...

Well, after two years of working non-stop and spending all the pennies I have on college stuff I'm finally having a week off (hurrah!) so I'm visiting a friend in London.

Before leaving I started a new drawing. There were a few things that I had in mind that I wanted to do...

   * A fully finished scene - after doing the woodland scene I thought I should have another go at doing a finished image as a lot of my stuff is just a character on a blank background.

   * Stylised and with no outline - I've done a couple of smaller images in this style before, and did two cut out animations using this style, and I rather like it so would like to work on it some more. This is the style I used on the woodland scene so I thought it would be nice to create something again using this style that had a lot more detail in, and as I wasn't working to a deadline it'd be nice to just take my time with it.

   * Little Shop of Horrors - as this is one of my favourite films, I've been wanting to do some drawings from it for a long time now (and make an Audrey II puppet!) so I thought it would suit the style quite well, and it was something I could make quite detailed. 

So, I started to draw it up in my sketchbook in the hope I could finish it off, scan it and then work on it whilst I was down south... but I didn't finish it... so it didn't get scanned... and I forgot to bring the sketchbook with me. Idiot.

But fear not! for it provided me with an opportunity to do something I rarely EVER do... draw something straight into Photoshop. This always scares me a little, although I know it shouldn't, 'cause it's a lot easier to erase mistakes in photoshop, but I feel I have a lot more control over my drawing if I draw things out in pencil then scan them in and colour them/trace over them in PS.

However, it wasn't quite the disaster I thought it might be; after drawing one character, I was able to draw the second on another layer and concentrate on getting the proportions right without having to make sure it was to scale against the other character as I was able to adjust this afterwards. It also meant that I could reposition the character until I was happy with it.

So here are the first few images! 

Oh, and this is my 99th post! making the next one... ermmm... the 100th! I wanted to post something more interesting, a finished piece, for my 100th post and I had hoped it might be this finished image, but we'll see how much I get done and how long it takes!