Random sketchbook nonsense from the past while:

I feel I’m sort of on to something with that last drippy woman; I’m going to blow her up and transfer her onto bristol to see what I can make of her, cuz it’s about time I started actually doing something with some of these rough doodles.

In other news, I got onto the Black Church Print Studio’s screenprinting course (by the skin of my teeth—those things are popular!), which starts in April. I’m really excited! I’m not entirely sure what I want to print yet, but I’m working on some illustrations that I’ll hopefully be able to make a small print edition of during the course.

Please, somebody tear me away from Open Canvas—it’s addictive. I’ve previously attempted to digitally paint in Photoshop, and the plethora of brush options always sends me into a spiral of indecision and frustration. OpenCanvas is an amazingly lightweight digital painting application; it has a teeny footprint with just the required amount of options, and somehow painting feels far more fluid and natural than it does in Photoshop. Part of the fascination is the option of exporting an ‘event’ file, which contains a complete playback of your painting process, and is totally fascinating viewing. I’ve been looking at event files from various artists and it’s a brilliant learning experience to see how they work. There’s also a networking option, which enables you to share the same canvas with other artists online - my crappy cup-on-a-string dialup negates this possibility for me, but I can’t wait ’til we get broadband and I can have an OC sketch session with someone.

Here’s an unfinished work-in-progress (Vulcan, the fire god, to be precise):

1. Original sketch:

2. Inked lines in OC.

3. Colours in progress.

The colour isn’t even nearly finished, but isn’t it crazy how much the drawing improved in OC? The original pencil sketch looks bizarrely awful to me now. The event file shows me running through about five mouth and eye permutations—I think I need to fill a couple of sketchbooks with mouth and eye ref drawings.

Speaking of digital painting - here’s another sketch I’ve been working on, but this time in Photoshop:

This is all making me realise how much I miss the process of painting. I’m seriously thinking about digging out my oil paints again.