Octopus weekend

So I took the pencil sketch and did a bit of black pen overlay, but my poor old scanner suffers under OS X Lion, and has very basic settings, leading to a fair bit of speckle and grain.
I dumped it into photoshop and twiddled, and it looks ok.

Had a chat with Dom about the whole inspiration of the final piece, and found some nice Cthulhu pics which bridge the gap from Octopus to space monster.

Sourcey

Went to my last ever(?) parents evening at school last night.
Dom's art teacher was concerned that he starts too many things that he doesn't finish, and that he draws stuff he's made up rather than from source material.
This seemed a bit strange to me, as I've rarely used sources, except for the twisted stuff that lives in my brain. Anyway I promised I try and help, and we are having a "Draw off" this weekend using sources, and references and everything.

I did a scribble at lunchtime to get my hand in, and very quickly got bored of the reference and switched to making it up.
Dom wants to do some kind of Space octopus/cthullu creature in space for his final piece, so I thought we'd try and start a source and inspiration journey with some octopi, and move to Alien face huggers, DrWho Ood, Cthullu and such like to some eventual composition.

Sunday Sketch

I got Monday's Wychwolf page drawn and finished yesterday, making it either 6 days late, or a day early...
The upshot was I had a gap in the day, so I sat sketching monsters whilst Ali watched "Birdsong".
I toyed briefly with doing a Hellboy sketch, as Dom is thinking about possibly doing some comic stuff for his Final GCSE piece... and we chatted about whether they would allow him to pencil it & ink it in the real world and then colour it in Photoshop to get those glorious colours... I'm guessing not.
In the end I just started drawing, and this is what fell out of the pencil.

I'm planning to start scanning in at least the covers of all the books I've illustrated over the years, to put in the "illustration" section... the launch of iBook Author prompted me to think about converting some of the unpublished stuff to self published.

Distracted

I have an awful lot of revision to do for an end of module test on the 10th Jan, and I keep finding myself distracted by pretty much anything that means I don't have to get on with it.
I came down to my office to do SOMETHING, and instead ended up looking at the 10t sketch challenge - "Gremlins", reading the wikipedia article... briefly dreaming about Phoebe Cates, and then sketching Gizmo.

Happy New Year.

Rob