The End of the World II

Some more character portraits for the boardgame I’m working on.  Just got the zombie horde and angry mob to go now… they’ll be a lot harder.

The End of the World

One of my favourite books ever is A Night In the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny; it’s this awesome pastiche about classic horror characters – Rasputin, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman – indulging in tangled Lovecraftian intrigues, and narrated by Jack the Ripper’s dog.  After I read it for the first time as a teenager I had a dream that it was a boardgame, and the idea floated around my head for over a decade, until recently I reread it and decided to have a go making a game based on it.

I’ve worked most of the rules, but before I test out whether they actually work with the help of some indulgent friends, I need to make the board and the various pieces and cards; here are some rough sketches I’ve done in photoshop over the last few days of some of the characters; I’m not sure how exactly, but printed out suitably small and made to stand up they’ll probably serve as playing pieces.

animal love @ gallery 285

Here are two new paintings created for “Meet THE DEALER”, an exhibition currently running at the beautiful  Gallery285 in Sydney.  It’s open for another week, so if you’d like to see these works in the flesh, as well as pieces from 5 other young artists, get down to 285 Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst before the 5th March.

mini animal love

My mum likes to tell people that I was the only child she knew who could look at lambs playing in the field and think of lamb chops.  When I announced age 21 that I was becoming a vegetarian she was incredulous.  I’ve always been fascinated by animals, and as a result fairly good at drawing them.  On the internet I’ve discovered thousands of people who share my fascination, and endless email forwards about tigers adopting piglets, and youtube videos of unlikely animals engaging in mortal combat.  These drawings are my response to the strange symbiosis of cruelty and kindness, beauty and horror that exist in this thing we call nature.  All of my animals are drawn life size, and I research those which are extinct as carefully as possible so that the anatomy (if not the colours) are reasonably accurate.

These are a few mini animal lovers, each one is about 10cm x 15cm, pen and ink and acrylic on canvas.

 

animal love

I finally finished my paintings for this semester.  I’ll just post them here with minimal commentary, since I’m now exhausted from 36 hours of continuous drawing.

 

 

 

 

 

And some bonus images… One of my early paintings from the series, and a picture of me in action.

 

 

More Animal Love

Well, after getting that rant out of my system, I’d like to share with you some more cute animal drawings.  

 

Animal Love

My project for this semester is called “Animal Cuddles” (although I’ve just realised that “Animal Love” sounds better.  It’s based on sites like Cute Overload, and those adorably neotenous animal forwards that zoom from inbox to inbox in this great age of interweb.  Here are some of my studies so far.

Homo Novis Caelestialis

The semester of uni for which I was doing Return of the Space Gods actually finished about 2 weeks ago; I got less blogging done than I’d intended, but it still added up to a fairly formidable word count for an art project.  In the end, there were three final pieces; this was my favourite, the culmination of the alien skulls series (Homo Noves Baratharii, Osiris, Tetropsis).  You can see some close-ups and working drawings below, but basically the work is a full size alien skeleton, four-eyed and pyramid-headed, drawn in 0.4mm technical pen.  It took forever to draw, but the final product is quite striking.

The other two final images were both oil paintings, Hyperrapture and Truth of the Space Gods. Because they were both very large, and not very dry when the semester ended, I had to put off photographing them.

Even though this is technically the end of Return of the Space Gods, I’ll keep this blog open and update it occasionally with stuff that interests me, and maybe even get round to writing those essays on CS Lewis’ Space trilogy, Olaf Stapledon and Solaris I’ve been planning.

The Secret of the Ultimaton

The Secret of the Ultimaton is the third of the Space Gods series, the other two being Are You a Starseed? and Space Gods Bring Love. I actually did it quite a while ago (a month, maybe), but due to not having a working camera didn’t manage to photograph it. It’s my least favourite of the three; I think I got the facial distances wrong on the space god, making it look a bit weird (in a not good way), and the overall look is too modern sc-fi, too matrixey… I was going for a more pulp, 70s psychedelic look. But I thought I’d bare all and show it anyway. The text is from The Urantia Book.

Resurrection of the Space Gods

Mummies, equally incomprehensible and not yet convincingly explained, stare at us from the remote past as if they held some magic secret. Various peoples knew the technique of embalming corpses, and archaeological finds favour the supposition that prehistoric beings believed in return to a second life, i.e. a corporeal return… Drawings and sagas actually indicated that the ‘gods’ promised to return from the stars in order to awaken the well-preserved bodies to new life.
Erich Von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods