Here's an old drawing I found in a sketchbook recently. It's dated 17/7/05, which is odd, because I don't normally write dates on drawings. It's also odd in that, well, see for yourself. To be honest I'm surprised I managed to produce something so creepy. Can't think what inspired it, but presumably something did, because I remember quite clearly waking up that morning with the image in my head, and a massive urge to get it onto paper. Weird.

Not sure how you spell that. Anyway, the surprising thing is that I have actually drawn something. Oh yes. Finally got around to getting my domain registered (which is the one you're probably reading this from) and since I didn't want to immediately upload any content I decided to put together an 'under construction' type page. Even more amazingly, I was inspired to draw something very specific, and here it is.

Of course, it looked a little better once I'd got it onto the computer. I'd read about using layers in an image to do inking, colouring, highlights and shadow, but I'd never given it a go before. I'll save you the boring details, here's the finished result.

Not bad, eh? Well, for a first attempt, at any rate. I don't think I've quite got the light source in the same position throughout the whole thing, and if you look too long at the position of his legs they start to look wrong, and the end of the shovel isn't great, and the less said about the main shadow the better... but overall, yep, quite pleased. Overly critical? Me? Well, so they say.

Some more random doodles for your enjoyment/indifference/criticism* (*delete as applicable). You'll notice that my cartoony sketches (blobs, robots, etc.) are a lot better than my serious sketches (faces, people). You also might have noticed that I've started mixing the two a lot more. I think it helps if I can look at a page and see something I like, and currently it's a lot easier for me to do a quick cartoon that I'm happy with than spend twenty minutes drawing a face that ends up looking like it's just been punched. Repeatedly.

This was a quick sketch of a cowgirl figure that I decided to go back over and 'ink' with a harder pencil. It turned out looking more masculine and less curvy than I really wanted, but here it is anyway.

And I just noticed this little fella down at the bottom of the page. Seems to be a recurring cartoon blob theme here today.

Some more doodles. Both these images were taken from the same sheet of A4, but because I tend to draw quite small, I've broken them up into two images so you can see them better. Interestingly, the way the page split naturally around the stuff that wasn't even vaguely worth showing (no, it wasn't terrible, it was just incomplete and fairly pointless) has left one image mostly full of semi-serious stuff and the other mostly cartoons.

Some very rough sketches to get started with. One of the things I vaguely decided upon about this site was that I wouldn't only show the drawings I was totally happy with. One reason being, I'm my own worst critic, so if I did that there'd probably never be another entry on this site ever again.

So, some good stuff and some not so good stuff there. You may notice I'm drawing a lot of faces here - can't tell you why, exactly. It seems to be the thing I default to when I don't know what else to draw.