Yes, I'm alive, if you have been wondering. I blame the sunny days.

This post is really a digital quickie and and as much as I stand for the tradiotional mediums in drawing, the computer still does offer it's advantages. You can really do fast care-free stuff and don't have to worry spilling the ink bottle or something while doing. I do digital doodling every once in a while but don't really have the patience to do finished pieces on the screen.

Gotta do more of these at least.

Again, no new material but instead some really ooold stuff. This picture is one of many that had the alien in them. The movie hit me like million volts that time and has remained a favourite since.

This is from the year 1995, drawn with the tastes of a vulnerable 18 year old :)

I've been a bit busy lately at work and home so not much posts, sorry. So I decided to look trough the harddrive to find some decent enough old material. The bad thing about old material is that...it's old. The good thing might be that you can see some improvement happening. Also you can wonder what on earth have I been thinking when I did that.

So I dug up these two zombies! I guess at the time I was living in Italy and had discovered the work of italian Dino Battaglia and his moody horror comics. So these drawings I did to my sketchbook straight with a pen while listening a lecture on the history of italian illustration. When I finally scanned them I did the mistake of adding some cheesy photoshop thingies on them. They really would have functioned better on their own. Especially the dotted effect behing the zombie is horrible but the greys added to the bg of the Stalker work OK. I did post them once at the www.pingstate.nu -forum and they have been rotting on the hard drive since. So bring out your dead, I say!

I promise to post something "new" before next week 'cause these date circa 2002.

A few more...

When I was young, 15 years old or something like that, pretty much a kid that is anyway. I discovered a fantastic book from our local library. It was the "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" by two of the Nine Old Men Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

I had already been a fan of Disney animations (and of course WB shorts as well!) but this book was something of a revelation to me. Eventhough it went behind the scenes and explained the principles of animation, sometimes in exhausting detail it still didn't ruin the magic for me. On the contrary from that point on I began to watch animations with a completely different mindset. I admired the craft, the effort and the skill of the individuals. I wanted to be an animator. I haven't even started my lukio(the finnish "high school") and began asking possibilites for going abroad to study animation. The option that I considered was CalArts (thanks for my tutor for finding brochures and info in the no-internet era!). Of course I was young and completely devoid of life experience on my own, tied to my family. Then..I chickened out. It would have been expensive for my parents too although they might have even supported me financially, I doubt that they would have let this young grazy kid from Finland go all the way to the USA...

OK, now I got carried away in remembrance! Maybe I'll get back on that subject again. The point however was that the book "Illusion of Life" was Inspiration of Life. It presented these amazing artists and one of them was Bill Tytla (for example Stromboli from Pinocchio and Chernobog from Fantasia). He was a master animator and projected a lot of emotion to his drawings. I have adopted a few principles for myself from Tytla's work that I try to get into my drawings and what they should contain by a happy accident. They should have weight, be dynamic and have emotion.

And what ever fits for the occasion!

The post for today is just life drawings, croquis to be exact just 5-10 min. studies on pose. Hope I got at least one of those qualities right...

I just scanned a lot of scribbles and doodles from various scrap papers and such that I have had lying around at work. Meetings, presentations etc. can really be really effective doodling time but let's get one thing straight, I'm still always paying attention ;)!

Not many of them caught my eye in the sense that I would want to post them at once but rather I'll let them gather dust on my hard drive and mayybe I'll take them further...

Anyways, the picture here is a sketch of a boat that I drew at a beach in Sopot, Poland. Pia and I went there over a week ago. It was great. I enjoyed Sopot and Warsaw and definitely want to visit them again.

I really hadn't touched watercolors in a long time so it was fun. Just to sit on the warm sunny beach and draw transported me to another time. The atmosphere was great with all the fishing boats, smell of fish and the seagulls flying about.

Watercolor is a great medium but it's also damn difficult. There's not much room for mistakes...if you don't want them that is. This is more on the "traditional" side then.

It seems that I made a post today after all. Tomorrow I have to get up 5 am to drive my parents to the airport, sheeesh...

These certainly can be counted as Happy Accidents. I have recently been guilty of "pimping my sketches", meaning that I take those sheets of random shiit doodlings and start "polishing the turd" (Ville is going to kill me pretty soon for overusing that phrase). I think these came out ok, well ok enough for my blog that is...

Just had one of those days at work a while ago...

Now that I got started and liberated, let's get rid of unnecessary clothing. This one's a quick sketch on the beautiful forms of a female body.

Heh, I'm really taking uncertain babysteps right now! This pic should convey the feeling of uncertain future :D

Pen with digital color.

Damn, this seems to be a bit more difficult than I thought. Just selecting the first picture that I dare to unveil is quite agonizing.

Oh well, I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself. If I can run around naked from the sauna why can't I post a sketch that can evolve into something else later!

Well, finally I got around to the point where I hop into the ever-expanding flow of blogs! It took a bit of courage even though it is just push button publishing :).

I have been following for quite a while the enthusiasm that people around the world have in spilling out their guts in written word and pictures. So why not follow their example?

But do I have anything to offer? I sure hope so. The fact is that I'm not much of a writer so you can rest assured that I won't be posting masses of text. However, I will be posting pictures. Not huge amounts...at least not yet but when I get this thing up and running it just might give a moment of interest to someone and there I have reached my goal!

Pictures will be my choice of communication. They might be about my everyday life, comments about the world, things happening in my country Finland or most probably, they will be doodles and drawings that contain none of the aforementioned things :).

They will be happy accidents bound to happen!

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