Decided to post more of the same stuff as here. This thing is probably gonna be on hold for a moment but I will finish it at some point, that's for sure.

Yesterday I started to clean up papers under my desk and ran into old sketchbooks. There was this one book that I had in the year 2002 while living in Turin, Italy for a half a year. That seemed to be an inspiring period 'cause it had a nice amount of decent sketches and that's rare when looking into your 5-year old sketchbooks...
So this post is from that stuff. (actually these are from the same book) I sometimes like to draw these tiny figures out of my head doing poses. I think drawing them is a great and quick exercise. Sometimes I even manage to get some personality in them as a happy accident :) The others are done with a regular pen and the others with ink and brush.

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.

Just a couple of croquis again. I did the most basic mistake of life drawing with the man leaning on to his arms, it didn't quite fit to the page. He also does have the right leg it just isn't so well defined :) The other one turned out quite ok to me. I really don't want to shade in much even if there happens to be some time left. Ok,, there's shading of course especially with first one but with that I also have tried to use lines instead of going sideways with the pencil. I prefer to define the proportions, mass etc. with the lines, the direction, pressure and shape of them.

Edit: Just looked at the first pic properly and noticed that the head is way too small, damn.

I thought I'd post some of more recent stuff for a change :) These are sketches and doodles for a comic project I'm working on with Eija Lappalainen (she writes the script). It has been a real struggle for me to get back into the comic's frame of mind and to search the right style I want to go with this. The deadline is closing really fast and I'm practically nowhere yet. I'm going around this thing like a cat around a hot porridge. It's always the same, I don't get anything done until I really have to. I should be doing the actual comic instead of this! I said to myself that it might be fun to post some development work for the people to see. Since I've also told a lot of people that I'm doing this I'm just building pressure on me to get it actually done.

Now that it's in the open, I have no choice :)

Taking digital baby steps. These are a from a few years back. They are some quick digital doodles and the medium was pretty new to me. I think these turned out ok in their own way.

Went to do some life drawing today, croquis to be more exact, after over six months. I felt quite rusty and got fed up with the whole thing pretty soon. But I'll post two of the results. The one with the model in a side-view was a difficult one 'cause the legs are bent so that you can't see them below the knee. When I got frustrated I decided really to just let go the overly accurate model drawing and to just go with a loose feel of shape, volume and direction, trying still-animation I guess. The time was about 5 minutes for these, less with the latter one.

From 1992, another archive "nugget" which shows the vulnerable mind of the 15-year old :) As in this post I showed, the movie Alien had a big impact on me.This little gouache painting is one of those rare ones that have sustained the the time better than the rest of my drawings from that period. It also shows me how little progress I have made...*sigh*.
Sci-fi and fantasy was close to my heart in general. The influence of Moebius is quite visible in these panels from a 10-page comic that I did probably a few years later. It appeared only in this little fanzine "Bigger Than Jesus" that my good friend (and mentor :) Mika Tossavainen and I compiled of our miscellaneous short stories. I think I have only one copy left of that somewhere. The panels are not continuous to each other, I just stumbled upon a scan of them two. (The alien's head shape appears also here on the character fighting on the balcony in the top left -corner of the left-most panel.)
I'm gonna take another long-due stab at doing some comics really soon...

This drawing is bordering some copyright issues :D It was just free doodling with a pen without no specific goal, when I started with the head of the running chap first...Then it came out like this. I does have some strong Moomin and Bone influences in it...Influences go a long way but I want to say that it was not intentional and now I can just call it a tribute. Tove Jansson was really something. When I grow up I want to be like her...well not a woman but... :)

Sometimes it's just fun to sketch from dark to light.

Heh, this is definitely another "genre" piece. I think I did this during my obligatory military service in -97. That's probably the only proper drawing from that time then. In retrospect I should have taken the civil service route so that at least I would have got more drawing done than when sitting and running in the forests, freezing my ass off...
I think it's ok in it's subject matter and it seems that I used to go through a bit more trouble in drawing than nowadays ;)

I dug out some oldies "goldies" just to make a post! At some point I really seemed to be interested in samurais (I guess it just was the next logical step from dinosaurs :) The close-up piece done straight with a pen is probably from circa -98. The pencil one I did in -99 as one of the assignments for the first part of the admission trials/tests of the University of Art in Helsinki. I did get to the second part but... :) The title was something like "a meeting". It's clichéd stuff but otherwise I think it's got some feeling to it. This poor quality scan is all I have left of it. It does miss out some of the values.

This was just a tiny sketch, the size of a postage stamp. I gave it some simple color for the feel of a lino print.

Well, the year is now 2007 (I'm like...in the future...) and I promised some new stuff so here you go. In between getting drunk and sober and drunk again, I did doodle these amongst other things which will not see the light of day...yet.
Oh and at least finnish visitors can spot a familiar looking comic book character here (although the likeness isn't spot on).

All work and no bloggin' fun make Janne a dull boy. Here's just a workplace quickie but just to keep all of you regular visitors coming back please :)! My new year's resolutions include updating this blog again more frequently and with some new good stuff. Here's hoping.

Happy New Year 2007 to everybody!

Again, returning after a long time of not posting, I feel ashamed and also compelled to post at least something. I apologize from those who have actually seen the trouble of returning to check my humble blog and not finding anything new or even old stuff. I've been busy with my day job and also doing a bit of freelance on top of that...The new year is approaching with it's new challenges and promises...I for example promise to get some new work and actual work done that I can post here.
Here is at least something now :) I collected a bunch of hippopotamus character design sketches that I did a while back on a project. It was quite fun and I think some them actually turned out pretty good. My favorite has to be the kinda middle aged hippo at the top getting it on at the dance floor, wheehee.

This little sketch was done already over a year ago but I decided to post it 'cause it kinda fit my mood after I went to see "My Neighbor Totoro" by Hayao Miyazaki today. I've seen it a dozen times before from video but since it got a re-release I wanted to see it in a theatre. It is still one of the most genuinely heart warming, funny and innocently beautiful films I've seen.

I'm so ashamed that I haven't posted anything for quite a while. I was on a trip and after that I just didn't think I had anything to post. I'm not sure if these are worth a post either but hey, it's a free doodle country so here are couple of pages of them as random as they come :)