20 March 2014 (International happiness day. happy, happy day everyone reading this!)

Over the past week and a bit, I have recently done a couple of pictures, since the last review anyways. I felt I wanted to have a talk about them both.

*Disclaimer* The object of these is to not be negative about my work, far from it, I like to recap on what I have done. It keeps the creative mind fresh and that can only be a good thing! It’s just, unfortunately I’m mostly not happy with what I create, so it usually comes through as negative.

First up is a digital pic I did for my Facebook avatar/picture, as the last one had been there for at least a year…ish, so felt it was time for a change.

The concept for this was based on the song ‘cool guys don’t look at explosions.’ It’s a loosely based self portrait, loosely in the terms of it doesn’t really look like me. If I’m being honest, I’m not a big fan of it, but I keep it up as a reminder to progress and get better. Plus it’s just for a website I don’t really use that much. Apart from the Illustration page I have on there. (Cheeky plug.)

My major problem is the arm length, I was copying a pose from a picture and it didn’t turn out how It should’ve. A thing I found with a lot of digital work I create, is the line work, it seems to miss the movement, it’s too clean. When I put up the next picture you’ll see what I mean. However, the colouring although simple, I think helps it a lot. I find most of my colouring on Photoshop is simple and I try not to let it get too technical, I like the colour style of most cartoons, in that they have a base colour, with a little bit of lighting effect if needed. Although I think the font does work with the image, looking back on it, it’s too bold with the heavy black borders on the thought bubble and the border, it overpowers it some what.

Next up is a piece I did as part of a collaboration blog with a friend. It’s probably my favourite of the two I’m reviewing. It’s a blog of which we decide a topic and draw/design a black and white imagine to meet the brief.

As I said, it’s a simple black and white image. Features the two main characters from the show as the main focus. Like most of the images I’ve created for this blog, it’s brush pen and carbon ink on gloss paper. I think the boldness and the brush stroke of the lines, seem to give it a lot more depth and movement than say that of the digital piece above. Bold black areas seem to bring out features a bit more too, seems to add a sort of freeness that the computer seems to take away, from me anyways.

(There’re a lot of digital artists out there that blow my mind with some of the images they create.) A gifted one, is the person I started this blog with.

I think as I have tried to do mostly now colouring shall be saved for digital but most images shall be created free hand.

This has been a review, by me..

As ever, comments and worthy criticisms are always welcome.

Cheers for reading.

P.S I might start reviewing other peoples work, just to keep this thing going, it’s fun and quite educational for me to focus on something in more in-depth way.

Links to find Will

Tumblr – http://will-bot-aldis.tumblr.com/

Facebook – facebook.com/WillBotIllustration

Twitter – Will_bot86