Emmaretta's Red Robot

One morning on a bike ride I had a whole kids book story (in rhyme) planned out in my head, then I went home and really screwed up the drawing. I came back to it yesterday, and here it is.

I don't know why he's wearing perspex flares, they didn't appear in any of the sketches or the penciling and yet there they are.

Putting Fish on the Map.

I bought some old maritime charts a couple of weeks ago, with a vague idea of using them in  some sort of mixed-media way, but it wasn't until I read a quote from W.B. Yeats about the 'mackerel-crowded sea' that any sort of idea crystallised.

It wasn't a massive leap of an idea, because it was essentially 'draw fish on map.'

The Mackerel-Crowded Sea, mixed media, 30cm x 42cm.

You Have Nothing to Lose But An Unpleasant Brown Residue.

I really enjoyed this, a commission from Holy Island-based espresso engineer Neil Anderson, aka Coffee Repair Guy, to do him a new logo and image.

He had some ideas about Coffee Repair Guy as a superhero character, mixed in with soviet propaganda poster style, so I worked up a couple of comic hero ideas and one that was out and out sovietified. I was a bit surprised but pleased that he picked this one, because it was the one I liked the most:

although privately I still like this version with the red text at the top better:

The other two working ideas, which didn't get as far as colour choice:

The Caretaker.

New 'scape' drawing, 'The Caretaker.'

Pencil on A3 paper. 

It started off as two thumbnail doodles;

 

then this;

 then this;

neither of which I liked, so I went back to pencil. I like pencil. It's an odd amount of graft for something I'm a bit indifferent about now that it's actually finished. I read an article about pencil techniques after I'd finished which warned that pencil drawings can be almost photographic but oddly lacking in life, which I think is what's happened here. There's not a lot of life in it, and it's compositionally quite confused. I've done a few of these kinds of image now and not really felt that I've caught what I was aiming at yet.

And you have to look closely to find the title but he's there;

Time Passes

From work in progress; passage of time page.