Journey to The Far East - Days 1 & 2

After a ten hour flight from Frankfurt, Tom and I arrived at Incheon International Airport internation airport around midday and met with Jacob. Jacob is a good friend of Tom (and now me) and is the current English Pastor at Cheonan Cheonsung Presbyterian Church.
Jacob drove us back to the church where we spent a small amount of time before going out for a superb meal with Senior Pastor Kim and the associate pastors.
The restaurant that we went to eat at was recently opened by one of the members of the church, so we were visiting to pray for the restaurant and support the owners in their new business.

Friday
We had a well needed lie-in before heading out with Jacob to a popular walking destination not far from the church that I can't remember the name of. We treked up some wooden steps to a stop off point where a outdoors goods salesman was selling his wares. There were a lot of people walking here (a lot wearing 'proper' walking gear) which said a lot about how the Koreans view their health and fitness.
Jacob played the guitar and sang whilst Tom and I gave out small drinks that resembled Yakult to walkers. This is something that Jacob does every Friday to serve the people here and bless them. It was a real joy to take part in this and we came away on a bit of a high.

On the way back down we stopped by some funky stone tortoise taps to get a drink. These taps dispense water from a natural spring under the hill.

We went out in the afternoon for lunch with Jacob and his wife Beth along with a close friend of Beth's. We ate at a place called 'All that Barbeque' which was an 'all you can eat' buffet. The food was delicious but not all of it was authentic Korean food. Similar to when you have a Chinese or Indian in England and it's not 100% the real deal.
In the evening however, we went out for a meal with Jacobs parents to celebrate their 33rd wedding anniversary. We traveled to a restaurent located in the hills just outside of Cheonan that served delicious authentic Korean food. I'm not quite used to how spicy the food can be so I often have to stop myself from coughing after my first mouthful. It was a real pleasure to spend time with these guys but I found it hard staying awake due to the lingering jetlag.
The night ended with myself falling asleep on the floor at Tom's amusement.

It's actually more comfortable than it looks.

GRIM

Over at the Forgotten Corner Collective we're piecing together an eight-panel comic where a different artist creates each panel. I created the illustration above using 'grim' as the topic. The baton has now been passed to Mr Dave Hooper...

"I love it when a plan comes together."

Whenever I make a work 'plan' it always falls flat on its face, always! It's almost as though I subconsciously rebel against any sort of structure I make for myself but I'm giving it another shot anyway! I decided to get off my backside and focus on really developing as an artist after being inspired by the recent work of my friends and fellow illustrators Dave Hooper, Ondrej Buchta, and Tom Heard. These guys are the biz, check 'em out!

So, I've put together a fairly simple plan that'll cover the next few weeks and it's mainly focused on studying anatomy...yay. It may be a bit of a task but I believe that if you apply yourself to studying anatomy, it can be a lot of fun. There's also plenty of fantastic resources out there that have been created to teach and inform artists about the human body.

I've accumulated a small selection of anatomy books over the past few years which to be honest, I haven't spent a lot of time studying from. All of these books are visual varied and take various approaches to studying and learning anatomy but they are all grounded in a solid understand of the body. Among this small selection of books is Figure Drawing For All It's Worth by Andrew Loomis. This book is very highly recommended as Loomis himself had a fantastic understanding of human anatomy and teaches all the way from the keys elements like figure balance, proportion and placing in perspective all the way depicting the figure in dynamic poses with particular light sources. Anyway, I could ramble for a while, check this book out. You can buy it for fairly cheap online or grab a PDF from somewhere.

My rough study plan goes a bit like this on the anatomy study side of things:
General Anatomy - 6 days
Head -10 days
Upper Torso - 10 days
Lower Torso & Legs - 10 days
Arms & Hands - 10 days
This takes me through to the start of January...and then I'll do it again!

Thanks muchos!

God bless

Plymouth University contacted me and asked me if I would create the illustration for their 2012/13 Alumni Magazine. I gladly accepted the challenge. I was pretty pumped to create this illustration but again I threw my time management out of the window so the final illustration isn't quite as in depth and well crafted as I would have liked. Hopefully it won't look too bad on the magazine itself. Anyhew, I'm grateful to have had this opportunity. Here's my initial draft design which we scraped because it stuck too close to the conventional blue/purple colour scheme.

Thanks everyone for stopping by, really appreciate it!

God bless you guys.

Benj

Fin!

I have just finished my job for Social-Zoo Ltd. They comissioned me to create illustrations for their new website, have a look.

Social-Zoo.com

Thanks :)

Benj

The Resident Frog

There's a frog living in our barrel! So we have a barrel full of murky water and a few plants that we call our 'pond'. This glorified barrel was home to a few goldfish (that had been alive for ages!) until they were killed off by miracle grow...yeah. But now there is a new resident that we noticed today, he was chillin' in the sun. We haven't told him about the rent yet.

This Summer

So far I've been home for about three weeks and I haven't really got back into the swing of things. I've been working on a job for a marketing company called Social-Zoo. Once the final illustrations have all been okayed I will post them up on my sorry looking website.
I'm off to New Wine this week, back for a week, then to Malta, and then Soul Survivor. After all these goings on I will finally get to work on something! This is what I have planned...

Sci-fi Epic
Mr Dave Hooper and I have plans to create a series of comics/a short graphic novel that will take place within our own Sci-fi universe. We haven't even properly discussed what we're going to do yet but I know Dave has something up his sleeve that is going to revolve around the term 'star-ship' being taken very literally!

Board Game
My personal favourite is Monopoly...no? Okay then. For one of my projects in Uni I began creating a Sci-fi board game. I made a few cards but it didn't really go any further than that. Time to rekindle the fire into a roaring blaze! I've worked out that I'll have to illustrate about 48 cards; a sizable project!

Japan
I rather like Japan and after reading my cousin Khan's blog I've been inspired to do an illustrative project on Japan. I think I'll draw a lot of the traditional aspects of Japan but we'll see where it goes, as long as it's to do with Japan.

Thanks for stopping by and having a read. Check out some of my talented friends -->

God bless.

Benj

Hold the line!

Now that we've handed in all of our Uni work for assessment, I have some time to do my own artwork, schweet! I want to get a few pieces done for the degree show on June 15th so I've decided to embark on a mini quest to create some Mass Effect fan art focusing on the Suicide Mission from ME2. I settled with this composition and I'm playing with a few of the elements. It's not as dynamic as I'd like but it's the best I can come up with at the moment. Lets take it to the Collectors! Assuming direct control of this art-form!