Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Vampires for Valentines


OK... few hours late. And I reserve the right to take this down and fix it when I see it without sleep-bleary eyes tomorrow. But for now here it is. The yearly Vampire Valentines day entry: Check. I was trying something weird with the painting here. I used no lines to define the silhouettes. Even in the first stages beyond a really loose sketch this was all blocked in with shapes and the details worked out through shadow. It was a very different way to have to think. I solved a lot of problems that came up... others never quite got resolved. All in all a lot of fun and an interesting challenge.

And it takes my mind off how much I hate Valentine's Day. Grump.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Anime.... ish (?)


So I've been on this anime kick. And I'm rubbish at anime. Though it's always fun to play around with different styles. But it's got me thinking about Japan. Here's a weird thing. It's about a year since I hit up London. The whole experience was freaking wonderful. A large part of that is because it was in all ways exactly what I wanted. London was so... Londony. It was upbeat and colourful and alive in all the ways I'd hoped and it was also gloomy and somber and full of interesting dead people. Same goes for Ireland and Spain. They were more or less as I'd always hoped they'd be ever since I was a kid and wanted to travel.

Japan though...

Japan has always been on my list of places to go but it has suddenly struck me that it's for an entirely odd reason. It's because I like anime. Whereas my notions about London were coloured by movies I've seen, books I've read and photographs of haunted castles that I'd poured over in the library, all the things I want to see in Japan... don't exist.

The stuff I've watched that makes me want to go to Japan is always set in the far flung future... and is watercolour or photoshop. I've seen so much more anime than I have Japanese live-action films that the part of Japan that is really interesting to me is entirely fictitious. I'd never really thought about it this way before.

Weird eh?

EDIT!!

It's WAY too late for me to be up playing in photoshop but whatever. Have another sthpooky ghotht. I had so much fun doing the other one I figured I'd do another. She took a lot more tinkering to get right than the first fella.