New Beginnings

 Hey I've moved my blog over to my website here's the link

Bennessy's Website

I'll have new posts, products and launched over here

Thanks a mill

Ben

Jack Frost : Rise of the Guardians

Hellooooo,

A couple of things to blog today, the first is this

My friend and incredible artist Adam coloured up my Blacksad piece from a few weeks ago.  Some of you might have seen on it my facebook page this past week ( cause I couldn't wait to post it up). Hope he feels like colouring more of stuff, cause well he just makes it look better! If you dig his work, go check out his blog it's class!


I've been pretty busy this week. Just got a chance last night to knock out this pic for the blog. It's Jack Frost from Rise of the Guardians. 

A great film that I only saw over Christmas and watched a bunch of times since.Wanted to have a go at drawing him since.  Anyways, thats me this week, catch you all next friday or over on my facebook page that im recently giving some love and attention to.

Laters!

Cappy

Working on some new test scripts at the moment. There's one or two people in it that I haven't drawn before and This guy, Cappy. Pretty swamped this week so I just inked up a sketch I drew of him during in the week, it started off as a lunch time doodle but I just kept ticking away at it. I'm always a bit, I dunno "surprised" isn't the right word but its all I got right now, to see Cappy with a gun and actually shooting people.

Really looking forward to seeing winter soldier so this was a lot of fun to do. hope you all dig it.

Blacksad and other stuff too

G'morning! ( or G'afternoon or G'night wherever you are)

A few things this week, first off BLACKSAD!  Blacksad is one of my favorite books so it's about time I actually posted a pic of it. If it's a book you're not aware of you now NEED to make yourself aware of it, the writing, the art ALL of it is so very, very well done.

Had a lot of fun inking the coat, I reckon I'll try some more Film Noir style pieces this year, referencing it was just great.

Aaaaaaand something new, I now have a facebook art page. There's a few pictures up on it at the moment I'll post more and more every week. So if you dig my art please go over there and give it a like by clicking here . Just to give you a little more incentive, as soon as I get to 100 likes I'm going to giveaway a few prints. So by merely just liking the page you could be in with a chance of winning these

Flo and Telephone Tess could be YOURS! So please click the link and I'll pick a name out of the first 100 likes and that person will get a copy of these.

I'll post up some sketches, warm ups, inspirational pics and pieces from the blog here as well, I'll also post up a lot of the figure studies that I only post on twitter so you'll get more than what will be up on the blog.

Anyways, that's it for now, catch you all on the new Facebook page and the blog!

Laters!

The Goddamn Batman!

Another Commission piece this week as the hand is only starting to heal up properly but look, NO SPLINT NOW :) HUZZAH!!

Was asked by family to knock out a Christmas pressie of Batman Arkham origins. Knocked this guy out, its A0!

Wouldn't mind having another stab at the Batman Origins costume, there's a lot going on in it. Next week I'll actually draw something for the Friday. 

Here's a pic from the printers just to give you an idea of the scale.

Anyways I'd better get back to work. Catch you guys next week. Same Bat time, Same Bat channel! ... (see what I did there? Ahur hur hur)

First Blog of the New Year!

Yooooo,

sorry about the blog silence but I have valid reasons

1 - Really busy up until the Chrimbo holidays and any free time I had went into the commissions I had to do, which I obv couldn't post cause it would have been a Christmas pressie spoiler.

2-  Look I sprained a ligament in my drawing hand so :P,  it's on the mend now tho and I'm back drawing, according to doc I'll be 100% drawing fit by next week

So I'm gonna post up some of the commissions I did now and keep some other ones for dry spells, like say when I'm busy or sprained my hand ( not that I EVER plan on spraining it again)

So here goes

This was for my friend Dave, who asked me to do a caricature of his missus Claire.  Usually when it comes to family and friends I point blank refuse to do caricatures for many reasons. But I grew up with Dave and Claire, now I live in Dublin and they're in Wexford so if I got it wrong, well I'm not around to hear about it! So why not have a go at it  ;)

After I told Dave I don't usually do caricatures of family and friends he said all he wanted was " a girl with black hair with a lab coat on" (as Claire works in a lab). When I got the chance to work out the caricature it didnt really take long, turns out Claire is pretty easy to draw.

side note - By the way EVERYBODY in facebook land, well finding reference on you to draw is a tad easy and a little stalker friendly... just something to keep in mind

So here's the pic, I just thought it would be a little funny if I threw in a bottle of wine into the mix and made it look like Claire was swigging wine from one of the test tubes in the lab.

and here's a pic of Claire with the pic, everybody's happy. ( Note her awesome Christmas jumper! )

Job Done! I'm back to blogging weekly now, I'll have a new Facebook art page soon that'll be updated a little more regularly so watch out for that too!

See yee next Friday!

Back Blogging

Hey folks sorry about the flakey posts these past few weeks, really been squeezing out every waking minute of the day recently.

I did another storyboarding talk this week out in DCU as part of their Media week. Got made a member of the DCU MEDIA PRODUCTION SOCIETY, not too shabby! :) This is me after the talk with events manager Aisling Sinclair, who I must thank again for the invite.

 I got some new stuff done before Thought Bubble this weekend. Thought I'd post that stuff up.

A few pin ups and some new sequentials I'm working on from a Deadpool sample script

Hope you dig em!

Here's the Pin Ups, Reeeeeeeeaaaaalllly like drawing Black Cat :)

Here's some Deadpool pages I'm working on

More of these to follow soon


And more of these too, I wont be posting up any more inks of these but the pencils I will for Sure, Here's the complete page one of Carrie and Rufus

That's the lot, time for me to clock back into work again

Laters I'll gfill you all in on Thought Bubble next time. Have a good weekend!

Storyboarding Talk at Electric Picnic!

Hey Folks,

Happy Weekend,

late post this week as I usually blog Friday morning ( Irish time ) and wasn't sure what I'd post up until now. Buuuuuuut I have a couple things left handy for such a week when things get so busy I don't get a chance to finish anything. This is one of those weeks.

Here's a piece I'm still pretty happy with from a cartoon I still adore. This is Heatblast from Ben 10, I drew this up for a mates kid who had the flu at the time and was ( hopefully still is ) a Ben 10 fan.  Hope you guys dig it too.

Aaaaaand here's the Ignite Talk I did at Electric picnic this year in the science gallery tent.  I talked about storyboarding and the way the Ignite talks work is like this - there's 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for 5 mins. It was a lot of fun to so, some of you may have seen it already as I put it up on Facebook and Twitter during the week.



Here's the Youtube link as the video isn't loading via blogger, I'll try get sorted so it can play on this post.





see yee next week!

Back from a Brief Hiatus

Hey folks

sorry about the lack of posts but I was at NYCC and then last week was me dealing with the fall out of taking off to the comic con at short notice, I did post some figure studies I did on FB and my twitter tho. Just in case you missed em I'll throw em up here as well. I'll start with them and lead into the finished piece I did for this week.

this guy was sitting around the airport in Dublin

Two more guys in Dub airport

This guy was sitting in a pub in NY, drew him while I was waiting for some mates

This guy was in Central Park

My fav of the trip, this guy was on the plane home

Some doodles in the pad, mucking about with some pens.


Aaaaaaand the piece this week. Well a bunch of my friends got married this week, that's right a bunch!!!

One of those couples are my mates Ted and Kells. I went through secondary school with Ted, we quickly became friends over comics and all things film and nerdy. As we left school and did the usual drifting apart nonesense, he meets the great Kells, they get married and live happily ever after!
Sooooooo a nerdy friend gets married, what do I do? Seize the opportunity to draw these two something nice. 

I remember him being a big Joe Mad fan ( who wasn't right? ) and while being on the stag I remember Ted saying he actually knew Kells when he was a kid. So it kind of made sense to use Joe Mad's characters Red Monika and Garrison from Battle Chasers, since these two kind of had a Mulder Scully will they wont the thing later on in their life and knew each other as kids.

The problem here, well Red Monika dresses a tad... well...slutty. Pretty sure herself and Ivy from Soul Caliber buy their outfits in the same shop.  And Kells is a classy girl and Ted well Ted isn't a classy girl.  So I didn't want to have that overly busty almost nude Red Monika in their wedding present, it works perfectly in the comics but not so much as a wedding present.

Then I started thinking about the pose, well I've wanted to do some kind of homage to Rodin's "The Kiss" for a while now. It's prob one of my all time fav's of any art ever.

I remember studying this in school, reading about how uncomfortable the pose is for these two  and that the kiss itself could only last for a second before the pose would become so uncomfortable. Nonetheless the couple seem to twist into "unison" so we literally see the couple becoming one. Every beat of intimacy hit in this great sculpture and yeah they're nude but it's pretty classy, bet these two never twerked a day in their lives and manage to kiss and keep their tongues in their mouths.

So tried to capture the essence of Rodin's 'Kiss' and Joe Mad's generation inspiring Battle Chasers, this is what I got.

Left out the characters weapons for the most part as Red Monika is a kick ass mercenary who usually is up to the gills in knives etc, but left in Garrison's sword, put it behind them, almost a fading silhouette so it's almost suggesting that it's the end of one part of their life, but the blossom on top of the tree behind them is blooming, so it's suggesting new beginnings. 

Ted and Kells, Congrats you two. I wish you both all the happiness in the world.

100th POST!!

HEY EVERYBODY ( HEY DR. NICK!)

this is my 100th blog post.. somewhere Dan Spencer is laughing at the guy who never blogged and used to shun technology. But here we are, Technology embraced and a 100 blog posts later.

Here's my folio for DICE, the finished Northlanders pages I did last week and some Secret Avengers pages. Had a lot of fun on these

I just got sent my Ignite talk that i did about storyboarding as well, I was hoping it would be up on the website for the 100th post but alas it aint so, hopefully I'll have it for next week!

right these pages, they show action, some talking heads, cars, helicopters, longboats, they show some super heroes and some vikings. Covering as much as I could and here's hoping these are the pages that land me that job in comics!

Hope yee dig em! see ye next week, same Ben time, same Ben channel :P

Comics Folio

hey folks,

here's some Northlanders pages you haven't seen & one you have seen before. Still have a rake of pages paneciled and not inked, only going to throw up the finished pages between now and DICE. Might throw up the in progress work on twitter.

Hope yee dig em. More to come next week, I'll prob put up my entire folio for Dice next Friday, so look at this post as a sort of Friday the 27th post 0.5

50 Shades of Trixie

Hey folks,

Just managed to squeeze this pic out today. Maybe some of you know Andrew Hickinbottom's character Trixe? Well if you follow his Facebook ( and if you don't I recommend that you do so straight away) you'll see that everyone kind of has a go at drawing this character. I've wanted to for a while now so gave it a shot today.

Lots of fun to draw, I can see myself drawing her again just for kicks! hope yee dig it. I didn't want to post another in progress page of comic art, they'll all get postyed when they're done. so hope this fills a gap until next week!

Really digging drawing women at the moment ( as you could probably tell from the last number of posts ), might even take a page from Bruce Timm's book n draw a bunch for a book we'll see how that turns out.

If you would like to get you hands on a book of designs let me know via Twitter/Facebook and  IF I get enough interest I'll try knock one out for Christmas or something! Linsk to both my twitter & Facebook are to the right! :)

Laters!

Felling a bit Nostalgic

Hey folks,

sorry about the lack of post last week, had a nerve problem and it sorta stopped me drawing for a bit. Buuuuut here's some stuff for this week,

Pics from the talks I've done recently and I actually found a rake of old drawings. like my portfolio that I used to get into college with aaaaaaaand some pics I did near the end of my days in college.

So here we go, Thursday lats workshop first.  

First off I'd just like to say Thank you again to all who came to the workshop. There was even a few people who came down on the night on the slight chance that there had been ticket cancellations and they might get in. Really appreciate the interest I hope you all got what you needed/looking for from the workshop, very happy to be working on your folios with you now!

Just caught a pic of the crowd as they left the science gallery.

Aaaaand then I went on to do an Ignite talk at Electric picnic last week. An Ignite talk is 5mins long, and every 15 seconds you have a new slide to talk about, so you gotta keep up with the slides as they change automatically. Loads of fun, would love to do it again. The talks were recorded to go onto the Ignite talks website, when it goes up I'll post it here too.

Aaaaaand yep they got my name wrong on the poster outside the tent, didn't put a dampner on anything I enjoyed doing my talk and saw some really interesting talks and met some awesome people.

sooooooo some of you may have seen on my twitter page yesterday that I found some old folio work, well here it is.

Found this chest and some old portfolios in a clear out yesterday, I thought it might be a bit of a laugh to post up some stuff! Well the stuff that lasted, some of the paper deteriorated over the past 10 years so i did what i could with what i had at hand. I apologise now, but I didn't have any internet access in when i was back in the rents house so i had to stick with the camera on the iPhone so some of the quality of the pics isnt so hot, but hey neither are some of the images ;) .

So here's what got me into BCFE... yes I was the guy that had comics stuff in his animation portfolio... rookie mistake

I copied this from a comic book I really digged at the time. Drawn n painted on A2, acrylics were about the only paint i had any grasp of at the time.

Yep I also had the stereo typical celebrity charcoals, here's Enya and some Hopkins, A2 again.

next probably what got me into college I had sketchbooks and sketchbooks full of drawing of my friends in school. there used to be an after school study, I signed up for that and used the first hour to draw hands, bags negative shapes of chairs, people you name it just things I knew that were famously hard to draw things I had heard helped me improve my observational skills. Honestly that's probably all i was aware of at the time. When I went to college I realized EVERYTHING that I was doing wrong.

I drew Loads of hands

More comics stuff I copied for my folio, all A2.

Then i got to college and did stuff like this, all of this is from my last year in BCFE.

10/15 mins pastel

sustained pose (always annoied my that I messed up his thumb) 

 10 mins conté, love conté never went back to charcoal after I got the hang of em

below is a gesture, probably a few seconds I cant really make out how long it is, charcoal on newsprint

below is a 10/15 mins, contour drawing was kind of a favourite of mine

started to get into watercolors the more I got into David Mack's work...

another gesture

 tried some new stuff with inks

More watercolours

this was actually my first attempt with ink i was raging i got the bleed wrong on the legs, the line ran pretty thick.

Pencil, sustained drawing

So there you go, I think a pretty clear learning curve is there to be seen from what I've done over the past 10 years. Here's to the next 10!

Also here's some new places to come see me talk about storyboarding  

 Above you will get a 2 hour workshop where I will talk about storyboarding and how it can be used in animation to inform people about health, kind of how to tell people visually and get the most impact.


AAAAAAAnd one Im really really looking forward to is the DICE con this year

Here I'll be doing an hour talk that will be closer to my workshop last week. So if you want to talk Storyboards come over and say hi. If you dig comics, You GOTTA check out this con it's got an amazing line up!

So Sin é Hope you all digged that, next week I'll have some new stuff to post! :)