Whoo, I’m one of the world’s leading thinkers! (theoretically, that’s who’s supposed to do techlab columns..) People coming for Lovelace and Babbage comics should go to 2dGoggles.

Is there some kind of conference on? Because there seems to be an unusual number of professorial-looking people on the Jubilee line these days.

Fun night of life drawing with a burlesque-costumed model with the London Life Drawing Society… I always wind up doing my best drawings of everyone but the model!

If burlesque becomes banned, what about burlesque life-drawing? Is it kinky because it has clothes?

Just a few ponies from a sketching/walking expedition.. some bunnies and deer, too, but they were a bit shy.

Comics now moved to 2D Goggles… we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming of sketchbook- and animation-related posts.

Whew! Sorry it’s a bit late, but just finished crunch last week, and this comic kind of ran away with me a little bit.. my Ada Lovelace Day contribution:

To spare your bandwith, the rest is at the link below:
Read More…

As usual I’m a bit overcommitted at the moment with Things That Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time.. my drinking buddy Suw came up with some cockamamie scheme for Ada Lovelace Day, and next thing I know I’m doing this (click on the image if, god help you, you want to see it larger):

The goal of this worthy enterprise is to celebrate women in technology… corrupted by myself to the goal of fooling around. Ada Lovleace, as I’m sure you all know, came up with the first theoretical program for the first imaginary computer, thus ushering in the Age of Steampunk making her an inspiration for all us girls messing around on computers in later centuries!

Insanely I actually have a few pages of this but to get in under the wire of The Day Itself I’m posting that up for now.

Teaser for the NEXT THRILLING EPISODE:

Here’s some arty boys from my sketchbook winnow… I think all three of these are from Annecy last year (click for larger if you like):

Last weekend I went to the medieval festival at Herstmonceaux Castle, where a fabulously geeky, if damp, time was had by all. Pictures of me in a fairy princess getup have most unfortunately all mysteriously disappeared.

The amazing thing about this festival are the dozens and dozens (hundreds, maybe?) of re-enactors who don’t only spend the weekend in meticulous period dress, but camp in period tents and cook over period fire eating period food– and fight some pretty serious battles in head-to-toe period armour!

I did masses of drawings but only a fraction of the ones I wanted to, with the amazing costumes and scenes and horses and objects everywhere! Mostly I focused on the costume for this trip, here’s a couple of pages:

I got back from the Annecy festival a few weeks ago.. don’t have any Deep Thoughts but a couple of film recommendations and some sketches.

On the whole I found the films kind of a let down (I’ll never brag about having film in Annecy again.. ) but it was worth it for one film, I think the best short film I’ve ever seen: Skhizein, which won the audience award. Very funny for 10 minutes, then turned suddenly incredibly sad; on a rare subject, and I’m still thinking about it weeks later. Catch in on the festival circuit if you possibly can; I suppose it will come out on the ‘net when it’s done touring. Also excellent was the feature Peurs du Noir. Not normally much of a horror fan but really inventive graphics in this one:

Anyways we all really go to Annecy to drink and socialize and stock up on graphic novels at the fabulous comic shops, all of which activities I thoroughly covered. Having a glass of wine or ten with fellow-Narnian Caroline, I couldn’t help noticing how ideal her features are for fast drawing; and then there was a random guy sitting behind her with classic French-comic-book-hero chiseled cheekbones, so I drew this:

And then I thought, obviously, HOW MUCH COOLER, not to mention more French-comic-booky it would be, if Caroline was a fairy:

and Mr Brooding noir hero could solve crimes featuring ogres and witches, but dark! and French! and brooding! It looked pretty fantastic on a bottle and a half of cheap red and a week’s all-graphic-novel-and-animation diet.

I promised Caroline I’d put it up so here it is… I was kind of fancying mocking a cover up in colour, because that’s the sort of thing I waste my time on, but I’m shockingly paralyzed by the death of my Toshiba tablet. I’m a lot more dependent on Photoshop than I’d really like for polishing stuff. No one seems to make tablet PCs with decent graphics cards anymore so I’m ogling Cintiqs now, which I can’t really justify as I’d mostly use it for doing things like covers for imaginary comic books.