Late, not never.

So the Bournemouth Air Festival has been and gone and left us all with the uncomfortable combination of strained necks, Close Encounters sunburn and ruptured eardrums. I managed to snap 2.4GB of photos and it goes without saying that it'll take me a while to sort through them all, so here's some highlights to tide you over until I can put together a decent post.

Damnit. Just realised that Blogger has posted those images completely out of sequence (Sigh.). Is it too much to ask for editorial control of my own blog?!

I've got some truly amazing shots of some of the aerobatic displays but without context many of them look a bit strange so I think I'll have to stitch some sequentials together in photoshop, but thats for later.

My best friend is a 4.5- 5.6/ 75- 300 lens.

Or at least this weekend it is because the Bournemouth Air Festival is back in town. This photo was taken by me at last year's event and I'm hoping for better this year. The weather's been utterly awful until now and it seems to be clearing up a bit so fingers crossed. I've just worked seven days straight in order to have Friday and Sunday off so if it does turn rainy I might just open up my wrists and bleed out on the sand.

Tuppence a bag.

Seeing as how Untitled Fantasy Project No. 2 was to centre on the idea of flight in a fantasy/ steampunk world I wanted to include some 'birdmen' of some kind, however I was determined not to resort to the standard cliches of angelic figures with dove- like wings.

I actually ended up with two birdman species, the first pictured above in male and female versions was to be an antagonist race- cooperating with a human empire and assisting them in exploiting the resources of their land.

Physically powerful, these people are none the less slight of build, particularly in the legs, which seem underdeveloped to us- this is because their skeletal composition contains quantities of the lodestone mineral effectively reducing their weight and allowing them limited powers of flight using their vestigial winglets. Their limited flight ability is a source of conflict between this race of Avians and the second race, an example of which is shown below.

These 'Flyers' have the true power of flight. Residing in floating island oases their habitat has come under threat from the human population and their Avian allies who seek the valuable deposits of Lodestone that keep the islands aloft. These people sport better developed membranous wings that stretch from their backs to a special joint at the elbow and then out to a specially lengthened fifth finger on each hand.

Devoted pacifists this race would form an alliance with the sky pirate rebels, providing them with a base of operations from which to conduct a guerilla war against the empire as it spreads into the 'floating valleys' in search of mineral wealth.

More on this later. Sleepytime now.

Give the people what they want.

Judging by his comment Den quite liked this character so I thought I'd post some more of her. Afraid I did away with the purple hair though, sorry Den- although her profile does state that her hair colour 'varies' so who knows, it could be back again. I really liked the two-tone hairdo but you might notice that in the head sketchs above the darker tone is clearly at the back- I swapped it around because at that point she was basically Freefall (tm) from Gen13(tm).

Remember I was really happy with the pencils for this one. Sadly, I don't seem to have kept a copy of the raw inks so I couldn't include them here.

I also read.

It would be easy to conclude from the material that I publish here that I am some kind of lethargic scifi loving, snack eating, tv watching, xbox gaming couch potato- but that would be underestimating me. I also read. Quite a lot in fact.

I love reading. Sometimes I like to draw from books I'm reading- mostly character sketches and such- some of which I'm bound to throw out on this page at some point. Very occasionally I'll render something a bit more complete as in this case.

Above is a drawing I did while I was reading Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds. Hopefully if you've read it you might be able to recognise some of the imagery in the picture, if you haven't I'm not going to try to explain it. Suffice to say it is somewhat... complicated. Definitely recommend it though, along with Robert Jordan (RIP) Peter F. Hamilton and Naomi Novik, Reynolds is one of my favourite authors. Look him up!

By the way, I purposely left the book binding in this scan so you can see just how much of the page I filled. Unusual for me- it's very rare for me to fill a page that much.

You'll learn one day, won't you?

Ah, the simplest ones are often the best.

Product contains nuts.

Seeing as how I posted a sketch of Faith I think it only fair to post one of James as well. This one kind of ties in with the 'friends as super heroes' sketches I posted the other week, but was produced much later. I'm sorry to say this one is only a concept sketch, as can be seen from the various doodles around the central character, but I think it captured James quite well, even if 'Stick Arms Man' does seem a lot more moody than James generally is in my experience.

Then again the photo below seems to show otherwise, heh (^-^)