My finished comic.

Finally finished the comic I've been working on over the past month or so,  this is my first real attempt at sequential art (well, something over 10 pages), and while it's not all I hoped it would be I am fairly pleased with the outcome.

 I have undoubtedly learnt a hell of a lot about the art and science of making comics while working on this, which is the main thing, really.
overall, I've found the whole experience to be pretty challenging but ultimately highly rewarding.

                               comment and critique is highly appreciated,

Microscopy doodles

Went to Cavendish campus recently as a part of the interdisciplinary Microscopy project I'm participating in.

                            a few reportage sketches of the activities of the day

Inspirations: Alex Roman

This is one of the most amazing short films I have ever seen, simply beautiful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGx4bBU9Qc

hard to believe it's all animated..

Comic pages.

                                         some WIP's out of sequence

Some finished pieces

 Stuff from the drawing module and a political cartoon from the summer project.

  For this piece on WW2 I had the idea of having a mushroom cloud which becomes the heads of these leaders. events like hiroshima were created by their wishes, now the bomb creates them.

                            

film poster project, tetsuo doesn't actually visit the moon in the anime, it happens in the manga, heh..

yeah, It's Tony Hayward leaving a mess for his successor,   

           

Inspirations: Moebius

I discovered Moebius only a year or so ago, owing to european comics being something of a niche interest over here, which is sad, because these are some of the most beautiful and strange comics out there.
I suppose this is a consequence of the perception that comics are an undeveloped and puerile medium, and not seen as the artform they truly are, unlike the high esteem the Franco-Belgian audience hold them (where comics are known as the 9th Art).

Moebius is probably best known for the fantastical worlds he creates which are surreal and otherworldly, my favorite piece by him would be Arzach, a silent comic which is very dreamlike in it's storytelling

I love how fluid his lines are and the use of strong colours here, it all feels so effortless...

Random studies

some sketchbook pages...

                                                       Patsy, playing world of warcraft.

love my skulls..

concept sketches

some busts at the V&A

and this centaur -like creature

Inspirations: Akira

An artist that has had a big influence on me would be Katsuhiro Otomo the creator of Akira, the long running manga which midway through the comic's storyline was adapted into an anime. this is the most fascinating comic I've had the pleasure of reading, and definitely the longest - spanning 6 volumes the comic is an epic 2182 pages long and you really get a sense of journey when you've turned that last page...

Otomo really immerses his audience in this future dystopian tokyo through astounding technical ability and masterful storytelling, the sequences which really stood out to me would be the corporeal transformations Tetsuo goes through (which are clearly symbolic of his inner turmoil), and the devastation of neo tokyo, these episodes play out for dozens of pages and become quite surreal in their abstraction of the disaster by their fixation on the destruction of a jungle of colossal buildings to the exclusion of human reaction.

the look of the characters while quite stylised are still very believable as people, which is suitable seeing as this is a dark and serious seinen manga, but it's worth remembering that manga in the 80's hadn't yet been exaggerated (simplified is a better word I guess) into an assemblage of symbols standing in for representations of the human form.

The world of Akira is vast and complex in it's visual analogy and unravelling of the human condition, the use of metaphor that this masterpiece works with is something I would be interested to write about, maybe I will for my upcoming essay..

Some concept art.

Just some character designs for the comic I'm working on. the girl's called Lydia a shepherd and unlikely heroine, the guy with the bow is Lars who sees himself as something of a hero.