Happy Birthday Charles Dickens!

Today would have been the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, the Victorian author who created many iconic novels including Great Expectations, Bleak House and The Muppets Christmas Carol.

Dickens died in 1870, over 140 years ago. If he was still around today, he would almost certainly be a zombie...

Old Skool Scribbling: Episode IV - A Scanner Darko

Okay, so this is the last of these retro-themed blog posts for today, although I do have a few other bits and pieces that I want to share.

I really liked the 2001 film Donnie Darko, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular character, who goes out sleep walking, meets a demonic-looking rabbit called Frank who tells him that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds, and returns home the next morning to discover that a jet engine has crashed through his bedroom. As you do!

I drew this picture imagining what Donnie Darko would be like if it was a Looney Tunes cartoon...



When I found this drawing in my sketchbook, I actually had all the different parts – the individual characters and items, and the background – drawn seperately. So scanned them and pasted it all together in Photoshop, as I must have originally intended to do.

Old Skool Scribbling: Episode III - Se7en

Hmm... It seems that I quite liked drawing group shots in 2006.

Seven Soldiers was a comic book series published by DC Comics in 2005–2006. Written by Grant Morrison, and featuring art by J. H. Williams III, Simone Bianchi, Cameron Stewart, Ryan Sook, Frazer Irving, Pascal Ferry, Yanick Paquette, and Doug Mahnke, it consisted of seven loosely interconnected titles, each of which featured one of the titular Seven Solidiers: Shining Knight, The Manhattan Guardian, Klarion the Witch Boy, Mister Miracle, Bulleteer, Zatanna and Frankenstien. Although events in one title would sometimes impact upon another title, the characters themselves never meet and aren't aware of the fact that they all eventually play a role in the final battle against the Queen of the Sheeda.

Anyway, in complete contrast to the tone of the series, I decided to draw a picture of all of the seven characters together...

Old Skool Scribbling: Episode II - Why So Serious?

The second of my retro-themed blog posts for today is a bit silly, but it made me laugh.

As far as I can remember – all the way back to two thousand and six – sitting and drawing some stationery items led to me developing a brand new Batman villain...



DC Comics never returned my calls.

Old Skool Scribbling: Episode I - Hadoken!

So last Monday I went to turn on my laptop only to be greeted with... nothing! No image on the screen, no reassuring sound effect as my Mac turns on, just a slight whirr of the fan and then a glowing light on the front as if it was in Sleep mode. But it wasn't in Sleep mode!! After rushing to the Apple Store I was told that there was nobody available to see me today, but I could make an appointment... for Wednesday afternoon! Two Mac-less days later, I went to the Apple Store and they told me not to worry, it was a problem with the graphics chip and not only could they repair it, but I would also not lose any data (which was my main worry!). They didn't have the parts there, so they took my laptop away to the iHospital (...not to be confused with the Eye Hospital, which is where you go if you get Glaucoma), and two more Mac-less days later I got a call to let me know my laptop was repaired and ready to collect!

Which is a long way of saying that I wasn't really able to do any illustration work last week. I did do some drawing in my Sketchbook Project sketchbook, but there were a lot of other things I wanted to do which involved scanning or Photoshop, and so had to wait. But while I was in my low-fi existence I had some time to sort out a couple of boxes of stuff that I'd been meaning to look through for ages now. And in them I found a couple of old sketchbooks from the dim and distant past of 2006AD. Flipping through them I found some old drawings which I quite liked, so now with my computer back, I scanned them in so I can share them here.

Street Fighter is probably one of my favourite computer games. In October 2005 Udon Comics released a comic book series based on Street Fighter 2 and I drew this picture featuring all* of the characters from the game desperate to get a look at the first issue...



On my original drawing I'd left a blank space for the cover of the comic to be scanned and placed in Photoshop, so I finally got to complete the image as originally intended.

*I just realised as I was writing this that I didn't in fact include ALL of the characters, and left out Dee Jay and Ken, which I was quite surprised to discover as Ken is my favourite character...

The Ghost of Drawings Past: Episode One

So I found a whole bunch of drawings that I'd done a couple of years ago, back in the dim and distant past of 2006, when I used to have a MySpace page, money was actually worth something, and Jonathan Ross was still employed – crazy times! Anyway, welcome to my little trip down memory lane...

Spongebob's Nightmare:

One of the first illustrations I ever posted online, slightly perverting a much-loved (by children and students) cartoon character. Possibly the result of too much alcohol...

The White Stripes:

I used to love The White Stripes and saw them live at the Reading Festival and in Alexandra Palace. They're last album, Icky Thump was a bit...odd, but this was when they still had a place in my CD player (I don't think I'd actually bought an iPod back then...)

Euro 2006:

Yes, football! Some of you may be surprised to see that I actually drew a football-related picture, given my general disinterest in 22 overpaid idiots running about on a patch of grass for an hour and a half, and failing to justify the ludicrous amounts of money they get for doing it, but I do at least show a passing interest during any International Competitions such as the World Cup, or European Championships (...well, at least until I resigned myself to the fact that England are useless at these things and will never ever win, despite occasionally managing to fluke their way through to the later stages of the competition, only to lose at penalties in the dying moments).

Anyway... this was done during Euro 2006. Some of the references may not be instantly recognisable to people now that enough time has passed, but these are my drawings of lanky, human bean-pole Peter Crouch, the Burns-esque Sven Goran Erikson, and professional neanderthal, Wayne Rooney, who had recently done a "controversial" poster ad for Nike.

The Mighty Boosh:

What a difference a few years can make. Back in 2006, the Mighty Boosh were actually funny, as opposed to the toe-curling, wannabe rock stars that they've become today. This was my drawing of Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt in costume as my two favourite characters from the second series, before they "jumped the shark": Old Gregg and Rudi van DiSarzio. I guess this is quite dated now, but I still quite like the drawing in this one...

Jimi Hendrix: the Original Guitar Hero:

After discovering the rainbow gradient tool in Photoshop, I decided that the best use of this Psychedelic colour generator would be a drawing of the poster-child for the Sixties: Jimi Hendrix. Not much else to say about this one...

Napoleon Dynamite:

One of my favourite films ever – a fact that is proven by the number of times I've watched the DVD – this is a drawing I did of the main characters from Napoleon Dynamite: Napoleon, Kip and Pedro. If you haven't seen this film already, go out and buy it NOW!