Manul Of The Universe

The piece has the Mimosa Manul character I've been doodling a while and I did this as a gift to a friend who was the actual inspiration of the manul and who has fond MOTU memories :)

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!

Overdue post number x

It's been a while. I've been busy at work, then traveling, Animatricks and then doing some freelance work on the side...so sorry for the lack of updates :/

This one is a quick fun logo my friends asked for their band Serial Humpers aka Vakavat Humppaajat :)

(It's an accordion aka hanuri...)

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 :)

How To Train Your Doodle

Collected sketchbook stuff again :) In the last doodlelayout I tried to sketch out some characters in the feel of 50's animation design. Keeping in mind contrasting shapes, curves and tangents. It was a fun little exercise in design discipline because I usually tend to draw just by keeping the pen moving, without actually thinking where the next line should go.
The "fishnaut" is a kind of a tribute to the character in Antti Kemppainen's illustration. Sketched it out with a ballpoint pen while boating at Näsijärvi and slapped in some quick phoshop color.

Sanguine Di Sketchbook

I'm on my holiday so I have time to sort my pencils and other useful stuff so as I went through my art supplies I came across some pieces of sanguine chalk. Hadn't been using that in ages so I gave it a quick go. Added a touch with white chalk as well.

Doodleland in the year 2010

Gee, it's a whole new decade. That's sci-fi.

But I on the other hand haven't evolved to digital or any other than pencil, pen and paper doodles on my spare time on dry land.

So I present you once again with the collected doodles and random scribbles from various scrap papers. (Click for a bigger and better view.)

But! I promise that this year, I will deliver something a bit more substantial. I just won't promise you when :) (I can hear my millions of "followers" gasp right about now.)

Tales from the crypt

Click for bigger images.

I thought I'd post the comic online that the cover in the previous post was for.

Eija lappalainen wrote and I drew.

More about the comic here. The comic was published in a comics competition anthology called 5 Fantasiaa by Egmont. It seems to be pretty hard to come by in stores nowadays but I'm sure you'll find a copy in the used book stores or the bargain bins ;)

Sorry, the pages are in finnish only...(if someone really wants a translation, give me a message)

Don't judge a comic by it's covers

I realized that I hadn't posted this image before.

It was firstly a picture that I made as a contribution to a great book called: Pingstate Art of a Visual Community. It has many many many many wonderful artworks and is a nice gift for a friend interested in visual culture.

Secondly this is a "unofficial" cover for the comic that me and Eija Lappalainen did for the Sarjis 2007 comics competition. You can find my posts about it here, here, here and here :)

It served more as an inspirational artwork, as an entry for the aforementioned book and as a start for work with the actual comic.

But the cover certainly has it's roots firmly in the story of the short comic. The Helsinki comics festival was held again last weekend. As usual I was solely on the reader's side of the tables so I decided that I might as well publish online the only comic that I've been able to produce during the last 2 years :/

That will be the next post.

Hot in the Face

A quickie, to keep this up and going. Sometimes I try to shake my "comic drawing" sensibilities and try to draw in a more classical way. That means a bit more naturalistic and no outline -type of drawing. Well here I failed miserably 'cause I have some outlines instead of just shadow/light. I also couldn't skake my feathering habit or that laying in values with separate strokes/lines.

But I lov drawing on a tinted paper. If anyone comes by a sketchbook that has all the pages tinted in grey for example and proper paper quality, please let me know :)

All it needs is a little bit of paint

A friend of mine commissioned a painting from me. There were few requirements. It had to fit the frames that she already had and those were of challenging proportions, really wide and quite low. I needed to have a certain color palette that fits with the interior of the room. Also the subject matter was set to have lovers lying next to each other.
I think the proportions were the toughest bit. I took the color palette a bit too seriously and went almost monochromatic. The subject was nice and I did go at first to the more sexual approach but settled (had feedback) with the more cuddly approach.
I hadn't painted in many years, at least not in traditional acrylics. I kept looking for the undo button and digital eraser. I got the colors almost right in the first pass and they had a fresh transculent glow...but then I fucked up. I saw that several proportions were of with the figures and I just couldn't mix the same colors on the palette that had come up with the thin layering of colors. So painting off the mistakes was producing colors that differed from what I originally wanted. I didn't remember that traditional painting was so hard...with lack of practice obviously.
If it had been just my own painting I had gone the other way but now I had to stay true to the original sketch and the required palette.
I definitely want to paint again so this didn't put me off it but it came close :D! And here's some sketches and "in progress" pics which I forgot to take from the first phases. I'm not completely satisfied but gald that I got it done..

Crestock tryout

As these things usually go, I decided to start doing an entry for a competition the night before the deadline. Quick and dirty then.

The idea in the (annual) Crestock Photoshop competition was to make an apocalyptic christmas "card" based on the given stock images. I went for a kind of an animated short -feel on the characters here.

One irritating thing was that it seems my monitor at home shows colours a bit too dark, especially in the red area. I realized this when I checked the image on the monitor at my work place. It looked like crap. I did a couple of quick fixes and sent it off.

I'm just happy that I did something. Makes me want to do more digital painting again.

You can check it out here and cast a vote if you like it and want to go through the trouble of registering :)
http://www.crestock.com/blog/photoshop/contest2008/entry.aspx?id=8678

There's this one image that I feel is a sure winner. It has a good consistent style, conceived with care and a refreshingly not so bleak take on the subject:
http://www.crestock.com/blog/photoshop/contest2008/entry.aspx?id=8542

Cintiq doodle

OMG a post! Yes it's been a while since my last outing here. Nothing extra special this time but I did get to make my first marks with a Wacom Cintiq. It's not my own (although I started to think about it...). They got a couple of the 12" versions at work now and I tried it out.
It wasn't that great at first. The feel of the pen or the offset between the pen's point and "canvas" with the screen material in between kind of annoyed me at first.
But here's my first ever quick doodle with a cintiq anyway!

Machine Bliss

This is actually a kind of a new thing in this blog. The normal stuff that I've thrown around has been doodles, old stuff etc.

Picture's name is "Tollous" which translates roughly "stupidness of a jolly kind" :) I did it as an entry to a competition where the brief was to illustrate a poem by Arja Tiainen. The title was "Rakkaus koneisiin" = "The Love for Machines". I went the feeling route on illustrating it to avoid the word to word -type of illustration. It's still in the same universe as the poem :)

I didn't win any prizes but I was happy the get something done for a change and I got to be part of the classy exhibition surrounding the competition. The exhibition is open at the Art Museum of Mikkeli until the 21st of October so if you happen to be near the city, I recommend that you check it out.

Sketchville

I think I'm getting back up to speed with this blog, at least in terms of publishing frequency (quality is another matter).

Well here is at least one Dark Knight -inspired doodle (excellent movie!) and with that Eeyore goes together nicely. The doodle about Eeyore came about when I watched a couple of episodes of soviet produced Winnie The Poohs. The design of Eeyore was way more appaling then the Disney one. This doodle is something of a cross breed of those two donkeys...

(Now that I look at the two doodles at the bottom-left corner, they remind me of a scifi-version of the Hunchback Of Notre Dame.)

Doodle The Right Thing

I got back today from the rock festival in Werchter, Belgium.

Once again, great. It really was something to finally see Radiohead live, I wasn't disappointed, far from it. Great gigs also from The Raconteurs, charismatic Neil Young, R.E.M., Mika, Beck, MGMT, Sigur Rós and Band Of Horses.

These doodles I made into my bag (a continued tradition then!) during Anouk's gig...since there really wasn't anything else to do..

Doodoos

Doodles...at least! The one with the happy man in the puddle of blood I draw on this A4 sheet of paper that I tape on top of my Wacom at work to make it less slippery (it's intuos2, no matte surfaces yet). Anyways, the paer does get quite dirty after a while and this one had this nice grey gradient on it so I didn't want to just throw it away. I'm not sure if I was having a bad day but the guts just spilled out...
The one with the jungle boy, I did during some meeting, again without much thought to it but it does present an idea that should I do a fantasy/adventure comic in that direction. I'm not sure if I would do it with blue and red pencils allthough I like the visual feel to them.
EDIT: Did'n want to make a new post with these but I added some really fast doodles that I did with Illustrator. I really haven't done much with vectors after school but I enjoyed drawing these with the wacom and didn't overly noodle with 'em. Gotta look into the software more in the future. Ok, I admit it! Any cheeky monkey can do nice flowing lines with a vector software!

Sketchbook scavenger!

I started thinking that why I keep on posting seemingly pointless sketchbook drawings? Probably because I enjoy looking at the rough sketches from others, maybe even more than finished pictures.

But! In fact there's a pic here that has actually gone through minor phoshop tweak (aside from the usual levels and stuff). The one with the guy leaning against a tree, I did again straight on doodle -style with two different color felt pens. After scanning them in I wanted to smooth the surface of the green color but I ended up with a look that resembled a bit that of a lino cut print.

The chef pic is the scan of a gift card for a gourmet lunch that I gave as a present to my girlfriend. On the others, it seems that I was in an animal mood :)

Burlesque lifedrawing rings twice

Another session of the wonderful Dr. Sketchy's burlesque lifedrawing was held. Likeness is again something that is off in almost all of these.
I personally like best the small single black and white one. It was drawn while the model was moving and performing as most of the non-colored.

Burlesque lifedrawing!

Last night I attended the Dr Sketchy's Anti-Art-School featuring Miss Sugar Kane (FIN), which was part of the first official Helsinki Burlesque -festival. So it was drinking and drawing a beautiful woman, what could be better! The mood at Dubrovnik (the bar) was inspired and fun.
I think I should have stylized more but they turned out ok. After all, Miss Sugar Kane went through the drawings and picked mine as the one to win the men's festival t-shirt yay :)!

The "winner" -pic is the one at the bottom of the first layout and those on top of it are a warp-up drawing (mind model :) and some of the fast first ones with Miss S. Kane. I myself do like the middle one of those with it's baby doll -face even though it's not "accurate".

Thank you very much to Mira and Saija for inviting me!