What inspires us?

 

A week or so ago, I saw the story of a little girl called Elena Desserich on 'Russel Howards Good News'...

Elena was a 6 year old girl diagnosed with terminal cancer.

During her illness, she turned to drawing for comfort. In this time, she became a renowned artist, and even had her work put in galleries! However, her most poignant achievement were the hundreds of notes she left her family, to comfort them after her death. They were still being found months, years after her death.

It's hard to believe a 6 year old could be so strong, selfless and courageous. She is a true inspiration to us all, and a reminder of what our work can achieve, if we can stop being self-absorbed, and pour our heart and souls into it.

If you haven't heard her story, I invite you to watch this video:

A Hard Days Work

I have no energy left right now, so I'm going to let my painting do the talking:

The Dreamer

'Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?'

- George Bernard Shaw

Say what?

Just a random sketch I came up with in uni yesterday... She needs a name.

Major Project: E.J Expression Sheets

Here's some expression sheets for my Character. I had a lot of fun trying to capture her personality. I imagined her as very fiesty, domineering and hard to be argued with. Getting this across though... was very hard! In fact, it was so hard I had to fill up almost an entire sketchbook with failed drawings before I came anywhere close, and it's still not perfect. I changed costume midway too and got rid of the criss crosses on her corset as they looked a bit too 'fru fru'. Apologies for the woeful cleanup, I try and embrace smudges wherever possible... I might have to fix some of them though.

'All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them. '

-Walt Disney

Major Project: Character

So... This is how I want my major project to work. I'm going for an old-fashioned painterly kind of look. My character and environment are going to work together and hopefully I will end up with some very nice still images and visual themes. Since my motivation has always been to work in features, I felt that by mixing the two projects together I could develop and showcase my lighting and compositional skills.

Anyway, whilst I was in the process of designing my projects, I started to wonder... Is there such a thing as a 'perfect' idea or design? Is it better to pull off an amazing concept, or create an amazing piece from a rushed idea? In the grand scheme of things, my ideas at this time weren't that important. I noticed a lot of my peers spending days thinking over ideas and wasting valuable 'doing' time by perfecting their concepts and convincing themselves how terrible their ideas were. I just had a single image in my head, so I drew it out (albeit very crudely) and went from there.

                                      

Not the best works of art ever... But the colour information was quite useful... Now, less explaining, more doing!

'Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner'

-Walt Disney