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! :)