2 posts within a week!? surely not!...

I finally had some time to myself this weekend! Hurrah! As i'd updated my laptop, and in the process lost my desktop image, I decided to draw a new one.
Obviously it was going to be something with tentacles.
LO AND BEHOLD!

I prefer to draw stuff by hand but the lack of a scanner at the moment is forcing me to draw straight into photoshop using my tablet, but I'm getting a little better with it, though I still find it difficult to draw smooth curves. I drew him out roughly and then played around with colours. I really wanted to make him turquoise, but every time I draw a squid or octopus (or make a giant one!) it's turquoise, so I decided to try a different colour for once!...

I built him up in layers just using blocks of flat solid colour, a pinky red colour for his main body and a peachy colour for the underside of his tentacles...

Next step was to add shading by adding lighter areas to the octopus. This is kind of the backwards way of doing it but it's just laziness as I just used the same paths that I'd used to create the main shape and just moved them around a bit and shrunk them down...

Once I was relatively happy with the shading I added his eye, I did this in the same way, building it up layer upon layer...

I don't know what I'm going to to with the background, I don't like having too much detail, so I just added a turquoise colour (I had to get it in somewhere) with a gradient on it. I might play around with some textures, maybe something like the ones I used on my final show photos/drawings. 

So this is where I'm at now, I've started drawing on some suckers which I'll probably just colour free hand rather than using paths.. 'cause it's easier... I'm not sure whether I should put something else on there with him too, I like to have clear space on my desktop for files and stuff, so we'll see...

POW!

Well, once again it's been a while since I updated! I will try and keep on top of things now that I'm getting used to my new routine! It's my fourth week at my new job this week (it's flown over!) and I've been pretty busy so haven't really had time to do anything creative for myself, let alone post it on here!

The new job is going ok though, I've still got a LOT to learn about the company, I haven't a clue what people are talking about at times, but I feel like I'm doing a lot of work and I'm even learning a few new PS tricks as I go! It's even prompted me to use twitter a bit more! 

Today I got to go to CAT (link below), there are a lot of people out of the office this week doing important things in other countries so I get the impression I was a last resort so as not to waste the ticket, and to be honest I was expecting to be sat there not having a clue what was going on and not understanding what anyone was talking about, but it was a great day with some awesome speakers and some mega interesting stuff so I'm chuffed I got to go, last resort or not!

http://creativitycat.com/index.php

The highlights of the day:

Stewart Smith - http://stewd.io/ - you should definitely check out his website, full of fun things he's created, he did a great video for Grandaddy which is on there too.

Chris Milk - http://chrismilk.sites.livebooks.com/ - this guy is genius, if you've seen the interactive Arcade Fire video then this is the guy responsible for it. If not then go here now... http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ 

Unfortunately it's a little limited when inputting your town, I opted for London (no Newcastle or Durham on there unsurprisingly), but the idea is amazing. 

He's also the guy responsible for this http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/ which again is total genius, and although each frame is done by a different person, I love the idea of doing a rotoscope animation and using different media for each frame. *rubs chin*

As well as those guys there were a bunch of other cool folk there such as Iain Tate from Wieden+Kennedy (responsible for the Old Spice - The man your man could smell like ads! If you haven't seen them... where the hell have you been!? get yourself onto youtube and have a look, check out the twitter responses they filmed too) and Tommy Pallotta (producer of A Scanner Darkly) who talked about his new project http://www.collapsus.com/ which is a mixture of documentary, drama and gaming and looks pretty ace. There was a whole bunch of other cool things and interesting people too but I won't go on.

ANYWAY, it's pretty late and I have work tomorrow and I've rambled on enough for now. 

Here's an octopus with a monocle drinking brandy which I drew whilst watching Day of the Dead...

TTFN!