Girl with glasses portrait

So here's a portrait based off a source image of @Christianapage taken by @Toby.

It's a great source pic, and I love drawing hair, so I was all about this.

Sketchbooks

So these drawings represent the end of the green Ciak sketchbook I've been gradually filling for the last two years, and the start of a brand new slightly bigger green Ciak sketchbook.

It's been a while so I started the fresh book with a new Bowie portrait. The other two are based off of photos I found on Unsplash (one of my favourite new resources). I can't really find any proper details for the first one, but the second is a from a photo of @cestemily taken by @kinga_cich. And there are a ton of other great pics on both those accounts. 

Bill Murray 2018

So, I've posted a new Bill Murray picture every year on the anniversary of this blog. And it's time for a new one. I've been doing this thing here for five years now! 

This year I decided to get way ahead and started working on this giant inky portrait weeks ago. I had a bunch of commissions in the middle but it didn't matter because I had planned ahead and was far ahead of schedule. But yesterday I realised it was an absolute horror show. Like just so comically bad. I can't stop looking at it.

Not going to post it though. Worked flat out to do this one instead. Which is fine. But nowhere near as interesting.

More sketchbooks!

So, in lieu of anything better - here are another three sketchbook drawings.

Benicio Del Toro, a terrible drawing of Peter Sellers, and Frances McDormand from Martin McDonagh's (excellent) Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. 

And I'm not going to lie and see there definitely won't be more sketchbooks next week. Because there might be more sketchbooks next week.

Sketchbooks!

So it's been a while since I've filled some space with a few sketchbook drawings, so here are some sketchbook drawings.

This time, the eminently rewatchable John Cusack in the eminently rewatchable High Fidelity; an Audrey Hepburn using a source image that a thousand other people have used before me; and Kiran Sonia Sawar from the brilliant (and my favourite of the newest crop) episode of Black Mirror - Crocodile.

There are months between these pics and you can see the change between John and Audrey where I started properly cheating in Photoshop and adjusting the hell out of the contrast.

Everything is Irrevocably Fucked

So I've been trying to mix it up lately. I've been gradually spending more and more time drawing over the last five years or so, starting out with an aim to spend at least an hour a day drawing on average over the week. That went up to two hours a day, and then three. But lately I've been smashing that target, sometimes getting up to over 40 hours a week. Which, alongside a full time day job, is probably about all I am logistically capable of unless I cut out sleep entirely.

And it's great, but it does mean I'm getting a bit bored of working in the same way all the time. So I'm trying to get some stuff done without working from reference images.

It's difficult because that's kind of all I've done for years. And, based on the thing above, regardless of whether or not we are living in the dystopian hellscape of 2018 it seems like I haven't really matured at all since I was seventeen in terms of what I want to say. Anyway, there it is.

Red haired lady illustration

Here's another illustration that wasn't inspired by a movie. Because that's what I'm making myself do now. This is based on a source pic from Instagram user @princessfairylai who was kind enough to give me permission to do my thing. 

I'm 260 posts deep in this blog and it's a lot harder now to think of people I want to draw that I haven't already had a bash at somewhere along the line. And Instagram has been a really big help when it comes to finding source pictures of great looking people while I figure out what I'm going to do next (and there is something next coming - I feel it on my back). 

I don't know if other people reach out for permission before using a picture from another user's profile as the basis for artwork. But I dig it. And I think it's only fair - we're all out there together looking for those likes. And I've been really blown away by how generous people are. It's nice knowing that there are people out there in amongst those algorithms. And that they're cool with me drawing them.

Sunglasses Portrait Illustration

So this week here's a portrait based off of a source image by @foulsterr. As soon as I saw the original I knew I would be drawing it. And I dig the way it turned out.

I'm still drawing stuff that isn't from movies. And I am still drawing while sober. It's a really big change.

Girl with glasses portrait illustration

So here's a pretty muted portrait this week. I got the source from @iamshwa on Instagram, this is his pic of @elliedefuk. I'm having a great time drawing portraits that aren't from moviestills.

Incidentally, I'm about five or six weeks ahead of where I need to be in order to maintain a weekly blog update. Back in the day I would often scramble manically to get something finished before midnight, but now I'm trying to remember the order in which I finished things for posting. 

It's almost entirely down to the fact that I have (virtually) quit drinking while I work. Which is really annoying. Because I love drinking while I work. It's got nothing to do with the fact that the work suffers while I'm wasted (it's often much better) it's just that I can't work when I'm hungover. Those wasted days add up. And the older I get the longer those wasted days last. I guess it's also better for my health - but that's nowhere near as important.

Which isn't to say I'm going to start doing anything other than stockpile this backlog of drawings. I have nowhere near enough confidence in my ability to lay off the sauce for that.

Sci-fi lady illustration

So I'm attempting to make good on my declaration to lay off the movie illustrations and head and shoulders portraits (for a bit). I've discovered Unsplash (a massive resource for royalty free photography) that his helping me kick the habit.

The image above started with a photoset by a photographer named Ahmed Carter. And then I threw a bunch of clichéd sci-fi bullshit at it and put a big round tech thing in the background.