This past weekend I’ve been at Manifest, the Melbourne anime convention. At one of the stalls selling art supplies I had a chance to do some scribbling and try out some Copic markers.
At some point in my art history I’m sure I would have snapped up a set but now that I’m enjoying using watercolours it seems superfluous to invest in the Copics. Still, I had some good fun trying them out.
Was going to use this as the first post of March Blog Madness then completely forgot.
Drawn from life at one of JP’s Miyazaki Fridays.
A project for life drawing this term was to use collage techniques to create an image. The term’s work has consisted of less representational drawing work and more exploration into extrapolation of form and figure as well as different materials and techniques.
Here’s the reference ‘sketch’ I made:
And here’s the completed collage:
One of the things that struck me about the source image was the striking light and the contrast between highlights and shadows. When choosing materials for my collage I chose to go with bright colours, reflective surfaces and contrasted them against a black background. The hi-vis material was pretty fun to work with.
Oops, didn’t have stuff ready for today. But luckily, Connell has put together an extra-special guest post this week! I feel really excited and privileged to be able to share this with you all.
So, today I thought I’d share with you the creation of the wedding cake for myself and my lovely wife Helena. We’ve been married 3 months already! Time flies when you have an awesome wife~
So, our wedding was very geeky in theme, but not to a degree that it overshadowed the importance of the day. But for the cake, we knew that traditional was not going to cut it. Looking online, we quickly fell in love with the many Mario cakes that people have made over the years. The idea we had was to make a custom wedding topper made to look like us, and place that on top of a cake where each tier had the appearance of a Mario level.
The initial design for the topper was Helena and I high fiving, which we thought would be a very cute idea. To account for our rather amusing height difference, Helena was to be standing on a Mario item box:
We have a friend who makes his own toys, and had hoped he’d be able to hook us up with someone who could make a specific resin toy of this design. Sadly, for size we wanted, it was going to be expensive and time consuming, and instead, we found a local cake topper designer who uses wooden pegs and makes custom clothing for each topper, which all looked incredibly cute. We sent her descriptions of our clothes (including Helena’s wedding dress, so I didn’t get to see the topper until the night of the wedding), and I designed faces to look closer to my art style than hers:
With this being made, we had to find a cakemaker who would be up to the challenge of making our cake. A local cakemaker Helena found showed some pretty amazing talent, and once we’d met her and tasted her cake (oh my god her cakes) we knew we had the right cake craftsperson.
So, I had to design the thing. I wanted each tier to be unique, and thought it would be cute if each level was as if they were connected via pipes, making the entire cake effectively one Mario level. Firstly came a basic planning stage, the cakemaker and I had to come to an agreement on what was feasible based on the limitations of icing. Here’s the sketch we started with:
Initially it was only two tiers, but the cakemaker recommended a third (who can say no to more cake?). With that, the top tier was also going to be a cliff rather than the sky and trees I settled on. While the top tier could have been made with a darker brown, it really wouldn’t have been as unique as I wanted.  From those decisions, an overall cake plan was determined:
With that worked out, I searched for as many Mario images as I could find. I ended up chosing the look of New Super Mario Brothers, the colours in that game have an almost… sugary feel to them already (for want of a better, more correct phrase). The first step was to create the building blocks that I’d be needing for all the tiers: blocks, goombas, pipes, pirhana plants, and so on:
And once that was done, I started building Mario levels, which was actually kind of fun! I made sure to keep in as many nods to classic Mario level design as possible. The final designs are quite large, as I designed to scale, so they’re linked below.
And with that, the planning was complete! And the result was completely and utterly worth it:
In the end, the cake designer took some liberties in the design, but that was to be expected. I loved how the colours came out, and of course, the taste… As for the topper, I think it is so damned cute.
Helena and I still have the top tier with the topper on it kept in a case – the actual tier is Styrofoam, and the sugar icing will keep for a very, very long time. Best wedding cake ever? I think so.
Thanks Connell! I hope you’ll provide another post about the other awesome cakes that made an appearance on the night, too! Every table was graced with its own original cake and an accompanying story. Our table especially enjoyed our Pikmin themed cake, but I couldn’t resist sneaking over to the Tetris brownie table and playing some pretend Tetris… I mean, uh, congratulations to you and Helena!
Contests and requests – keeping me on my toes by stretching my normal artistic fare.
My entry into the AVCon 2011 T-shirt design comp:
I’ve started taking character illustration requests for the Kingdom of Loathing again:
A sample picture (this is my Disco Bandit character ‘Silks’ from my old comic)
A painting for a player named ‘Brocrates’:
A painting for player ‘Ereinion’:
I was inspired after attending the ACSA’s 2010 graduate exhibition. Today was the last day of the exhibition so I was glad to catch the show before it ended.
Since I’ve been dabbling in watercolours lately, the watercolour portraits by Ruby Chew were really awesome to see. When I’d caught glimpses of the graduates putting up their work I had no idea that there would be her 52 marvellous mini portraits included alongside her large canvas paintings.
With Ruby’s works fresh in my mind I thought about restricting my palette to just the three primary colours to depict myself. I’m no master in watercolours or portraiture, but this was a fun exercise that I’ll probably try out some more over the weekend.
I am in an evaluation stage now. If I do go back to the image I think I will have to see about making the dragon’s beard more golden and tweak some shading on the tail. Otherwise I’m ready to call this complete.
Last week’s homework was to create two images that were hybrids of two objects that were randomly assigned to us. Each image needed to have one of the objects stand out as more dominant than the other.
Here are my attempts. Can you tell what the objects are, and which is supposed to be the dominant one in each image?
Does this one give things away too much?
So hey I was putting this off until I got a chance to write a bit about it and then I remembered I liberated myself from having to write things to go with my posts. But now oops I’m writing something to go with this post.
From my mum's garden 🙂
Here’s the finished-for-now Juri:
Now with added stripe!
Kind of hurried it towards the end, I always have a tendency to do that! I’ll probably have a few more tweaks to make later, but I think I ought to get my ideas moving for my next picture.
On my monitor this looks more subdued and less pink than it does in real life. I will have to play around with the colour balance in Photoshop and check it out on some other monitors… I’ll probably also do some other digital tweaks like clean up the fuzzy edges of the circles. I’ll learn to paint more tidily with practice, I swear!
