ILX Art Gallery: Tregaskin Memorial Wing (do not read if you hate me)

kinda one of the things I love about cel animation, so much done with so little

It's that abstraction process - on both sides, what the artist knows to put out/leave in - but also how the human brain fills in emotion based on very minimal cues. It's amazing, I love it.

Anyway, Jonny is looking hilarious today! It's like Carter the Painter's Cat when he was only half painted and had to go out without a tail. Or, a mouth in this case.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7042/6896396763_858b04cdb3_o.jpg

You can tell what bits I work on, and in which order. I usually do the hair first - not just because I love hair, but because it provides the frame for the face, and sets the colour palette - especially if the person is a brunette, it makes the colours of the face "pop" against it - if I do hair last, I always tend to end up making the face too dark simply as a reaction against the white of the page. Every new colour and new bit you add ends up affecting the colour composition of the whole thing, and I'm constantly adjusting to make it all harmonious. (I suppose I really should block out the lips in colour on another layer so that he doesn't look so alien, but I want to adjust the pink of his lips to the colour of his face, not the other way around.)

I use the blobs above his head as a palette - I usually sample the colours directly off a photograph of the person, but often have to brighten them, so I need a record of the processed colour I'm using. (Shadows are not black, they have colours, this is the most important thing I ever learned, and I learned it from a novel, not a painting class, oddly enough.)

I do a basic gradient on the face to get it blocked out, and a few bits of shading to make it look curved, the go straight in to the eyes - once you've got a person's eyes right, the rest of them really kind of falls into place. Really wanted to capture Jonny's bright-eyed, alert expression, but also get the wan sadness. But it is funny to see his eyes looking v v realistic and his nose and mouth so flat. LOL.

Aaaaannnnnnndddd... a bit more airbrushing to give him a MOUTH and a proper nose (ugh, I hate drawing noses, why are they SO hard?) and heeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrre's JONNY!

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7046/6897361733_f8a2870a8b_o.jpg

I did some colour blocking to add a background because it looked so unfinished against the white (I will at some point put in a proper background, maybe, but I like it the way it is right now.)

is wandering greenwood eye grid-sketch for sale?

Not that you'd know it from an old 90s scan of him, but his eyes are that sort of hazel color where they're very green around the outer edge with a red-gold ring around the pupil. But I really love how this is coming together so far! The colors have really brought it to life. x-posts

And the fully colored version is stunning, sorry I didn't see it before I posted!

Yeah, I know about the Greenwoods' amazing hazel-gold-green eye colour (I mean, I'm not that bothered about Jonny, but his brother - ::SWOON::) and I tried to make it more pronouncedly green-gold but it just wasn't working with the light, so I made them more brown-gold. (they were at one point purple, which was... interesting. Colours in drawings don't always look right if they're completely naturalistic, it's weird.)

Sorry, Philip, if you mean the pencil sketch, that's long gone, the pencil gets erased during the inking process. I tend to discard the paper as soon as it's scanned, because it's not that important to me. (I mean, I keep them, they're usually floating somewhere round the flat) but they're not what matters.

Really tempted to draw a Thom to go with him but jesus christ, I think I drew Thom approximately 40,000 times between 1993 and 2001, I think it would be ridiculous.

I have some photos I'd like to see you attempt!

What, photos of Thom? You could ... share them ... and I could have a go. But, y'know, because you asked me to. Not because I *want* to or anything, you understand.

Of course.

Let me look around my files for a second.

...

tee hee hee

...

OH GOD I AM SUCH A WHORE FOR THOM YORKE WHY AM I GOING TO DRAW HIM YET AGAIN?!?!?

(I think my favourite drawing I did of him is that one of him at 18, in the beret, it was called "if I should lose my faith in art" but I'm fucked if I know what happened to it. Actually I might look for that...)

Wow I really really love some of these. Nice work WCC.

http://i.imgur.com/HnWV4.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/rIvDf.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/88QmO.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zUo5z.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/9SEiG.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/sVthK.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/aJRSf.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8dbIS.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/hBXtZ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/29Vxa.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/FugLG.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tos4D.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/5Jbnh.jpg (more Colin than Thom)

Oh sweet Jesus, so many Thoms!

(What on earth *is* he doing in that last one?)

I have no idea, to be honest.

1) masking his face so that he can sneak up on Colin unseen? (like that hedgehog hair isn't a dead giveaway)

2) Ed just told him "christ, you smell, mate" and he's trying to figure out if it's him or his clothes?

...

......

..........

Either way, jesus, Coz is hott.

He looks more like he's pretending to be some sort of shirt monster.

Bonus Jonathan - http://i.imgur.com/RgrSE.jpg

Sometimes I pull my t-shirt up like that to wipe sweat off my face.

Really enjoying this thread.

rrrrroooowwwwrrrrr it is the Yorkeian shirt monster! BEWARE!!!

I'm trying to figure out which one of those already looks the most like one of my drawings. Probably either the first one, or the one of him under Southwark (??) Bridge?

How is someone so completely weird looking and everything I find unattractive (short! balding!) so absolutely amazingly beautiful.

I'm going to go and get some wine and try to decide.

Aw, what a sweet Jonny! Since drawing him, I've decided he looks less like Alex James and more like Brian Cox, but honestly all three of them hatched from the same pod.

(oh dear this thread has abandonned any pretense of being about art and is just all about LUST now tee hee hee)

I think the degree to which he's balding is often overstated. He has had the same terrible hairline since he was 20. x-post

Do you think Cillian Murphy also hatched out of that pod?

I mean - http://i.imgur.com/PzGCn.jpg

Yes, Cillian Murphy was definitely in that there pod with them. He got that same weird jawline that Jonny did. HA HA HA HA HA x-post I agree.

And Thom's hairline comes and goes and always has (I mean, the worst it ever was, was the Karma Police video, but I suspect that was partially post hair extension damage, the way the hair is in clumps like that - and partially pretty much anyone's hair falls out after spending two years solid on tour) but there was that recent photo from the HUGE Magazine fashion shoot where he was leaning against a tree (Thom? A tree? Imagine that) and pushing his long hair out of his face, and you could see that yes, his hairline has actually run quite a lot further back than it used to be.

AND I STILL WANT TO LICK EVERY INCH OF IT.

What is wrong with me.

Now stop distracting me with pretty Radiohead boys, do you want a drawing of Thom or don't you?

:-P

;-)

Goddammit I still want to lick his bald patches. I don't care.

http://www.radiox.ru/pics/mag/2011-huge/2011-taro-mizutani-06.jpg

I don't know, this is from that same photo shoot and his hairline just looks the way it has for years and years. Anyway, with you on the licking.

And it is up to you whether you're distracted or not! x-post

Yes yes yes, but look how it has been styled! So that that careful landing strip of longer hair from his forehead is held in place with the sunglasses to cover the receded bits? He's very good at this, he has been doing it for a long time.

What I really REALLY want is that Pablo era photo of Thom, and Jonny bending down to rub noses, and they're both in profile? I found a scan of it on a Japanese website but they'd javascripted up the page so I couldn't d/l it and my god I NEED that.

It might actually be cuter and more homoerotic than Mark Gardener and Andy Bell sharing bubble-blowing.

screen capture! alt+prtscreen or whatever it is!

Yes, or ctrl+U to go to the source, search for .jpg. Pretty good chance you will find it.

http://i.imgur.com/Qm6VK.jpg - Here you go, WCC.

My screen caps aren't very good and when I tried to look at the source, there were like 500 jpegs on the page and all the text in Japanese and it was just impossible but...

YAY!!! thank you so much, Melissa. I knew if anyone would have that, you would.

Jesus, how hott is that. It doesn't hurt that Jonny looks so much like his brother in that picture. Wau.

(God, this is going to be so embarrassing if anyone in the future ever goes googling for my art looking for information about my technique and they get 300 posts of me going alskfjkljslkdfjsdj lsdfjlkjkljlskdjfsjfds over Thom Yorke's bald patch.)

believe me the more and more you draw faces (from real sources) means you will soon have no problem drawing your own made up faces.

Only because Melissa asked me to so nicely, you understand. Naught to do with me! ;-)

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7195/6899658433_15e6c4ea46_o.jpg

1) his hair took FOREVER to draw. Freaking hours.

2) Nothing on his face is symmetrical. NOTHING. Not even his nostrils. It's not my fault, that's just the way his face was made.

lol his hair is amazing. It is alive! But oh my god, thank you. btw do you mind if I post the result of my eye color experiment on your Jonny drawing?

If you like!

(I'll probably do a proper colour version of Thom tomorrow, but i thought you'd like to see him tonight.)

http://i.imgur.com/soeXl.png - lol subtlest of differences, I just wanted to see if I could get the color right. I have not your photoshop skillz, so eventually I just achieved this by literally cutting one of his eyes out of a close-up picture and putting it in a color layer. x-post

And thank you for posting it tonight! I thought for sure you had gone to sleep.

Wow OK, yeah, that really works. I think it's because the green catches the green of his jumper (I didn't have any colour blocking when I did his face.)

His hair in that drawing has a Studio Ghibli vibe –– like it would puff up to match his emotions (just saying probs bcz I saw ARRIETTY last night). Another good draw! When I used to draw pics of Yorke in the '90s I was really quite mean about his eye and he always looked like a dying baby bird.

OMG Abbbbs, I LOVE YOU because of those two images you have put in my mind:

1) Yorke's hair like actual hedgehog (or is it porcupine?) spikes that puff up and lay flat again depending on how ~defensive~ he is feeling

2) The second half of yr post just got me singing "She used to comi-i-cs... of Yorke in the Nii-iiine-ties... but gravity always wins."

and both of these are the best. thing. ever.

(One of those things I should totally not confess in public, but I'm going to take advantage of my newfound ~anonymity~ - one of the section editors at Plan B - he was another one of those small, perfect, beautiful boys with total hedgehog hair, I used to have *such* a massive crush on him, it wasn't even funny. But you could always tell when the magazine was getting close to print deadline by the state of his hair, at the beginning of the print cycle it would be perfect, but as deadline loomed, it would get more and more perpendicular until approaching vertical, so you knew not to bother him if he was in hedgehog mode. But aaawwww.)

"Taking the Darwinian naturalist's approach, in order to understand a creature's plumage, one must observe the natural habitat where it evolved..."

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7055/6908910249_08ea3719b3_o.jpg

I mean, really.

I think I'm feeling that spikey right now. Like, feeling utterly incapable of communicating with other human beings without it turning into a total disaster, which makes my hedgehog spikes go all defensive. When what I really want is the intellectual equivalent of a hug, and to be told that it's all alright. Portraits of other people are always depictions of mine own mental states. I'm going for a walk in the Great North Wood until I feel better.

I didn't think there was any left? Or are you wandering the streets of Norwood? Can't seeing it being quite as soothing for yr inner hedgehog tbh.