Merry Christmas

Photograph of the week #015

When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week.

Another day of winter in my back garden.

Photograph of the week #014

When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week.

Still on the winter theme and taking advantage of the fact that it snowed again I've taken a few images from my back garden.

Photograph of the week #014

When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week.

Technically a photo from last week but still...

Photograph of the Week #013

When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week.

So it snowed in Bournemouth.

A fairly rare event this far south in England but apparently becoming more common in recent years. Last year I mostly missed my oppurtunity to get some quality photographs of the fresh and suprisingly quantifiable amount of snow but this year I promised myself, no matter what happens, if it snows, i'm going to capture it.

And so I did, despite having the car in the garage for a service and MOT which had 3 days worth of delays put on it, despite not being able to wriggle out of having to put overtime in at my day job and despite the poor state of the roads in my vicinity making the drive to anywhere at all an adventure in itself involving side-wise driving, downhill auto-mobile-sledging and "car-curling". Despite all of this I managed to sneak out half an hour before sunset, to an area less explored in the treacherous weather conditions, and shoot off some photographs i'm quite happy with before the last remaining light of the day disapeared.

So here is my personal pick of the bunch for this weeks PotW. :)

Photograph of the Week #012

Photograph of the Week #011

Of autumnal leaves and the scent of mystical doings...

Up next is a piece of work from one of a couple of projects i'm working on currently. It's very much a work-in-progress so befitting the title of this blog.
I don't want to talk too much about the project at this early point too much as it's still in it's early stages but the project will involve a lot of "fantasy" artwork. Very much with a dungeons and dragons theme in so far as there will be races such as Elves and Dwarves and monsters and classes such as Warriors and Mages, all of which need illustrating in one way or the other.

So below is my, current, cooncept for an Elf mage in what I consider an apropriate setting. It's still fairly early in it's design, the character itself might actually be completely removed and is mostly there for reference at the minute. Her lines need cleaning up significantly and i'd like to play more with her shading/lighting on completion, not to mention her left hand is a little gnarly, I'm not currently getting the right feeling from her trousers either so I might change that up aswell.

Then the background itself which is taking me a significant amount of time but should be cleaned up in the next few days, I was going for a slightly different take on a wood elf sort of theme, it's not a terribly new concept though but a lot of elf artwork will tend to wards a lot of greens and browns and I thought there could be some advantage for going for more dynamic colour schemes such as the autumnal ones i've gone for below. Currently i've just blocked out where I want different colours to be down the right hand side and bottom of the image whilst the left handside is probably nearly there.



As this project develops there should be a fair number of images to post up here and a recent history of concept artwork as well that might be posted in the near future to show my development process.

Photograph of the Week #010

Photograph of the Week #009

I've been extremely busy working for the past month or so, hence the lack of updates however, because of how busy i've been there should be plenty of updates in the near future.

This weeks photograph is a product shot taken on behalf of HT Modelshop check out some of their stuff.

Photograph of the Week #008

Photograph of the Week #007

Photograph of the Week #006

Photograph of the Week #005

Just as in the past few shots this one is from a similar shoot using the same gear again but... following the previous shoots I couldn't resist buying another Nightmare Before Christmas toy... Growing up is taking me a while longer than most possibly.

Never the less, behold this weeks photograph of the week.
It's one of my favourite looks that Jack Skellington has in the movie and the briefest of them all really but the "Pumpkin King" concept is just such a great one I couldn't help myself but take a few more snaps.

"Here a moo! There a Moo! Everywhere a Moo Moo!"

Yet more All Animal Rescue work.

This time I was required to make them a fairly simple A4 poster with relevant details on with a similar design to the previously succesful Banners.

I made two in the end, one with a specific message, (Advertising two animals in need) as a proof of concept and then another design as a more general purpose poster.

Both designs have now been put to use.

Photograph of the Week #004

With a Huff and a Puff...

Brother Grimmer update!

I've been playing around with the shots from the Brothers Grimmer shoot and cobbled a few things together. It's all rough pieces of concept art still at this stage and i'm just fooling around with the resources I got from the shoot whilst trying to conceptualise some really professional looking artworks for the band.

As per the name of the website and very much in the name of the this blog I should point out, These pieces are very much works in progress.

Once again do check these guys out;
http://brothersgrimmer.co.uk/
http://www.facebook.com/brothersgrimmer

Photograph of the Week #003

This weeks photograph is from another set I've done recently similar to the test shoot I did here.

This time however I had a new piece of equipment, a "Neewer Ring light". "Light" being the definitive word here, it is not a flash. However it is very cheap compared to actual ring flashes. I may make another post on this subject in the future but for now here is a macro shot of a wooden dragon statue.

"... like a river running through. Running through you..."

Today I witnessed a New Forest Drift.

I went along with some friends who have horses of their own on the New Forest. The Drift is an event where horses and ponies on the forest are rounded up to a pen where they can be branded, wormed and collared, etc. It's quite a spectacle but not an event for the general public for general safety reasons and for the succesful completion of the work that needs to be done without interference.

I got lots of photographs that I am, in equal measure, pleased with and disapointed with. I've not had lots fo experience taking action shots so I didn't mange to get the best shots otu of some of the frames I composed but on the positive side I did get some I was more than happy with.

These first few images are of the round-up itself.

Photograph of the Week #002

This weeks photograph is of one of the flowers my dear Fiance grows in our back garden.

"Talk to meee! Tell me pleeeease!"

Had a whole lot of all-sorts and sundries on my plate as of late but i've got several Brother Grimmer pokers in the fire at the minute which I need to get finished up to pass along to the guys.

For now though here is a little concept piece I've thrown together recently, trying out some ideas.

Do check these guys out;
http://brothersgrimmer.co.uk/
http://www.facebook.com/brothersgrimmer

Photograph of the week #001

Because whenever i'm not scribbling i'm snapping away with a camera and to compliment the scribble of the week articles, there shall now be "Photograph of the week"

Every week I shall pick a random photograph(that I like) from that weeks(or near enough) snaps and post it here. That's only 52 shots a year... how hard could it be?

So this week, with no more fanfare, a shot of the pirate themed mobile that hangs above my dear sons cot.

What's this? What's this?

I recently got a few more gizmos and gadgets for my camera, some close up filters to go on the lens and an extension tube among other thigs. I decided to have an experiment with these amateur augmentations and see what sort of images I could squeeze out of my camera with them. So I set my miniature photo studio up on the kitchen table, got my lighting sorted (two constant lights on either side and a flashgun) and suddenly found myself lacking anything to snap at.

When doing "studio" macro photography for the first time with such equipment for no real reason other than fun(on this occasion) it becomes hard to think of what to do. I assumed I'd want something with an interesting texture or with interesting features worth zooming in on, possibly something colourful but i'd already resolved to not use flowers as my subject matter.
With a hesitation for thought and inspiration I grabbed up an old stone dragon statue I was given as a gift once and a couple of high quality Nightmare Before Christmas toys that I bought a few years earlier to which I got the below results.

Regrettably this first shot has a slight motion blur to it as my hand must've shaken, most shots were taken with a tripod however.

The last two shots show the same dragon statue, one normal shot(taken to experiment with exposure settigns with flash) and the second one taken with the extension tubes so as to get a close up on the texture of the item.

"I bite my thumb at thee..."

This bank holiday weekend I took my family out to see the jousting at Lulworth castle so that we might see some acts of chivalry and so on and so forth.

The crowd itself exerted no real attempt at displaying any amount of chivalry and so we actually had to leave fairly early on in the event because there was no space or patience present for our little toddler but I did manage to get some shots before we escorted our dear son over to the animal farm that was somewhat more civil.

Once upon a time...

http://www.wip-tricky.com/2010/08/once-upon-time.html#moreSo this weekend past I went down to Throop village with a camera under my arm and a lighting kit over my shoulder to meet up with Matt(Aka Guru Grimmer) to take some photographs of the Brothers Grimmer.

Once there I begun setting up my gear and chatting with the other guys. Lee(Empup Grimmer), Mike(Macko Grimmer), Shawn(Bobo Grimmer) and Steven(Teflon Grimmer) each of them had tons of character and were great fun to shoot.

It was a bit fiddly setting up my "portable-studio" kit in the hall due to tall, angled ceilings but I got it set up... suitably enough and started throwing band members infront of my lens.
Very little direction was needed with these guys to get some excellent shots so it was mostly down to my own abilities at photography to get some good images in frame.

After a couple of hours or so of backdrop shots the guys got back to practicing. So I took the oppurtunity to practice some live action band photography with admittedly mixed results but with some experimentation with lighting and various exposure settings I think I got some good results.

Click here to see more from the shoot.

'Cold Contagious'

I was hoping to make a slightly different post today as I was meant to be doing a photography shoot for the talent Brothers Grimmer this afternoon. Disapointingly a sickness has taken me and my family and so the shoot has not come to pass. Hopefully I'll catch up with the band later in the week or so.

Not wanting to waste my time feeling sorry for myself however I wrapped myself up in a blanket, grabbed a hot water bottle, a pile of medicine and suitable supplies of tissues for blowing my nose with and decided to catch up on some work requested by All Animal Rescue to design the wraparound graphics for their collection tins.

I went with a couple of fairly basic concepts, layout and content is still to be discussed but these are my two intial concepts(before criticism and change requests.)

In response to these designs a further request for a banner design was made based on the second design from above.

Skull Logo Design Phase 3

Final design finished, this one was a little bit more ambitious than the last few, the feathers took a massive amount of time and it wasn't untill i'd finished delicately painting in the buffalo fur that it's not actually traditional on a normal indian headress. I was working from memory of a head dress i'd seen once.

I'm pretty happy with it however and the entire series of hats has been a fun run of concepts, there may be more in the future.

Scribble of the Week #006

My sketch books are forever filled with random mind-scrawlings and scribbles that will otherwise never be used for anything or be seen by anyone, because of this I bring you "Scribble of the week".

Scribble of the week is a weekly feature(on and off probably) where i'll be posting a random sketch, scribble, design or element from one of my various sketch books. These will always be unfinished pieces of work and will often, most likely, be very eclectic.

Here's another old one.

The date of the scan itself goes back to 2007 so this particular scribble is at least 3 years old and almost totally forgotten about. Looking at it though it's tempting to clean it up and finish it.

The concept was inspired by the 100 themes challenge, this particular image was meant to represent "Sorrow". In my head I wanted to do an image of a homeless or otherwise unfortunate person sat hunched with their hand in their hands... it's pretty tough to resist the urge of adding horns/ tails and clovern feet at the best of times but when I considered the idea of a 'fallen angel' who would ofcourse be quite the sorrowful sort I couldn't resist at all.

Skull Logo Design Phase 2

A scribble of the week should be following in the next coupkld of days. (A few weeks late)

In the mean time however is a further four more variants of the same skull logo design from my last update. There are still a few more variants i'm considering toying with before drawing a line under the series but i'm enjoying it so far.