Two more drawings - a spiral shell, in oil pastel with 6B pencil worked into it, and a section from my acorn arnacles drawing in oil pastel.

I've got literally hundreds of pictures to post, thanks to my new scanner, camera and drawing tablet. So, as a way of making it up to you all for my absence, here's some of the stuff I've been working on...

( Beneath the cut lies artwork! )

My fourth and final illustration for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The idea was to include more biro (i.e. ballpoint pen) as the series progressed, and so this final piece was entirely in biro on coffeewashed paper collage.

A note: any vagueness in quality, most notably in the top half of the 'scan', is entirely the camera's fault. I didn't use the flash, but the lighting in the room caught in the ink and made it look all pale. Biro ink is strangely reflective, even when it's dry...

This one wasn't so bad. I was quite pleased with the way I portrayed my ideas, and in the way I portrayed the character; the wild hair, the half-eaten face, the bulging eyes... it worked exactly as I wanted.

What I wasn't happy about was the proportions. I feel her hand should have been much larger, for one; think about it, when you hold your hand up to your face, it goes from your chin to half-way between your eyebrows and hairline, generally. Her hand is tiny (and I mean it is way too small), and I don't think it stands out as much as it should have done.

Another fundamental aspect was looked over for this reason; the dice in her hand. It is by rolling dice in the epic that she wins the Mariner's life, and so I feel the poor little dice should have had a better portrayal.

Oil pastel, 2B pencil and touches of acrylic paint on torn, coffee-washed paper collage. It would have been A2, only it got on the right side of a pair of scissors.

This one I hated. My main issue was how to compose the piece, as you can tell. I didn't work from a reference image of an albatross, which is probably why this looks like a badly composed oil piece of a troubled seagull. This is definitely one for the 'try again' pile!

The little white bit in the top left corner is where a bit of the paper collage fell off, after all the colour had been layered on. The collage itself was basically bits of roughly torn paper glued down, then coffeewashed over. The coffee would sink into the edges of the paper, making them darker. When oil pastel was applied, the edges of the paper bits would show through, giving a 'broken' feel which was intentional.

Oil pastel, 2B pencil and touches of acrylic paint on torn, coffee-washed paper collage. It would have been A2, only its mother decided it needed a trim.

The first, and in my eyes the best, of my A2 Art final pieces. This is the piece in which I discovered how much I loved working with oil pastels, for their boldness, the way they blend and for their ease in covering such a large scale.

Oil pastel, 2B pencil and touches of acrylic paint on torn, coffee-washed paper collage. It's vaguely A2 in size; or it was before I got to it.

Whew! After a good two hours of work, I've finished the book cover! Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you...



If ever you run across this book in your local shop, I highly recommend you turn the other way and find the Terry Pratchett section instead.

Credits for the fonts:

Title/Author text: Pointy by Pointy Design
Books One + Four: Love Ya Like a Sister by Kimberly Geswein
Phone on the 's': Phones by Signart
Speech bubble: Talkies by Iconian Fonts
Buildings in the background: Cityscape by The Scriptorium

I know! What is this world coming to? I've finally posted a drawing! Mind you, it's a very rough drawing; you could call it an embryonic version of the book cover for 'The Timeshare Presentation of Death', before I decided to change the title.

Because I'm quite happy with the drawing, I've scanned it in to take bits (namely the tower block and phone box) for use on the actual cover. Anyway, here it is...

( It's under here to save your eyes. )

Apologies for the messiness. It was half finished. The idea was to have two tower blocks in a line, with a phone box between them. The two tower blocks on either side would work to make the phone box look gigantic. If you look carefully, you can see guidelines that were for the second tower block, and some scribbling around the bottom of the page because I was struggling for ideas to fill that particular area.

Since I'm making a cover that's for both 'Arcane Mathematics' and 'The Timeshare Presentation of Death', I'm going to design a cover that'll incorporate themes from both books.