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Wednesday 30 September 2009

Raise Your Hem: Red.


The red design version. Was thinking of doing a series of images of the band: the person in silhouette against a different colour background, with their instrument foregrounded and lit up.

Raise Your Hem.


An image for the Screen Banditas event, 'The Eruption of Kilauea and Other Treasures'. One member of the band 'Raise Your Hem'. More of the band still to come! I used a ripped up piece of corrugated card to create that interesting sand texture.

Wednesday 23 September 2009

Zorras Unite.

I'm working on something for Screen Banditas at the moment and I'll be drawing portraits of a number of Edinburgh bands. Here's the first one, and although the final will be in black and white, I thought I'd try giving it a little colour. It's the Zorras.



The original it is based on is here.

Monday 14 September 2009

Living In The Dark

Last year I designed the album art for a friend's band: Pheonix Street. Below is the concept I mocked up for them...



And here's what they ended up with. It's an epic image that took a lot of tweaking to get right. I was a little disappointed to see the final product in a sense, since CD cases are so bloody small! It would look amazing as a vinyl sleeve. Click on the image to see it nice and big!


The song the cover was inspired by is a really claustrophobic, mournful song, their title track. I think I managed to capture a sense of overwhelming painful memory with the piles of scrap paper, photos and trinkets. I found all the polaroids amongst my parents old photographs and had always wanted to do something with them. All these weird test images from their years of professional photography.

Photographs © Peter Ross and Margaret Drysdale 2008.
Cover art © Edward Ross, Tom Sharrock and David McRae 2008.

In The Mood For Love

An image based on the poster for the Wong Kar-wai classic In The Mood For Love. I used found textures around the house for the clothing, bacakdrop and skin. Photoshop allows us to add so much visual depth to an image.
I've been meaning to do a series of these, but I've not been able to decide on another poster to use. It's such a simple and elegant initial image that captures the tender and wistful relationship of the two characters perfectly.

Monsters!

Another comic for the Filmhouse. I'm pretty pleased with this one.





I actually recently read that Cronenberg denies the A.I.D.S. allegory in The Fly. But since the Death of the Author I can say what I like! Would have loved to have done a Jurassic Park as fear of genetic engineering bit... I do love drawing dinosaurs.

Wisconsin, 1895.

The documentary Wisconsin Death Trip is one of the most atmospheric and unique American films I've seen in years. With our view of the Old West so shaped by cowboy movies, it's a revelation to see a film that shows us the day to day moments of melancholy and quiet pain that normal people lived. The idea inspired a short comic, that's still forming in my head. I managed to draw a first page though...



An example here of me using the computer for good rather than evil. All my colours are done in photoshop. In this case, I also used the program to tweak the composition, and the original hand drawn images were really just props that I later moved around in the computer. I think it turned out really well, and sets the tone for the story to come nicely.

Reel Iraq

The second comic I did for the Filmhouse. I was less pleased with this one. Time and space constraints meant I could only do a six panel piece. Not really enough room to do justice to a country's entire film history pre-2003.



If you think that King Faisal II's hair looks bad, you should have seen him when he was wearing his Admiral's hat. This was an instance where I did quite a bit of computer fixing, but really ultimately to the detriment of the image. For example the gunbarrel effect in panel 4 just looks bad: an airbrush effect that doesn't work with my thick black lines. Sometimes keeping the image with some blemishes intact can work in your favour.

Food On Film

Earlier this year I illustrated a wee 4 page comic for the Edinburgh Filmhouse (www.filmhousecinema.com). The comic went out to the cinema's members with the monthly programme.






The comic itself was based on my Undergraduate Dissertation, examining the role of food in Far East Asian horror movies like Dumplings, Gozu, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance and 301/302. I've got a real love for Asian horror, and highly recommend checking out the work of Takeshi Miike or Park Chan-wook to those who haven't already.

Some Older Work.


A sample of some of my older work: a story that fell by the wayside called Bus Stop Boxer. I colouritised it today as an experiment. Turned out okay I think...

You can see I'm drawing inspiration here from one of my favourite all time comic artists Chris Ware. His use of muted colours in Jimmy Corrigan are on show here, as well as the diagrammatic style. This kind of thing is only really possible in comics, and something I'd like to see more of. The way Ware can interlink characters, histories, those tiny moments in peoples lives through his elaborate, eloquent paneling is just amazing.

One day I'll get this story started up again...

Blog Time.

About time for a blog I'd say. I'll start posting up some of my work soon...