Sketching for life.

So Xmas came and went. I got a pile of Mauri Kunnas picture books as a gift among other things...I wouldn't have believed that I'd been that nice :)

The new year 2008 (still no flying cars or teleporters...disappointed!) arrived and I will throw in a new gear in my "professional" life. I've had the feeling for several years that I've been a bit on the backburner for several years. I'm going out to find the true potential in me if any :)

Year 2007 had many nice surprises for me and the year 2008 will probably and hopefully hold some new ones! I'm not making any actual New Year's resolutions but I promise to myself to start before it's too late.

For the blog I'm gonna start doing more images "with a point"...but to reset that, here's some more sketches ;)...

Oh yeah, Happy New Year 2008 everybody!

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

It didn't have the best day for drawing today. Again here's a collection of some really quick ones and the other ones where I went ahead with a bit more painterly style...hit and miss :)

Phantom lifedrawing

A somewhat different mindset with these lifedrawings. I added some color in a couple of them. There's also a collection sheet of really fast doodles which were done while the model was moving. The model had some really dynamic poses.

For A Few Scribblings More

Trying to break the silence here so I'll post a couple f recent sketchbook doodles. These I did last weekend when I was in Turku and visited the Cosmic Comic Cafe tere. I'd never been there so I had a pint, read some comics and drew something. Nice place.

Back To the Life Drawing Part II

A different model, different poses and some quite funny. Don't know if these turned out just the way I'd liked.

Oh, and I finally went to see Ratatouille...it was great, the Brad Bird/Pixar -recipe's cookin' that works. The end credits sequence was great and the same guys have done an animated short in the same style to the DVD. I guess it's officially the first Pixar -produced 2D -short. It really would be cool if Lasseter&Co would finally pick up the long lost pencil under the animation desk were it rolled during the last dark days of Disney's feature animation.

Back To the Life Drawing

Let the images move for themselves.

A quick comic

Little...black humor.

Doodlecollection part X

A bunch of doodles and scribbles, yam yam.

Lifedrawing - attack of the clones

Today's lifedrawing went better then last time, I think. So here's a bunch of graphite and ink ones.

Doodling while waiting...

Something to keep things warm. It is starting to get chilly again here. A non-sketched pen drawing into the sketchbook without a particular idea (I have too much of those)...of course it could also be the start of a story since it was the first page.

Oh the agony! I'm waiting for my new computer to arrive hopefully already this week yeah! Maybe it will give my creative output a boost and I'll get something meaningful done.

Life drawing strikes back!

I felt that drawing didn't go too well this time but here's a couple of the penciled ones. The ink ones weren't OK enough.

Doodlecollection again + animated doodles!

The Animatricks Animation Festival is over for this year. Five days of animation screenings and I went to most of them...whew. It did get a bit tough at some point...Anyway it was great to see a lot of good animated shorts from Finland and other Nordic and Baltic countries.
The Master Class held by Paul Driessen was very inspiring and gave tools for thought. I didn't get any actual animation done on that too short of a day but maybe I'll do at least pencil test versions of the ideas I wrote down.
But! Here's at least some animated stuff ;) While I was waiting for the second last screening I doodled some sequential stuff to the festival catalog's note pages! I just couldn't resist testing out..would it actually move. It would use some inbetweening but hey it's just a doodleman!

Oh and the usual collected doodles page here too---

Doodlecollection

These I my favorite and most common posts, doodle-pages. These are again some recent and not so recent doodles from various scrap papers.
I'm actually quite busy this week watching animation at the annual animation festival Animatricks here in Helsinki. I'm also helping out with the festival team. There's gonna be a Master Class on friday held by Paul Driessen, a veteran dutch animator. I hope that's gonna ignite some motivation in me to do some animation finally by myself. After all, it's another passion of mine.
The festival started today and is gonna last until next sunday. So if you're in the neighborhood, go and watch animation! See more info here.

Life Drawing with a vengeance!

Yeah, I'm back and so soon :)! Here's some recent 5 minute croquis. The model was this skinny but muscular guy who took fun poses. They were expressionistic, sometimes awkward and always with a dynamic feel. I soon didn't pay any attention to the accuracy of the anatomy but more to the feeel of the pose and the emotion in it. I tried to achieve this by changing the tool from pencil to a brush. That automatically makes you go with broader strokes and more on the flow of the line in the poses.

An anatomical mistake might be the one were the model has no head.

Good old stiff

When I just got to update with something, I dig some oldies of course :) The lady here is rare painting of mine and by rare I don't mean that someone would actually pay for it on ebay...Rare in the sense that I very seldom (too seldom!) pick up the brush and do a painting. So this I did during a painting course at school. It's pretty big over a meter tall.

It had been a while and it still has...

CPR for the blog again!

It's a bit of a dry season at the moment here...so I just decided I'll draw a dry looking person. I picked up a pen, some scrap paper and tried to draw in a sterile way. Still, I had to give it a hint of color with markers to justify a doodle-post.

It's not much, I know but I'll try to pick up speed again.

It's hideous

Well a bit quiet around here again so I whipped up this little digital sketch and colored it a bit. I seemed to have a grotesque vibe to my doodles today...which is nice :)

For Wallu's Songbook

The finalists of the comics competition were all at this dinner. It was cool to sit at the same table and chat with finnish comic's big names such as Wallu, Tarmo Koivisto and Petri Hiltunen. Wallu brought these great two books that he's had for quite some time now. They are his "songbooks" were he has asked people, mainly comics artist to draw a song or a tune. He asked us all to draw something in them. But as I got more concentrated in eating and chatting away with mr. Koivisto I didn't get anything drawn in neither of the books. So Wallu kindly said that I should just take one with me, draw a pic and return it to him! So I hesitated to hold on to this book that is somewhat valuable with it's artworks from different artist but also I bet loaded with sentimental and cultural gravitas.

So today I finally sat down and drew something. I decided to draw without sketching as had most of the others. After all it was about music which in itself is spontaneous! I just had to scan it to keep as a memory for myself. It was really cool to get into the same covers as the many of the finnish comic veterans and the likes of Don Rosa, Mort Walker, Gilbert Shelton, Moebius... :))

A Happy Accident!

Well, I genuinely couldn't have believed that the comic that me and Eija Lappalainen did for Sarjis 2007 -competition would get to the competition's anthology let alone reach the 2nd prize! To our surprise and delight it did :)

I hope this will give me the motivation to do more comics in the future! Now I can post a few panels of it. Get the whole album "5 Fantasiaa" from the stores here in Finland :) It's got a lot of good stuff in it!

My only complaint is that they misspelled my name in the author credits :( It reads Hanne instead of Janne. Not only it changes my name but my sex also! Oh well, I guess I'll have to take it as my alter ego...

Here, here and here are some of my previous posts about the comic.

Going primal

The comics festival in Helsinki is being organized during the following weekend. Check here for more info.

I plan to hang out there a lot and also there's finally some of my new comic stuff published too. It's not much but hopefully...it's a start! See ya all there!

Oh and this pic is something I doodled down on paper at work yesterday, could be something more primal in me or maybe it's just a bloke totally wasted, wanting to make a closer acquaintance.

Again some new croquis

Ok, these are from today. Drawing went a bit smootker than on th previous time. A lot to learn still and hope to continue with these and to do some other new stuff as well!

Croquis are back!

The life drawing sessions have begun again. You really can see that I haven't done nothing at that front during the summer. It was a real struggle to get anything on paper but hopefully it starts to get smoother on the next time. Interesting was the drastic change in the feel when changing the medium from pencil to colored pencil and then to dried up brush pen.