eightears

✎ elloise | illustrator/creator ✎ creative-blog bloggery here

[eightears]

diary comic: #11 Making Seating Out of “Palets” in the Garden lol

I’m changing these to “diary comic” instead of daily comic, cause daily just ain’t happening! So yeah, been doing a lot of DIY stuff recently as part of a process of moving in with my gf. One project for the garden is outdoor furniture making. Started making loungers out of pallets using a youtube tutorial. It’s pretty straight forward actually. It’s fun just to make things for the sake of making.

[eightears]

daily comic: #10 music melancholia

I love it when I find new, current music to enjoy, but it seems to be happening less and less lately. I’ve been listening to and enjoying a lot more “old stuff”. Maybe I’m becoming jaded, I don’t know. I am enjoying the new Chilli Peppers album though, but where are the great new artists!? The up-and-comings!? Any suggestions welcome! :)

[eightears]

daily comic: #09 music passed midnight

Sometimes I write and produce demo songs. Sometimes they are garbage, but it’s always obsessive. Making music is like an exorcism; not always of demons though. Whether it’s sh*t or not, it always comes with a feeling of lightness afterwards. I wanna do it more often.

[eightears]

daily comic: #08 vitamin g

I drew this one on the bus. Please enjoy all the wobbles. Spring is a fabulous time of year… almost as good as summer 😏

[eightears]

daily comic: #07 butt-naked hands

I’m not saying I like washing-up... but it’s definitely growing on me, maybe. It’s still gross, but it challenges me lol.

[eightears]

daily comic: #06 chapped nips

Did this happen to anyone else!?

It was like running about and being really active caused a repetitive rubbing of the cotton fabric against my chest and then I’d get really saw, chapped nipples. Even now, if I’m not wearing a bra, I make sure to Vaseline my nips just incase. Chapped nipples are NOT fun, guys.  

[eightears]

daily comic: #05 tee-nage

These are all supposed to be me lol. Let’s just say the variation in likeness is due to the power of a hairstyle. Anyway, how embarrassing and awkward are teenage years, right? Just like your twenties - sorry kids!

[eightears]

daily comic: #04 family home 

I went to China for a month - I’d never been abroad for longer than a week or 2 before - and when I got back, my nan was all moved out. Didn’t even have the key anymore. I remember looking through the window and seeing the empty space. I think I was actually there because my Nan had left her shopping in the house by mistake and wanted to know if I could climb through the window to get it - a classic nan situation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t. But that would have been nice. I imaging myself slowly walking through the empty rooms, running my hands across the surfaces, then sitting on the floor in the empty living room, crossed-legged, thinking about how the sunlight falls through the big noisy street windows. I miss it a lot. I still have dreams about my family home now.

[eightears]

daily comic: #03 tight squeeze

Mini comic about me and my gf’s poor coats getting squashed every time we walk in and out of our room. I’m in a year long process of moving in and we have a lot of stuff piling up. We are all feeling the squeeze!

[eightears]

daily comic: #02 beanie bonce 

A mini-comic about have sh*t hair and relying on your fav beanie to to do the trick. If my beanie was sentient, she’d be like “Ergh, you b*tch. Why would you put me on this sh*t?”, pack her bags and leave. The moral to the story is... don’t skip out on self-care and maintenance lol 🙃

[eightears]

daily comic: #01 the screaming kettle

I recently purchase Matilda Tristram’s cute lil book My Life in Small Drawing and I have been challenging myself to create as many of these 4 panel mini comics as regularly as possible. It’s great to read about what inspires Matilda to write and create, but also super handy to be able to utilise her prompts to coax out your own ideas - especially with my mad creative block slash creative insecurity I’ve got going on. I’ve always enjoyed narrative based art (mainly animation) but I’ve rarely pushed myself to explore sequential visual storytelling as directly as in a comic. I mean, my final project in uni was basically an animated comic, but I see so many of the flaws in it now, that it would be nice to explore different approaches to building stories and finding more authentic and cathartic moments to include in my storytelling. I think I instinctively do this in my personal writing, but not in my visual work.

[eightears]

life drawing 

Yeah, so haven’t done life drawing in a whiiiiiiiiiiile. Finally done one over zoom and ngl, the virtual life drawing experience is not for me. It just defeats the whole point of the experience. I mean, I guess it depends what you’re looking for, but it’s fair to say it was not what I was looking for lol. The only thing is, your classic life drawing classes are sooooo expensive now. All the ones in my area are £16+. Where are all the £5-bring-your-own-materials classes gone? If anyone knows of any cheap life drawing classes in South London or near, please do share them with me. Thanks!

Anyways, these were my fav outcomes of the entire session. I couldn’t bring myself to post the rest for fear it would damage my career prospects 😅 What do I like about them? Not much really. I like the colour pencil on the left drawing and the shape of the veil on the right. Otherwise, there ain’t much to them in my eyes and I wasn’t very inspired by the model on this occasion to even build on them post-session.

I think I’m going to start reading more on approaching life drawing to refresh my memory, cause I found this session so challenging, but I feel like it was half to do with the fact that I was drawing from a screen? I dunno.

[eightears]

automatic drawing pt.2

Done some automatic drawing/painting with my gf to help shake some creative block. We made a playlist and just messed up some pages, responding to the sounds. These are some of mine :)

Songs:

Crew - GoldLink ft. Brent Faiyaz & Shy Glizzy (left), Water Baby - Tom Misch ft. Loyle Carner (right)

The Man Who Stole the World - Nirvana (left), Do It Again - Steely Dan (right)

[eightears]

automatic drawing pt.1

Done some automatic drawing/painting with my gf to help shake some creative block. We made a playlist and just messed up some pages, responding to the sounds. These are some of mine :)

Songs:

Whiteout - Warpaint (left), Mare - Juls & Sauti Sol (right)

Tunnel Vision - Kodak Black (left), Blessed - Wizkid ft. Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley (right)

[eightears]

the elevator test

I’ve started making my way through the Pixar in a Box: The Art of Storytelling course on Khan Academy - IT’S FREE! It’s super interesting, easy to follow and the instructors break down each accept of character, world and story building you should consider when putting together your own narratives. 

One of the activities is the “elevator test”. Place a character in an elevator and write or draw out how you think they would respond in the situation. I based my panels on Jack the Pumpkin King from The Nightmare Before Christmas ‘cause it’s one of my fav films. He is quite intelligent, curious, theatrical and emotional, so I assumed he would at first have curious reaction, followed by an emotional, hopeless mood, which is then disrupted by his inventive, problem-solving side. It’s pretty simple, but I think it’s cute. You can apply this scenario to your own characters to gain a better insight into what time of personality they have.

[eightears]

backwards boarding

I tried backwards boarding my fav animated show - maybe - Adventure Time (E25 S1). This is the first time I’ve tried out this process as recommended to me during a mentoring session. I find it quite challenging actually, because I consider myself to me quite a slow worker and storyboarding is supposed to be quite a fast paced process. I was being way too precious, hence why I’ve only boarded about 10 seconds worth of footage from the episode. Also, after I drew it all, I realised I’d probably have been better off creating a long vertical panel and drawing the fall “beat” once, then using arrows to describe the movement of the characters falling and the panning of the camera. Oh well, something to consider for next time. Probably took me about 4hrs to draw all these out. Insane! 

I posted some closes ups of the close up panels because I’m super meta lol. No, I just really liked how they turned out, but I also acknowledge that they are way too overworked for thumbnail story panels.

[eightears]

going camping

More doooooodles! When going camping, it is essential to have a slice of cake in your backpack.