Look What I Drawed...when I was four and a half years old!

My mum was having a sort out recently when she found a bunch of drawings that I did when I was four and a half (when you're that age, the half is very important!). I was pleasantly surprised when I saw them, especially by the fact that there were quite a few recognisable characters included...

Old School Scribbing: A-Z Guide To Helping Your Child At School

I recently found a bunch of illustrated books and stuff that I'd made while I was at school, which included this book which was produced as part of a class project during my first year of Secondary School (so I would have been twelve years old) and that I did all of the illustrations for, based on our teacher's suggestions. The original drawings were in colour and then photocopied to make the book. We also produced a video.

I had to take photos of the pages, because the book was too large to fit on my scanner...

Old School Scribbling: The Ghost of Christmas Future

My mum was recently having a sort through the cupboards, and found a bunch of books and drawings I made when I was at school. I was sat having a look through them and I found a book called All About Me, which unsurprisingly was all about me...

One part which made me smile was where I wrote about what I wanted to do when I was older: "In the future I would like to write and illustrate my own books and get them published!"

A pretty accurate depiction of what my life is like now! Although I wish my desk was really this big...

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 Four

One more old-skool drawing I found! This was a cartoon I drew for a student magazine to accompany an article about the number of movie sequels – Men In Black 2, Spider-man 2, Scooby Doo 2, Stuart Little 2 – being released that summer (2002)...

Old Skool Scribbling 2!

So I found this still life painting I did using acrylics for my GCSE Art exam...



And a couple of my sketchbooks from my A-level art course with these pen and ink drawings of imaginary landscapes and architectural views...