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

I need to do more arts, it just makes me a better person.

I've definitely slowed down in terms of finished pieces lately (been focusing on doing a stop motion animation piece primarily)

WHOA Shakey Mo! I was gonna shout at you ask you nicely if I could keep this thread for just my stuff, but flipping heck, those are lovely! Post away! Thank you so much for sharing them. I really enjoyed seeing those. I do love that 60s SF poster feel - but you're right, there's only so far you can go with it. What's your technique - are they hand inked, digital or what?

yes, the (c) this is only on the digital image as obviously the sad wan man essence sketch hasn't got one because it was taken with iPhone so I couldn't watermark it.

Haha, Abbotttttt I am so glad I'm not the only person who ends up destroying her own artwork through simply being a slob. Rings from teacups, flakes of chocolate that I don't realise it's chocolate until I try to flick it away and there's a brown stain on the edge of my sketchbook. And I used to draw in bars, a lot, but I had to stop after one too many beer flood disaster taking out an entire sketchbook. (ARGH.)

Thanks, I have always been quite proud of my inking skillz, I used to ink other comic book artists' stuff when I was at art school, I love doing it so much.

"Sad wan essence" fucken LOL.

I'm kind of annoyed, because looking at the pencil, I realise that I must have done something to the left side of his hair, which actually brought it more in line with the original source photo - but the slight curve of the line of hair makes it look much more Jonny-like for the simple reason that that hair is usually in motion, flying over the top of a telecaster or a theremin or something. (I love this original photo because he is holding a pair of scissors and is actually hacking the shit out of Thom's hair without even looking at it, which is why Thom had such terrible hair for much of the Pablo Honey era.)

And yeah, Melissa, he is SO strange looking. Obviously, he is not unattractive, in fact, his oddly composed features come together in a pleasing way to create a very handsome man. But individually, the pieces of his face are just so odd they're really hard to draw. His jaw is completely disconnected from what is going on in the rest of his face.

Once I do the shading, and put the pupils of his eyes back in (it's amazing how just adding that white dot in the pupil turns a flat picture into a portrait) he'll come back to pale and wan sad life.

This not the actual reference photo, but it's from the same session. I just love the expression on Thom's face so much, like "what have you DONE to me?!?!?"

http://www.radiox.ru/pics/mag/1994-patpope/1994patpope04.jpg

Sorry. I will not phangurl out. I will get back to drawing.

no worries WCC wasn't sure if this was just a new version of other ILX0r gallery threads or what. oddly we seem to rely on fairly similar techniques for the most part - I do the pencilling and inking by hand, scan it in and clean up stray marks etc and then lay in the colors digitally in photoshop.

although when I'm sketching or doodling I tend to just stick to ink. a lot of the pattern-y stuff above was all inks/no pencils once I had the general layout worked out.

I'm getting kinda sick of the sight of the dude at this point, but carrying on the experiment. Here is the retouched version, wherein I have fixed the wonky unevenness of the eyes. Slight fear I might have moved them too far in the opposite direction, but it's definitely looking better to me, and I've fixed his hair, too, so it has more movement, more like the pencil sketch.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7182/6893818699_a45c6e25b8_o.jpg

that def looks better - alignment of the eyes was off in the original, I think

I knew the eyes were off in the original - seriously off - but I liked the expression in them, so I knew I could just go with it and fix it in retouching.

If I'm feeling kinda insecure or not sure about a sketch in the line art stage (and it often looks weird and two dimensional because, well, it's line art) then I'll do some basic colour blocking in black and white (usually with 25% or 50% fills in grey) to build up an idea of how it's going to look when it's coloured in.

Because it's a heck of a lot easier to fix something like a badly angled eyebrow or a lopsided lip when it's in black and white, and you're only dealing with two colours, than once it's coloured and has gradients in it and everything has to be colour matched and corrected if it's changed. And this is the thing that always strikes me - how completely you can change the expression on someone's face just by adding, removing, angling or thickening a single line in the face - especially in the eyes or lips. Faces are amazing like that.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7056/6893818705_3062e8ec79_o.jpg

It's also funny because this is when I notice that I really have to accentuate the adam's apple, because if I don't, he really does look like a GURL.

Now I'm going to bed.

yeah faces are incredible - if I don't have a photo reference to work from I end up with some really bizarre looking people

This is why I swear by using grids to get eyes and noses in approximately human proportions! (Obviously this doesn't always work, as evidenced by the pencil sketch)

I once did a Julian Opie style moving portrait in a gif, where the guy blinked and kind of twitched his nose a bit, changing his face with just a few tiny lines. It's really amazing how expressive a single line can be.

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.

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tee hee hee

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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!