Bratislava

Part two - Pictures from Bratislava! Only three this time.

Budapest

This year I went on a wee holiday travelling along Danube. As per usual instead of bothering with photos I did drawing instead. This is the selection from the first part :)

Home. 2

This is part of a panorama of what currently is my home. The city is placed on seven hills, here you can see two of them. When I was first picking as to where to go for my gap year it was between here and Glasgow, and for a completely unreasonable reason (which has the access to the sea) I picked this place. It has been a while since I moved here, I got completely sucked in and I think it would be hard to leave now (although not impossible :)).

Home. 1

Unlike my mom I have never really moved when I was growing up. I spend almost 20 years in the same city, in the same home. And then I finally moved! It was probably my first big, independent decision. One thing I never want to change is closeness to the sea. I might not live super close to it now, but it is there when I need it.

And the above is my favorite panorama of my first home :)

It's this time of the year when I miss it more.

North Lodge

This is a commissioned piece I did back in July. The original is A3 and it was a "portrait" of a house. Drawn from a selection of photos :) It was great fun to do it. I also have a lot of in progress pictures which I am trying to assemble into an animated GIF :P

Edinburgh Reef & a wee update

After way too long I am actually posting it here: the Edinburgh Reef site which is part of my degree show is live. And actually has been live since 13th of May! You can admire there some illustrations, the story of Rufus and Henry Pearce and other miscellaneous things!

Apart from that there have been some gentle visual amendments to my portfolio and the actual contents of it have changed. Next step: Eelcat update!

untitled collaboration

These are effects of collaboration with Lindsay Ure. This is the text and illustration I did for the said text, you can see the other one here.

You think about them while sitting in the sun. The tip of your cigarette throbs orange between the grey of the growing ash as you inhale, sitting at a café, sipping your latte. The noises around you are muted, quiet trams and foot traffic. A bell mounted on a bike handle chimes, cautioning. Wind pushes itself through the streets. The morning light reflects off the canal in front of you. It darts across the rippled water among swimming mallards and sinking leisure boats, shining up to the buildings pulled forward by the weight of their many windows. The water sparkles as if covered with coins.

They are tall navy coloured houses with decorative white trim, lining the canals, leaning into one another like narrow books stacked loosley on shelves. You wonder how to describe them; their endearing unevenness, their lines attempting the elusive right angles. How can you illustrate their pultritude? As European as empty wine bottles, as crisp as tailored suits, as romantic as tulips in basketed bikes...Bricked rivers flow under, beside, in front. An arced bridge is a conversation between them. You sip your latte. They are exquisitly handsome yet oddly familiar, their grace stands unaffected. They remind you of prostitutes tied upright to benches to sleep, but that reference does not do them justice; their beautiful dysfunction is too charming. Next you try to imagine them as windmills tipped into one another, but then ask yourself what would happen to the overlapping blades; Victorian dollies on display; fat crows on telephone wires; crooked teeth in fat women’s mouths; illustrations in a graphic novel about the life of Vermeer. You decide that none of these work, you need to be more economical in your phrasing. ‘They lean’, you say to yourself.

Owls and Monuments

Something I did for the Student Newspaper here in Edinburgh. :)

Long time, no see!

Christmas had me very busy, so did New Year... I am mainly focusing on my college project at the moment. I got this idea that it would be so nice to animate some things, but I never did flash before. It seems to be quite easy to leart though. Here is my test animation, which only consists of few of my sketchbook drawings put into one!

The Hub

One of he most characteristic buildings around. You can see it from the illustration studio at college, and last year I had the pleasure of working in there :) First one of the more properly "underwatery" buildings. More is yet to come!

Today is going to consist of doing some college work (this is the "plan" for pretty much every day, whether it goes according to it or not is an entirely different matter) and doing fun things in the afternoon with Riennahera.

Yellow + Sea

These are two of my favourite so far pictures of buildings. I played a lot with them both and they are the sor of thing that I would quite like to do later on - not necessarily for this project, but surely at some point.

I am finally feeling a bit more settled in my new job too (shoe shop! Mondays and Wednesdays, quite perfect even in last year of your course). And for Halloween we watched (with Mr C) Zombieland, which was quite disappointing after all. Either more guts spilled out or more funny things would have been good... But generally it was so-so. Popcorn we made was pretty good though ;)

Drawing Journal

It's all about paint mark and line.

Drawing journal is current college project. It is meant to be researchy-connected to our main project for the year. I decided to just do a series of drawings that will be connected with my main project by a theme, and also use it as a field for researching and working out the way I will draw/paint the final illustrations in. Some of those drawings I like quite a lot, so I decided to put them up here :) It is all drawn in a little journal book which I made specifically for this purpose - it has days of the month marked on each page. Some of the drawings in it are just on one side, others are on both - but since it is a book, there will be a line dividing it in the middle. For the first time this doesn't bother me :)

Bees, Zombies and a Haunted Bathroom

The other 3 illustrations for the same project as wolves (which was to illustrate 4 out of 10 bizarre stories). I do have some studies for those final illustrations too, but they are nowhere near as exciting as the wolves ones!

The stories were about: bee beards, a new course called Zombie Studies and a bathroom that was posessed by Satan (or so believe the owners) who apart from watching people wash would turn off the heating in the room. Shocking!

Rainy Royal Mile

It's pretty miserable in Edinburgh today. Raining and all that, just makes me want to snuggle up on sofa with a cup of tea and read Moomin books. (Which sadly, I don't really have time to do).

This is a painting from a cuople of weeks ago, posting today because it fits the dreadful weather...

I am very sad to report that unfortunately, St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh has drowned in a fishtank.

My second attempt ever of painting architecture (the first one was funnily enough the very ame part of the very same building).

Trying to catch up with July posts ;)