Noch asleep

A little late-night sketch of my dog lying at my feet. When one of us is away the dog gets to sleep on the bed all night which he loves (when we're both home he finds it too squashy on the bed and prefers his bed on the floor next to us!). I love sleeping animals, they look so peaceful and content. I wanted to capture that in this sketch.

Imaginary Animal Doodle

Just wanted to share an animal doodle I was doing between coding CSS for my new homepage. This is one of those imaginary beasts that are almost therapeutic for me to sketch. Yes folks, this is how I started out drawing -- doodling imaginary animals and monsters everywhere. They are basically a jumble of different real animals that I have at some point drawn studies of. One fine day the co-illustrated fantasy monster themed book will become reality.

Going back to dipping pen

Ahhh today has been a nice but slightly frustrating day. I am completely redoing my homepage and am very excited about applying my hard-earned XHTML and CSS skills. Once I am done my homepage will be a breeze to update *yay*. So what is the frustrating bit you ask? Well if you know anything about HTML and CSS it's the fiddling with positioning and getting the boxes to line up the way you want them to and keeping you div tags in line! One typo somewhere and you have boxes floating all over the place (haha -- yes, pun/in-joke inteneded).

Recently I was browsing the web getting distracted when I stumbled upon Jill Calder's blog (one of my tutors when I studied at the Edinburgh College of Art) and read her excellent interview. Great inspiring stuff for illustrators to read:
http://jillustration.blogspot.com/2009/01/interview-by-anna-violet.html
(Caps Lock warning: she btw apologises in advance for leaving Caps Lock on by mistake)

About the image I have posted -- I revisited using a dipping pen since I came across it whilest unpacking (yes, our house is still a big mess in boxes). I am also trying some new Photoshop brushes thanks to a setting I hadn't thought of using to it's full capacity before. Quite pleased with the result. Not sure if the person is an angel or just a person -- but I just wanted to try to see if I could get that feeling of stretching out in some quick few strokes.

R.I.P. my warm light bulb

I for all saving the environment, but with the news of the EU banning the old light bulbs come September first reaching my ears I can't help but feel a little sad. Of course I am happy for the energy and emissions saved. A little less happy about about the mercury in the energy efficient ones. And really quite sad about not being able to have my old desk lamp filled with the warm glow of a 60W lightbulb. I will truly miss the 95% of the energy being used to light a normal lightlbulb going to heat my cold illustrator hands on a wintery day. But of course this heat is wasteful so it just has to go. I just hope they make energy saving bulbs with a warmer glow... (I find they cast a more greenish blue light)...

http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/10/11/eu-bans-incandescent-light-bulbs/