PROGRESS

Day three:

Kept my promise and dragged myself out of bed at the crack of dawn. Mostly to avoid the landlord, but thought i'd kill two birds with one stone.

Worked on the mural for 9 solid hours today, consequently I am now close to collapsing, but I'm so pleased I don't even care.

I know it looks like I'm wearing the same thing, but I do wash - I promise. Anyway, just to show size of things:

Close up of the norse ship - I will get round to painting on a figure head at some point:

One of the sirens:

Alas, I've got to return to making coffee for a bit, so it looks like the big white sections are staying for another week.

Heads or tails?

Day two of the mural. Don't feel I got as much done as I would have liked, but I don't have a deadline and I'm getting paid by the hour so I guess it doesn't matter.

Rooted around in my paint box and found an array of acrylics [finally I can use black YES! I don't understand those strange breed of people who are averted to using it], so spent the day doing detail on the norse ship and some of the siren's tails. If anyone was wondering if you can mix emulsion with acrylics - it seems to be okay [probably not a burning question, but I'm sure you can store this little nugget of information somewhere in the back of your brain to pluck out at a later date]. Although saying that, I'm probably going to go in tomorrow though and find it's all pealed off. My fingers are crossed:

Gave up using a paintbrush and pretty much finger painted these:

Definitely need to fix the spray behind the rock and put some detail on the ships head. Also just realized I somehow managed to paint over the ships sail without realising it. I really hope no one notices. I'm going to stop having lie ins and pretending to do exercise on my Wii Fit and get started early tomorrow, so watch this [significantly blue] space.

Daunted

Yesterday I went to an art show in Islington, I was promised vast arrays of materials and art supplies, but when I turned up it was filled with little old ladies ogling over bearded men doing watercolour demonstrations. Once I got over the sea of OAP's, I discovered a man doing sea-scapes in oils. Picked up several tips for my painting.
So today I started the mural that i've been commissioned to paint at Starbucks.

Here is the ugly white wall before I started:

Got set up with my pencils and drew out a rough sketch to work from before I started working in colour. I hate this bit, everything always looks terrible at the beginning, and I always feel a bit daunted when I have a large area to paint. So I put in the base colours with a large brush. Had a little panic when I discovered that i'd forgotten to buy black paint, but seemed to make do with dark blue for today.

I probably got as much paint on the floor as the walls, but for several hours work it seems to be looking okay so far.

My arms are aching. Updates tomorrow...

Logoing

Final Logo for the biology society:

DNA

Last post for today I promise!

I have been asked to redesign the logo for the Biology Society of Nottingham,

Here's the old logo:

I looked at a couple of models of DNA strands on the web, and most of them use a plastic bobbly bubble type of material. So I drew out the letters by hand, then retouched it up in photoshop, trying to keep most of the key elements intact:

Hawks

A distant australian cousin came to visit this past week. After all the compulsive sight-seeing he asked me to draw him a tattoo featuring his favourite football team - The Hawthorn Hawks.

I'l post up a photo when he gets it inked.

Progress!

Finally I have got round to uploading the stop motion short film about anorexia!

My Mural

I have been commissioned by Starbucks to paint an extremely large mural in the district's meeting room. I have been given 5m by 2m to play with. After lots of careful thought I decided not to paint any of the partners or managers but to illustrate the story of the logo.

If you are bored, have a read of this - it's quite interesting:

http://www.deadprogrammer.com/starbucks-logo-mermaid

I will summarize for those of us with less time on our hands. Basically the logo originated from a Norse Woodcut of the two tailed siren Melusine, a greek mythical creature. They would sing to the sailors, enticing them to the rocky coasts with their enchanting songs, then make love to them before devouring their flesh. Neat.

I am definitely going to need to invest in a ladder.