: I was studying illustration in Melbourne and getting told by the teachers of the course that "we would never earn any money from it". (Inspirational people weren't they!)

5 Things on my to-do-list today:
1. Get a coat of paint onto a couple of rooms in our house
2. Eat
3. Go to Bendigo to pick up my suit for my mates wedding
4. Eat
5. Eat again

What I would do if I was suddenly a billionaire:
Number 1 would be to travel. Starting in Africa to see what we didn't see there last year (which is a lot) and just going from there. Possibly spending half the year travelling and the other half making my own films (which l would do by decking out a bus and travelling around Australia working from inside as l go) for the rest of my life. l'd invest a little too, but donate most of it to a selection of my favorite charities.

Three of my bad habits:
1. Sleeping in
2. Eating too many dim sims
3. Always starting too many projects at once and never finishing any.

Three places I have lived:
The last 3 have been Echuca, Cohuna and Taylors Hill in Melbourne.

5 jobs that I have had:
Trench digger
Medical Waste Collector
Wine Salesperson
Animator
Playback Engineer

5 things people don't know about me:
1. I'm really an alien.
2. I take medication that costs more than l earn in a year
3. I happily pay my taxes (look at number 2 for explanation)
4. I don't care what goes into dim sims. I'll eat em anyway.
5. I'd love to travel around the blues fesivals playing John Lee Hooker, Hendrix and BB King on my guitar. Because people need to hear the blues.

Buck

Well 2000 hits on the blog just ticked over, .... so since about 1900 of them are probably me that makes a solid 100 visitors to the page over the last couple of years. Impressive numbers, l'm sure google will be jealous!!

What better way to celebrate than to throw up a new pic. Here's one l did yesterday for my mate's bucks day which is gonna happen at the gee-gee's in a few weeks.

Alien

This is something that came together fairly quickly. Aliens with raygun blasters are always on my mind it seems, so l sketched this out and mocked it up pretty quick. It's ok, but l look at it now and see a lot of stuff that needs fixing. not least the character design! mainly though its the lack of a warm underpainting that l like to start with now, the colour design (while not brilliant) would be a lot nicer with the warm/cool contrast under the linework ... oh well, maybe next time.