.drizzly water

What a strange thing it is to walk all alone in the cold drizzly streets of the city, going back and forth in a time cycle that has no end nor beginning. I’m carrying a broken watch in my right pocket, the hand tightly grasping it, I walk with thin water in my glasses and through those polka-dotted windows I see those pieces, all dazzled, all messed up, this pieces of memories, right in front of my eyes. And in time I realize that I don’t care. It’s frozen on 4 o’clock, the watch. If before or afternoon doesn’t matter, it doesn’t cares. And the fragments of it’s stopped time are all around, coming and going back and forth in a time cycle that has no end nor beginning. I shall call it life.

What a awkward thing it is to stay all alone in your home, to stay inside of your own tower, and see the time passing, not speaking a single word all day, not seeing a living thing for so many hours, and thinking about so many things, that all seems to be otherworldly, in another time and space. But not, it isn’t. And you wake up back to life. The memories, so vivid, they are true. The people, so colorful, they are real. And slowly you do accept to be driven back to this infinite loop of experiences, of vinegar and salt, this huge bittersweetness. That strange thing, we shall call life.

This is the third paragraph.

¹ in time: indian ink on layout 180g paper. 35 minutes from first sketch to done.

.sleepwalking

Hello boys and girls! That’s right, I’m back! Or at least I’ll try to be. This last months has been very busy. I’ve moved, Thom and Cathy have got some decorative partners, adugestudio has moved to my home also, and it’s been great to live with the gentlemen and the lady.
The work of the studio is also great and progressing, and I have a bunch of novelties to show you all, hope later this week. By now, I’ll live you with my last loki. This is a very peculiar and particular kind of draw that now and then happens to come to my mind. It’s a sort of representation of all the too much inside my head, but somewhat less poetry-full than it may sounds. And I love to do them. This time they came in a pair, this’ the second one.

.the incredible adventures of mr laslande and petit

Oh! And so this is 2009! Welcome, my dear.
I’ll use this most splendid opportunity  to think about me past and bring something very interesting from back then. Being then the year of 2005, my first in the Design College, and most remarkably, the one in which I’ve settled the foundations of  Les Incroyables Aventures de M Laslande et Petit, not a children’s story. The first idea for this project is probably forever lost in history somewhere between 1997 and 2001, the earliest known concepts of something vaguely containing a background history for the characters are some sketches that I’ve found the other day in the bottom of a drawer in my old room in my parents’ house. They’re from 2001. But today we’ll talk about something slightly more recent, a series of illustrations I’ve done in the second half of 2005, just after a long period of creation and refinement of the characters and their surroundings. Today the count goes something like 40 characters, situated all around a sort of electropunk fantasy world: the time is a alternative version of the 30’s and the main place is Paris. Petit is a Secret Agent for the Europol and best friend to a lonely private detective, Monsieur Laslande, his owner. Petit is a 4 years old dog.
Just to start, some character sheets:

More soon. There are many other characters, including M Laslande and Petit themselves, and some illustrations done for inexistent comic-books imaginary layers.

.the madman is in the desert

Can you dance with the leppers in the madman’s house???¹

—-
Hereby I present these very preliminary  sketches done for the “Flavour of the Month” section of John Howe’s website². I thought it would be interesting to have them here. The December’s flavour is The Silmarillion:

And February will be Dragons:
 
 

That’s it. I’ll probably do the Morgoth and the Feännor ones this month and Ancalagon, The Nightmare and possibly two old drawings that I should’ve done a long time ago.

¹ Part of Arabian Sand, by British band The Coral.
² Every month there is sort of a little contest in John’s forum. He gives a theme and the best 5 os so drawings get the right to stay in the site.

.darts of pleasure

There and back again…
Did you missed me too much? Sorry for the absence. My brother has come to visit me, the ravens and some of his friends, ’twas his birthday last 26th and we’ve spent some time drinking our lives away. What does it mean? Well, I haven’t drawn a single sketch for many days! Shame on me.

Remember that Molly from Neuromancer I’ve talked ’bout? Finished her today.
All references to real life are mere coincidence (or not).

Other good news is that I’ve re-opened my account at John Howe’s forum¹, and will be participating on the next competitions, soon… So wait and see, here may be dragons. 

Back to the point. Molly and her dart gun; indian ink, pitt pens and color pencils, a4 layout 180g paper. 

¹ this one i mean.

.domination

Today is a good day! I’m quite happy! GameArtisans has annouced the posters from DominanceWar III, it’s Blizzard supported competition. And hey! I’m in! The third edition of the contest has taken place some months ago, and I’ve sended my entry. I’ve been accepted, but not qualified to the finals, so I wasn’t expecting any news about that, but here are the posters! My illustration apears in the CG Society poster, in the right, above the funky Eel guy.
Basically the plot was to create a hero to save all system’s planets from a alien machine invasor, without using any complex machine and with some kind of magick power. The result of a long process of creation, that I may show thee someday, was that guy:

In the final step I’d sent a concept and a model sheets and a final illustration.

 

Saddly this last one isn’t sharply what it should be… I was coming all the way in traditional drawings, all the pieces of the modelsheet, except the crystal, are washed ink, paper, oldschool. Whem the time for the final one came I just don’t had it, and due to possible risks of making a traditional drawing (a.k.a. the inexistence of cmd+z in real life) in so short a time I’ve decided to go digitalway. As you see, not my strongest arm…

Sad story. Hohoho. But hey! The poster is nice and I’m there!
GameArtisans and Blizzard just opened a new competition, something about Death Knights and WOW. This time it’ll be paper based all the way!

.mad madness

One of the consequences of reading too much of Batman’s graphic novels is that if you don’t watch yourself carefully soon you’ll gonna be mesmerized by the magnetic personality of Gotham’s criminals.
Just like I am…

And tonights case is a double problem.

It’s a shame, I know, but I must admit, I’ve never read Lewis Carroll, and don’t even remeber much of Disney’s version… But hey! I do know some of the characters! Yes I do. Great… But the big problem is when you take one of those characters, one that everyone knows and thinks is the crazyest thing around, you take this guy, and put him in Gotham! Now we’re talking ’bout a psycho villain!

Yesterday I’ve warned you, and The Mad Hatter is coming, he’s half the way now.
Here from the top of the watchtower we can see the image taking form:

and it’s getting closer now:

Thom flew of the tower to have a little chat with him. Hope he’ll be able to get Mr Hatter upstairs soon.
Beware! Take care…

.here is to aduge

Oh hi! I’ve told thou ’bout my little enterprise havn’t I? Our little aduge. We’re working hard in it, and more then ever with high hopes. Next wednesday the folks back in Curitiba will have a lil’ chat with Mr Chris Norden from SCEA, quite unnespected, quite remarkable. I’m back here in WY and waiting for some news. Pray they’ll be good. Thom ensures that everything is gonna be allright and that I should get back to work. And so I do. Tonight I’ll start a Mad Hatter. Whait and see.

Here are the last three inked ones I’ve done, all of them in a4s.

 

This last one is shurelly a cyberpunk, and in my last post I’ve referred to Gibson’s Neuromancer… Yeah, I’m reading it, and it’s friggin amazing! But this skinny guy up here is older then my reading. It’s quite an improvisation, since I don’t had such a big ciberpunk-visual-library inside my head, yet. But while reading Neuromancer the images just came, I can see every little detail of that universe, and it’s helping a lot to build a cyberpunk imaginarium that soon I’ll have to use. The charecters of the book are so very graphic, so visual in their concepts, that I’ve already started to draw two of them. One is, obviously, Molly with her quicksilver eyes and tight black suits. The other is Lupus Yonderboy, the Panther Modern. I’ll finish both this week, in the same style of those 3 here, maybe with some color in Lupus’ hair. Cathy loves his pink hair.

.vini, vidi, vinci

I just lost the game¹.

Yet another trip. This time ’twas Belo Horizonte, Brasil, for the SBGames, the major Game event in the country. I need to admit that I’ve greatly underrated it, I was expecting something completely boring, technical, and… geeky.

To say the truth, shurelly it had some very geeky moments, but not at all was that the rule. Half the papers presented were related to Art, Design, Culture and/or Education. The main keynotes were in such a high level that I really don’t expected, Chris Norden from SCEA², John Nordlinger from Microsoft Research and Bertrand Chaverot from Ubisoft. The later actually is the director of the brand new São Paulo Ubisoft studio.
Ok, fine papers, great keynotes, good coffeebreaks (that’s utterly important)… But the greatest thing in SBGames was shurelly people.
Yeah yeah yeah. Life is good, this is fun,  but I gotta go back to work, and maybe someday I’ll come back to this topic. What I really have to say about the SBGames is quite simple, just vini, vidi, vinci.
And now I leave thou with the latest drawing, Chiba City Blues³, from this morning, watercolors on cotton paper:

 

 

¹ The game has three simple rules:
   rule #1: When you know about the game you start playing it.
   rule #2: When you think of The Game, you lose The Game.
   rule #3: When you lose The Game, you announce it to those around you. 

   I’ve lost.
² Sony Computer Entertainment America, that is opening a incubation program for brasilian game developers.
³ The relation with the first arch in William Gibson’s Neuromancer is mere chance. By the way, the thigns that happens by chance usually are the better ones. I like chance, do you?

.tah-dah… it’s magickal!

The Dark Knight.

Since the end of Batman Begins and that killing scence with the joker card I was waiting for The Dark Knight to come. Something like 3 fortnights ago it arrived, and I went to the theatre. 5 times. Two just in the first day. Maybe a little too much, ok, but I’m one of those freaks that doesn’t just go to see a movie, I very much eat every little piece of it. And TDK has plenty to be eaten. In the third time I’ve found the rails of the Wayne Tram in the backgrounds, in the fourth I’ve seen Harvey knocking down Maroni’s bodyguard, in the fifth the audience, nearly a month since the premiere, was still mesmerized by the movie, still laughthing, all of them, of the dark humor of Joker’s magick pencil¹.
So.  Dark Knight. Thanks Nolans. Thanks Heath.

And, with some of my old memories back from Batman Animated and it’s greatest invention, Harley Quinzell, and the always-in-mind work of Mucha wandering around, the result followed:
 

But that’s not all. I know that the movie isn’t THAT awesome.

They haven’t created so much. In a first moment I’ve thought they had. Even knowing that there were all those classic comics and graphic novels. And, after the movie colled down, I’ve decided to  read what I long ago should have.
My head exploded!! A sevennight passed ’til I’ve finnished cleaning my brains from the ceiling. The three on the roof, all harvey’s mind, the italian mob, the hanging cops, “tonight’s entertainment”, and, much, much more. Seriously, Miller, Mazzucchelli, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale are now among the most remarkable artists I know, and I must admit that recently I’ve also been greatly inspired by the work of other Batman artist, Mr Dustin Nguyen. And they’ve done this to me:

Quite a change. At least I think so. Catherine too. This one is the very first drawing of a new lineage the I’ve just discovered inside my mind. I’m very glad that I did so. Wait for the newer ones… The 3 Peteca guys² are some of them, but I’ve done others while I was travelling that I’m very happy with.
That drawing is also my first work with tube watercolour, before I used to work with Talens’ Ecoline, a liquid type of watercolour. I think that the new ones, to me, i mean, are even faster to work with.

But that’s not all!!!
Yeah! What a marvelous thing!!
¬¬ Ok.
Reaching this new style within my own styles remembered me of one of my oldest ones, and, still in the Joker Rush, I’ve done one more, this time in a Playing Card template. I’m planning 3 decks of Batman characters, 12 figures in each plus 3 Jokers. I have the list². Now it’s a question of time to do all them. But back to the point, Mr J and Harley in a twist:

 

¹ “How about a magick trick?”
² See .last things first.
³ The Batman, Batgirl, Robin (Jason Todd), Jim Gordon, Zatana, Nightwing, Alfred Pennyworth, The Oracle, Lucius Fox, Azrael, Batwoman, Robin (TIm Drake), The Penguim, Ventriloquist, Black Mask, Mr Freeze, Catwoman, Solomon Grundy, Killer Croc, Mud Face, The Scarecrow, The Red Hood, Harley Quinn, Mad Hatter, Harvey Dent, Guilda Dent, Hush, Carmine Falcone, Sofia Falcone, Alberto Falcone, The Riddler, Poison Ivy, Manbat, Ra’s  Al Ghul, Talia Al Ghul, Bane. The 3 Jokers: Cesar Romero, Bolland’s (Killing Joke) and an original one.