Both ‘coloured in’ with Photoshop :)

Been cheering myself up with a little tub of ink I found:

(apologies for the messy images… I’m not using my normal scanner & had to stitch one image together from two scans)

the dancer’s my favourite, i might put her up somewhere.
what d’you think?

Trying to stretch my stylistic vocabulary a little, I managed to channel a little of the distorted essence of Egon Schiele while sketching some character studies for a kids book i’m working on: she looks to me like a bitter old girl , but i love the strength of the character

went life drawing with mik tonight.

She was a pretty young thing… pity I haven’t the sklil to capture it!

So the other day, I was walking past a shop window all rugged up in my big coat & scarf ready for another cold winter’s morning, and I thought to myself:

“My God! I look like an
Edward Gorey illustration!”

I thought it might be funny to do a little comic or something done in Gorey’s style, about some character who realises he’s in a Gorey comic.

I started with a bit of a sketch at the pub while waiting for friends to arrive:

Then (as I was struggling to embellish on any kind of story) I figured I might as well try a bit of an etching, as it kinda matched the style and I’d recently bought some ‘british scraper board’ that I was dying to try out:

(Click on the images for a larger view)

Ok, ok so its turned out to be not very Gorey-esque, but it was still a lot of fun! I’m not sure if I should leave it as is, or if I should fill in the whole thing to be more like the biro sketch… I love the emotive quality of having a character sitting in the dark, contemplating his cartoon nature, but I’m itching to continue with more and more detail (thereby lightening the scene.) Should I keep going, or start something new?

I have a cute little new sketch pad, all of the pages are connected, allowing the viewer to unravel the book into one long strip of sketches.

the first few pages: at Bennets Lane, with friends, and practicing spanish in a beach-house down south.

^ Martin Pribble

^ Dream characters

^ This girl keeps popping up in my sketches, though I don’t think I’ve ever met her. I don’t try to draw her, I think she just keeps drawing herself in.

This was a girl asleep in transit at Sao Paulo Airport from my sketchpad.
Measures about 1m wide

(Photo taken with a phone camera, so the colours are somewhat washed out. The real colours are vivid pomegranate reds and golden yellows)

Now that I FINALLY have a scanner, its time for some old sketches of Croque Monsieur, a fantastic gypsy jazz band I ran into in a downtown Melbourne alleyway, a long time ago:

I was really captured by the beauty & intensity of this violinist - she stared me down through the entire piece, and in case you couldn’t tell by the sketch, I grew intoxicated in her gaze.

The piano accordian player was fantastically charismatic.. I suppose you could say her was the band leader. He’d keep sliding into falsetto with his fake accent, and giving everybody smiles and winks as he played.

I went to the AIM graduation screenings, tonight.

There were some crap animations, some funny, and one really beautiful b/w piece, i think it was called The Astronomer (i HAVE to meet the woman who made it)

Afterwards, a friend and I started thinking that it might be funny if there was a short animation about cartoon characters who are having problems with their illustrations / animations ways….