Mr Wallet Blogs Again

Comic the third! This one doesn’t get printed until Monday, so you’re getting an exclusive, web-only sneak peek this week!

So. Street charity collectors, or charity sharks as I like to call them. I have to be honest - I don’t like them, and I don’t like their methods. One time when I was stopped by one of these people, I politely explained that I am a student and don’t have a job or any other form of regular income from which I could make monthly payments, but when I graduate and do find a job I will be sure to consider their organisation, etc, etc. The shark responded in all seriousness that I should consider donating a chunk of my student loan to their charity.

And so this comic was born.

drawnblog:

Aaron Renier shares his process of creating a page for the Adventure Time comic book — from thumbnail sketch to final line art and watercolours combined in Photoshop.

Watercolours and comics are such a winning combination for me! That beautiful, light but vivid colour, and the contrasting black linework. Just… rawr! This particular comic is a bonus story from Adventure Time #1, which you can pick up in your local comic shop. If you’re in London I recommend the extremely trendy Gosh Comics, who reserved it for me and put it into one of those nerdy protective bags.

What’s this? A second comic!?

The subject matter is a little old, but when this appeared in the student paper I assure you it was blazingly relevant. I have at least one more for you, so keep an eye out!

Look! A comic! I’m drawing the odd cartoon for my university’s poky student newspaper in an attempt to immerse myself in student life or something. I’ll put the next one up in a week’s time. And maybe another the week after that. We’ll see how things go.

Hello! Hope you had a nice Christmas. As I’m fond of telling everybody, I spent mine having a small series of photographic epiphanies, culminating in a resurgence of my interest in photography and a new urge to finally start shooting analogue.

I’ve been into photography to a greater or lesser extent since I was about twelve years old. Unfortunately, as I live in the twenty-first century, once I take a bunch of pictures I tend to diligently file them away on my hard drive and leave them there forever after. I’ve always been a hugely anti-social photographer, which is absolutely the wrong way to go about it! That was epiphany number one - I looked through my archives and ordered prints of some my favourite photos so I can give them to people and frame them and actually look at them. Promising myself to start using Flickr again was also part of this epiphany.

The second epiphany has to do with rangefinder cameras. This will only be interesting to you if you’re a big photo nerd like me, so I shall spare you the details. In short, I went up to Portobello Road yesterday and picked up the Olympus 35RC pictured above. Finding it was actually quite the coincidence, as it’s the exact camera I had been reading about on the internet during the Christmas break. It goes for about £100 refurbished these days, but this one was only twelve pounds. Hard to beat a deal like that.

The camera itself is very small, pretty light, and takes great pictures thanks to the pixel-less magic of 35mm film (at least in theory - I’ve not yet had my first film developed). It’s almost entirely mechanical, so I’ve been able to use it this weekend despite not having a battery for it yet (I used my Canon SLR as an oversized light meter - inconvenient, yet pleasantly ironic). There’s a small scratch on the lens which may or may not show up on film (which the seller hadn’t noticed, so I got an extra discount), but even if it does, I like it enough to go and hunt down a good one online and keep this one for spares. It’s pretty much a win-win situation.

It’ll probably be a week or two before I have any pictures taken with this actual camera to show, but in the meantime I’ve uploaded a handful of photos from the last two weeks, including the Portobello trip, to my Flickr. You can check them out here, or by clicking the new link at the top of the page.

Thank you for indulging me in my little photo tangent if you read this far. Next time I’ll post those student newspaper cartoons I was talking about last time. Ciao!

Gosh! The time flies so fast! Since uni started again in October, I got rather caught up in studying and have spent very little time drawing. In a nice turn of events, I was recently convinced by a friend of mine to start making comics for the college paper. I have submitted two and am now working on the next one. I don’t yet know if they’ll be printed, but if they are I could be looking at having a cartoon published every fortnight! Exciting, no? I’ll mirror them here after they’re ‘serialised’ (:P), so the internet version will be one issue behind the paper version.

(Those are my new Pigma Microns btw. Much better than the Faber Castell Pitt Pens I was using before - so much so that they’ve rekindled my love for fineliners. So smooth…)

I also attended my first life drawing class last Thursday, which was a great chance to just forget everything else and draw for two hours. Hoping to go regularly - will post any better stuff here!

I recently came back from visiting my family in Poland, where I fell horribly, horribly ill. I’m better now, but as I’m flying to Germany tomorrow I thought I’d quickly throw up a thing or two that materialised in my sketchbook while I was away.

The two guys on the left are characters I came up with for a short comic. They’re both supposed to be total douchebags - can you tell? The guy in the hat is a self-portrait-doodle, but it’s no longer accurate as I now have a beard.

I feel like my character poses are getting reaaaally stale lately - like all heads turned to the same angle etc. That is, if I draw anything more than a headshot in the first place. I need to push out of my comfort zone more [/cliche]. DYNAMISM & CONFIDENCE PLZ! If you have any to spare, please do send it my way.

There comes a time in every anime fan’s life when they realise that it’s probably time to sell some of those NENDOROID Petit Haruhi Suzumiya Figures you have standing around, and that the next time you’re in Japan you’ll probably be better off just paying ¥1200 for the Asahina Mikuru winter-maid-costume figurine than trying to get one through the fickle medium of sealed random-figure boxes.

Of course, if you happen to be a big Haruhi Suzumiya fan, please feel free to visit my ebay page at some point over the next three days ;)

I’m currently reading Mitsuru Adachi’s excellent baseball manga Cross Game (very much worth checking out). I just finished volume 3 and am trying to resist the temptation to immediately buy volume 4 and pre-order volume 5 so as not to bankrupt myself.

The cover illustrations for each volume are painted in watercolour - it’s something you don’t see very often in the copic-marker-and-photoshop-infused world of today’s manga covers. I personally really like watercolours, but rarely do any colour work as all my comics are always in black and white. So I decided to colour a panel of the main character, Ko Kitamura.

In particular, this was my first time mixing skin-tones (when I do pick up a brush, I tend to paint trees). He turned out a little orange, but I can work on that next time. I might do these more often - using someone else’s linework lets me focus on the the colour (which I have next to no experience with). I was also thinking I might try using this newly gained ability to do some colour figure drawings - stay tuned!