Typography urge- ‘Reise Reise’ – Rammstein

Another Rammstein-inspired typography experiment. Rammstein are my favourite band and I always end up whistling one of their songs at random while at work. It’s usually ‘Mutter’ or ‘Laichzeit’ that springs out when I start whistling but recently it’s been the chorus of ‘Reise Reise’. So I’ve fuelled the tune into a typography experiment to see if I can finally get a different song in my head. The typeface is loosely based on the old Fraktur typefaces but with more (technically-called) squiggly bits.

The other Rammstein-inspired piece I did a month or so ago was based on ‘Laichzeit’, meaning ‘spawning time’.

100+! Thank you all so much!

Good gosh! Where did the month go? I was ticking merrily along with daily INKtober drawings and whoomph! The boring demons of reality (a.k.a. extra shifts at work, family stuff, events) captured me and it’s now the 30th! What happened?! Truly, I am really sorry to anyone who enjoyed perusing my INKtober drawings. I admit I failed the challenge. But I want to say an absolutely HUMONGOUS thank you to everyone who has liked and commented on my work and an extra special thank you to everyone who’s following my blog. I’ve come back from an unwilling 2 week break and my follows has topped 100! So thank you thank you THANK YOU! I’m like an excited little child here!

INKtober31. – Day 16 – Tangled Dragon

A follow-up of yesterday’s dragon. I was wondering, Chinese dragons are so long, do they ever get tangled up in a knot? That sort of thinking shows that I’ve not had anything productive to do with my brain today…

INKtober 31. – Dragon triptych

 

The amalgamation of days 13-15 of INKtober31. Over the last 3 days, I’ve created a panel per day to go into this long dragony triptych. I thought I’d get bored of it but I actually found it really enjoyable, apart from the fluffy mane that runs down his back. That tested my patience a bit but it was well worth it in the end.

INKtober31. – Day 15 – Dragon (part 3)

The tail end and last part of my dragon triptych…

INKtober31. – Day 14 – Dragon (part 2)

The second part of my dragon triptych for INKtober, one more piece to go. I should hopefully get it uploaded tomorrow but if not, it’ll appear on Thursday!

INKtober31. – Day 13 – Dragon (part one)

I’ve got a few extra shifts at work over the next few days so INKtober may suffer a bit. Therefore, for today and the next couple of days, I will be creating a dragon triptych which will hopefully save a bit of time as I won’t have to think of something new to draw! So I will be creating each panel separately and then bunging them together in Photoshop… I’m only slightly cheating!

INKtober31. – Day 12 – The Taming of Space

It’s a little picture today, isn’t it annoying how going to work eats up so much creative fun time? Never mind, the work buys my fineliners… To be truthful the only inspiration behind this one was that I’ve had David Bowie’s ‘Starman’ in my head all day but that led me to thinking about space and how humans are, metaphorically, trying to put a collar on it. I think knowledge and discovery are wonderful things but the more our species learns about how things work, the more we tend to break them. The less mystery and danger there is, the less respect we seem to have for it… so please Mankind, don’t break space!

INKtober31. – Day 11 – Mr. Shrike, ‘Mortal Engines’

Sorry this one’s a bit late, couldn’t get on the computer yesterday. Mr. Shrike’s making another appearance, it’s been a while! Mr. Shrike is a character from the children’s book ‘Mortal Engines’ by Philip Reeve. He’s a Stalker, which means he has Terminator-like tendencies to lock on to certain individuals and not stop until he’s ripped them apart. Lovely. I first started drawing his character three years ago for a character development project at university and he hasn’t changed much since…

Below image: created in 2011 for a character design project. Biro, white pen and coloured pencil.

As the series continues, the reader does actually start to bond with his character to the point where he became my favourite all-time fictional character and I also cried quite a few times at his various unfortunate events. I obviously have a soft spot for fictional killer-beasties… I cried at the end of ‘Predator’ too….

INKtober31. – Day 10 – Happy (belated) World Octopus Day!

Missed World Octopus Day by two days, whoops. Better late than never. I tried something a bit different with this one and created the illustration on two layers (not in Photoshop). The background was created by wetting a piece of paper and dripping writing ink on to it, allowing the ink to bloom outwards.

The illustration was created on a separate piece of paper, pencilled on first, then cut out and finally filled in. All it needed then was a suitably excessive amount of spray mount to fix the two layers together. I could have just done it the Photoshop way but as INKtober31 is about just using ink (other than to improve scan quality) then it seemed like cheating…