Digital doodle dump

Something else than life drawing for a change: doodlepages. I really haven't been doodling digitally as much as I should but that's gonna change soon I'm sure.

These are just collected random digital doodles I've had here and there. Most of them are just quickly trying a new brush or something.

Teen's oldie goldie samurai-ish

Phew time flies...when you have no or little free time etc. So it's been almost 2 months without a post.

Well there's no material of my own to post anyways...yet so that's why I dug out some OOOLD stuff! These stand as examples of certain influences a young sensitive artist confronted...which are in these ones obviously blade runner and samurais. Can't really get much clichéd than that! Ok Blade Runner obviously was influenced my samurais as well...hmm. There really isn't any original ideas out there anymore now is there?

The samurai is from high school I think. Testing those watercolors and inking with a brush. It looks like I've been inking with stick though.

The Deckard dragon is probably a bit older as I've been testing coloring with my airbrush which I bought with my confirmation present money, heh thanks Jesus!

But it was such fun to come across these oldies goldies in a box that I had to use them as CPR to the blog!

Animation Classics from upper elementary

Now this is a special post. At least for me. As those who know me and those who've been checking my blog, probably know that I'm an animation buff. I've always been.

I practically took posession of the Illusion Of Life -book from my local library.

I was also a fan of The Simpsons which had recently started on tv. So was my friend Tuomo Kokkonen. We especially were fans of that lovable comical duo, Itchy&Scratchy. So we decided to do some animation. Pretty soon we realized the obvious fact that how much labor it is and we had no idea of practical technique (like keeping things in register..).

We had a very original story idea but ended up drawing only fragments of it. We also never saw if me had actually achieved any illusion of life...So with great anticipation after almost 20 years I opened some archives and with the aid of modern tech (if only we'd had Flash&After Effects back then..) I scanned in the drawings. There wasn't much to see and pretty hard to tell what's going on but still I was quite proud what we kids had tried to do :)

I'm not quite sure which "scene" was drawn by me or Tuomo but it was supposed to be seamless story in the end anyway.

There's also, which really must be my first drawn paper animation (flipbook or two maybe before), a test with half-filled flour sack. It was inspired by the Disney-book but the animation looks more like the sack has a fit mid-air...Click the images if they don't play.

Quest for the doodle

Slow it has been. So here's actually on Oldie Goldie that's a favourite of mine. I did it as a birthday present to my mother in 2004. It shows her as a little, lilliput size girl riding a tortoise (which is of course referring to our pet Yoda) in a magical forest.

Unfortunately it's not a scan but I just took a photo of it with my phone in it's frames on the wall :) So excuse me the low quality.

Ich bin ein Wunderbaum - high school stuff

I'll continue my Oldies Goldies -posts. With these I was at the same time pleasently surprised that I didn't grin in horror when looking at them but at the sae time thinking that have I improved so little.

These character design sketches were done when I was in high school (circa 95-96). A group consistings of a young and older animation enthusiasts and an animation veteran was thinking about an animation short. I don't remember why it didn't start going forward but I guess that's the case usually anyway.

The character in the synopsis was this wooden puppet (not Pinocchio). And I think we were discussing the name of Wunderbaum for it or it might have been that I just scribbled that next to the sketches. So here are the sketches I drew mostly on the spot. There's a couple of variations on the character. I also included some sketches to samurai character to a short animation that a friend and I were thinking about. Pure gold :D

Nostalgic as hell beginning from the year 1988 part I

I have to apologize in advance that this stuff is anything else but recent stuff. It's one of those "Oldies Goldies" -posts. I just want to share with you the nostalgic joy that I've had recently :)

My Parents stopped by with a couple of boxes of my old school books, comics and drawings. Here are few of those. They're dated between about 1988-1994.

I think it was interesting to see how much I was interested in animation early on as an industry and medium. I copied and inked a couple of animation drawings from the film Fantasia to overhead projector transparencies as they we're animation cels. Then I colored them from the backside as they back in the day ;) Then I painted backgrounds for them in watercolor. I'm really fascinated on the look that the bright cel with clear cut, flat colors painted on them have in contrast to the more muted background. I've been planning for couple of years but never got around to it (yet) to do an exhibition on the idea of "The Animated Feature That Never Was". It takes off from my interest in the "art of" books. For the exhibition I would do the pre-production related work, sketches, maybe even pencil tests, animation drawings and painted cels with background paintings but not the film itself.

In this post it's funny to see how I have marked with "The Comic Characters Inc" etc.

The oldest drawings I posted because they served the purpose of learning to draw by drawing from model. So the oldest here is from -88. There's Judge Dredd that I drew from this cover by Brian Bolland when I was 11 years old...nice bedtime reading ain't it :) Then there's a coloring model of a baby eagle from a Disney short that I have copied from a book on animation around the same time. The dragon creature is from the film The Black Cauldron which has remained a favorite of mine even with it's several flaws. The Batman picture is drawn from the seminal Frank Miller's Dark Knight comic around start of 90's

I bought an airbrush with the money I got from my confirmation party :) Around that time I had also been already a big fan of the Alien -movies. So naturally one subject would be the alien. The colors are just awful on the original so I did a quick test with photoshop to see if it would be kinder to the eye in less colors...

And finally here's a utterly corny comic from the year 1991. I can tell that I've just recently been reading Stephen King, learnin english and found some zip-a-tone :)

Mobile Animations

Went through my hard drive and came upon these GIF -animations exported from my old Nokia mobile phone. They were made with the excellent Animator 3000 -animation program developed at Sulake in 2007 (nowadays the guys of Secret Exit). The program unfortunately never saw the light of day :(

Good thing I exported these since I no longer have neither the phone or the program files...

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...

Little Red Riding Hood

Again digging up some old "goodies" just to make a post :)
This was done as one pre-assignment when I was applying to school. The brief was to do a modern version of little red riding hood...Now that I look at it I think that the visuals are OK but the idea is wayyy off.
I don't remember the exact year but I think it's something between 97-99.

Part II of oldie goldie -94

Last 5 pages of the spectacular epic sci-fi fantasy musical adventure comic.

A comic from a looong time ago..Part I

Well, this is again from 1994 (I think). No need for a translation since there barely is dialogue or a proper story for that matter. It's quite clumsy and seems mainly like a tribute work of a high school sci-fi/movie fanboy with various borrowed elements thrown together.

But still I feel warmly about it and amazed that I had had the patience to do 10 pages...seems impossible nowadays. It does have a couple of nice frames and moments.

Ok, have to do this in two posts, another one tomorrow so try to keep calm even though it had such a "cliffhanger" ;)!

1994 comics nugget (of corn)

Whew, I'm finally pretty much done with the comic for a competition. It still would have needed a lot of tweaking but...Anyway it was great to draw some comics after several years but I wish I could have just concentrated on that. Drawing just on the evenings after work and any other activities sometimes was quite tough and because I drew so periodically, there are huge differences with the "quality" between pages and even between panels.
I'm not entirely satisfied with it but I learned a lot while doing it and it certainly was a step forward. I'm gonna do a better one next time :). Of course I'm only speaking about the art because I was happy with the script that Eija wrote.
I can't post any pages from that comic just yet 'cause the competition isn't finished so here's again some really old comic pages!
It's a really corny story (the opening line "there's 2 drugdealers inside & the door is open" made me laugh out loud) but think it doesn't look that bad even though I drew it 13 years ago.
It's of course in finnish but if there are foreign readers that actually want a translation on my deep and thoughtful script here, please leave a comment :) Pages are 1-4 starting from top left to right and second row from left to right.

Comics from a 15 year old

Wow, it's sometimes fun to run into the ooold stuff. The ones here are some of my really early ventures into comics. The gloomy execution bit I did when I was 15 years old...I must have had some issues :) But at least it's a complete "story".
The scifi/fantasy piece is done a little later, I don't know exactly when. However it's another of those really ambitious starts of mine that never got further than the first page.
I'll post some more pics from my early comics later. I'm actually working on a comic now after a few years break and I'm not sure if I've developed at all from the ones posted here :D

Italy 2002. These were some fun and small exercises for a course in illustration. They are basically meant as rhetorical images, examples on the various "tools" and means for communication through illustration. From left to right and from top to bottom, they translate or mean roughly: repetition, meta, "the part for all", "change of weight", periphrasis, "change of color", paradox, antithesis, ossomoro(couldn't translate that), similarity, hyperbola/excess.

I'm quite sure I didn't get them all spot on due to some difficulties in understanding but looking at them now I think I got most of them right :)

It's 2002 Italy sketchbook again. We used to go into this same café always after school to drink some cappuccino and hang out for a moment. This drawing appeared into my sketchbook during one of those sessions.

Sketchbook, Italy 2002.

Since I didn't hear any objections, I'm gonna continue with my "2002 Italy sketchbook" material, muahahahaa. This time there is actually a common factor in these pictures. They are all comics that got randomly created straight with a pen to the book. All of them seem to imply that this isn't the end (one has even page 1 marked in it) but...They also are not particularly well thought out. I just couldn't resist putting the penguin bit in since in recent years they have seemed to be the stock cute/funny character in animations etc. It's too bad I didn't make him do some kind of dance moves just that I could then have him killed. To put it straight the only great animated penguin I've seen was the one in the excellent Wallace&Gromit animation "The Wrong Trousers".

From the year 2002 same stuff as here. The gentleman on the top right is my teacher (not much of a caricature, I suck at them) from the history of italian illustration class. I can't remember his name just now. It was quite an experience when after a couple of months or so I just realized at some point in his class that I actually understood almost everything he said. I guess my italian just clicked on eventually. Before that I had just been smiling and nodding my head when my name was mentioned...

The year is '05 again. These are just a couple of the sketches to a project still in hibernation.

Sorry! Been really busy with the comic project I mentioned earlier. It's been so long that I have been doing comics "seriously" that I have completely forgotten how much work it is. I just finished sketching all 10 pages, phew!
I'm not all that pleased to the results at the moment but hopefully after the inking, it's gonna come out looking a bit more to my taste. I really wanted to try something more stylized but I just fell into the realism trap. Well, it's not Realistic but just stiff! I hope to loosen it up with inking which of course sounds just the opposite how it usually goes meaning that the inking kills any vibrant pencil lines left...
We'll see, in a couple of days, I'm aiming to have at least two pages finished.
Oh, and since I don't want to post anything from the comic just yet, I'm gonna post another oldie goldie, haha. This pencil drawing was actually a present to my mom's cousin who she used to wheel around in those milk carts when they were kids in the countryside. I think it has some nice smell of hay in it. The scan is the only one I have of it and it's not again the best possible with values.