Second post of the year…

Hahaha. Every single blog I make seems to be some sort of apology for not updating my blog! I’m not sure who, if anybody, is reading but from time to time I get this “shit, I’ve not updated my site in months” guilt. Two, in fact.

Well, what’s been going on?

I’ve been busy recently creating designs for a Heavy Metal challenge over at Threadless. Not the music, the Heavy Metal Magazine. This was a magazine that I always saw in the comic shop as a kid, but always thought it was an adult magazine. The covers always had jaw dropping art, usually an image of a jaw droppingly beautiful women in various fantasy situations and outfits. I remember one cover illustration was used on the cover of a ZX Spectrum game called Game Over. It was pretty racy (see here) and featured some futuristic cyborg lady with a cyborg body guard behind her. Of course, her boobs weren’t cyborg like, they were very human and nipples very visible. As a young man I found this interesting and weird at the same time. As far as I can remember, she had nothing to do with the game. I think one of my friends had a poster of it as well, free from some Spectrum User type magazine!

I digress. It was with these memories in mind that I decided that I’d like to contribute something. But where to look for inspiration? I couldn’t just use Google images and take some random lady image to draw from. I ended up appealing on the “alt-pin up” site, Suicide Girls, for girls who wouldn’t mind me drawing them. I wasn’t expecting to get a reply, I’m pretty much invisible on the site. Just a few hours later I got messages from five girls, all putting themselves forward. This was great, but unexpected. I love that site by the way, the girls are all beautiful and the site defies popular beauty conventions. By that I mean there are girls of all ages, shapes, sizes, races, nationalities. Of the three girls I ended up working with one was Spanish, another American and the third was British. I’m really proud of all of the designs that I’ve worked up and will post them here soon.

I’m currently working on a final entry based on the third girl who I got in touch with Sophoulla. It was an idea I had and then stopped, in favour of a different design. I think it might be the best one of the four I did.

I don’t expect to win the top prize, which is to get the art published on the front cover. I just wanted to create something using real people, and developing the style I found when working on the Threadless Lowbrow challenge. It’s an opportunity to create something different, and the fact that I had unexpected replies just added a little bit of pressure that I needed to see the job through.

I’ve learnt a new few techniques by doing this. So if you’re reading this thinking “what’s the point in entering challenges, I’ll never win” forget about the prize, just go on the journey. You never know where it will lead and what you will pick up on the way.

There’s lots more to write, and maybe my next update will come a little sooner than this one!