Orange Fleet
As I’ve written before, I do love drawing spaceships. Here’s a whole double page spread from my Moleskine, full of little orange spaceships.
Drawn with Staedtler Pigment Liners and coloured with Copic Ciao Markers.
The Orange Fleet
this northern boy
Illustrations for an imaginary age
Tag: doodles
January 24, 2015
The Street
The Street.
Continuing my doodles of odd little medieval/Tudor/olde/fantasy streets and buildings.
Drawn in pencil, inked with a Copic Multiliner and Staedtler Pigment Liners, coloured with Copic Markers. All in a Moleskine sketchbook. I do love Moleskins but I wish the paper was a little whiter.
Line work
Final Street
January 9, 2015
Draw it, Post-It…
Post-It notes have to be my most used medium for doodling, often while I’m at my day job, waiting for my Mac to finish doing something. They’re great because they are so disposable. Sketching in a Moleskine, or on a fresh sheet of beautiful Bristol Board can sometimes be inhibiting. Scrawling ideas and shapes on a Post-It or a scrap of paper can be liberating.
Draw-it, Post-It.
November 24, 2014
A lone spaceship…
It’s been a while since I drew a spaceship, so it was fun to create this little one-man flyer. I think it’ll get some colour in the next few days – probably orange.
One-man flyer.
March 10, 2014
Size Matters
Bigger is better. Or so they say. Particularly in Texas I believe.
When it comes to my work, I’ve never been into ‘big’. My work tends to be small, tightly controlled, detailed – rather than expressive and sprawling. I’ve recently begun working much smaller though, as way of getting more ideas down on paper – rather than worrying too much about the finished product. Some of these little doodles will stay just that, but a few of them may become something else at a later date. Redrawn at a larger scale, details added, lines refined – all the while trying to keep the essence of what it was I liked about the doodle in the first place.
All the following drawings were done in pen, so no pencil or rubbing out, and were begun with almost no thought in mind as to what the aim was. In terms of scale, the largest of these little doodles is about 25mm high.
Mechs, probes, flyers…
Flyers, skiffs, speeders…
Low altitude flyers
Multi-legged mechs
Some kind of hovering probe
Three-legged mech and pilot
Heavy transport flyer
Stubby little speeder
One-man flyer
These were all drawn using a 0.1 or 0.2 Staedtler Pigment Liner, on bristol board.
It’s good fun drawing at this scale. There’s no room for obsessing over details, you just have to get in there and create some forms and hint at structure. They have bags of character at this scale too – the challenge will be to capture that if I work these up into full-scale illustrations.
February 26, 2014
Not a happy place to live…
Sometimes, not very often, a doodle becomes something surprising and cool. I started sketching the other day, with no particular aim in mind, and quickly roughed out the shape of a skull. A few minutes later, again with very little thought, a city began to grow…
I’m really pleased with what this little doodle became…
Skull City
February 17, 2014
Fly Fishing…
I’ve found myself doodling fishy things again. This time, it’s not just fish illustrations, but flying fishing boats too. Definitely inspired by the work of Ian McQue, I’m utterly obsessed by the thought of these floating ships – where do they live, who skippers them, what do they catch…?
There will definitely be more to come.
I had to include the latest fish illustration here too, one of my favourites so far.
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- A little flying fishing boat
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- A flying trawler
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- A couple of flying fishing boats
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- Pen and ink fish
September 24, 2013
40 days of droids…
Day 40 of my droid a day project. Here’s a selection of my progress so far, along with some of today’s sketches.
Just over half of the droids so far…
Some of today’s sketches – hands and feet.
February 3, 2013
Imaginary idyll
I’ve taken to carrying a sketchbook with me over the last few months, particularly if I’ve been working at a client’s office. It’s nice to get out on a lunchtime and doodle while I have a bite to eat.
This landscape is the product of a few lunchtimes in a pub by the Thames. It began as nothing but a doodle of a rock…
First doodlings
It took a couple of days, but only an hour or so of actual drawing, for it to progress into a landscape…
Work in progress
The final drawing. Could be the lake district, or possibly somewhere east of the Shire in Middle Earth.
The final sketch
UPDATE:
I’ve realised that this drawing reminds me of the drawings of the British walking book author Alfred Wainwright. His Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells are full of beautiful renderings of the Lake District.
February 1, 2013
Doodle Street
Doodles often end up being much more, which is sometimes a problem if I’ve started doodling on a scrap of paper, or if I’m simply sketching in a corner of another drawing. However, yesterday, my doodle simply evolved to fill the space available.
I began scribbling the beginnings of a house on a folded piece of paper I was using to keep another drawing clean while I worked.
Initial doodles…
I quite liked where it was going, so I carried on, and on. Eventually filling the space I had with half a street’s worth of buildings.
More building work on Doodle Street
I added some background, and extended the street with a little tudor building to the left, worked in a bit more detail and the pen work was finished, just the colouring was left.
Ready for some colour…
I use photoshop to colour my drawings, using multiple layers to build up the colour and detail. The final version of Doodle Street has over 80 of these layers. To show how this builds up into a final illustration I made a process movie…
The final image is shown below…
The builders have finished, Doodle Street is complete.
this northern boy 