Recent sketchbook drawings

The studio is situated right above the main pedestrianised shopping street of Nice. This means that our ears are assaulted daily by buskers singing the same song every day. It's like Groundhog Day!



Rapid sketches made around town.



Street performer tap-dancing in Nice.




Views of Bastille & Notre Dame from a couple of recent trips to Paris.




Vanessa Paradis & Matthieu 'M' Chedid will be responsible for the music & songs in 'Un Monstre a Paris'. They recently performed in Nice as part of the tour to promote Paradis' latest album so we went along to see them in action.



Seeing them together on stage proved helpful reference for similar scenes in the film where their characters duet together.



A regular night out with the Nice Ukelele Club!


Got caught short without my sketchbook at a café recently so resorted to sketching on the back of a receipt.



On a drive through Provence earlier in the year my camera batteries died so I made some thumbnail sketches back at home to help me remember some of the interesting views we saw along the way.

Bellissimo!

Last week my girlfriend & I took a drive across the border into Northern Italy. We visited Milan & the region around Lake Como.

These are sketches made around the magnificent Duomo & the piazza.


Here are a few shots I took around central Milan. I liked the vibrancy of the city mixed with old world elegance. Impressive architecture & as a capital of fashion there were many well dressed, chic looking Italians walking around.





Caught the David Lachapelle retrospective at the Palazzo Reale.

I've been a fan of Lachapelle's work since the mid-nineties when I first saw his incredible surreal pop-kitsch fashion photography. I love the garish colours & plastic textures in his shots & the bizarre compositions he sets up.

His latest work re-inteprets the Biblical deluge as a critique of the decline of values in modern consumer culture & our increasing dependance on material goods.





A couple years ago he designed eye-catching window displays for Selfridges deptartment store in London (above) & was of course responsible for the astonishing documentary film 'RIZE' about LA dance craze-krumping.



At Lake Como we visited the idyllic Villa Balbianello on the Western side of the lake opposite Bellagio.


It has been used as a location in films such as Ocean's 12, Casino Royale & Star Wars: Episode 2.

This image I found online shows how ILM artists digitally extended the villa for Star Wars.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Here's my image for the latest 'Gum or Mints' art challenge-FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER. I had fun with this one & the painting above was the culmination of all the following sketches.


I started just scrawling head shapes & variations on the typical dumb/agonised expressions.



I kept pushing the cranium size bigger & BIGGER. . .




I thought it helpful to not just DESIGN a character but to put it in a situation too. Initially I considered ripping off Mel Brooks' 'Young Frankenstein'-the scene where the old blind man pours soup in the monster's lap. However I figured that would be TWO characters to design & switched to the scene with the little girl & the flower, figuring the girl would be much simpler to design than the old hermit.

I thought the contrast between the two figures would work well & the situation is more subtle than the 'hot-water' gag; it can be perceived as entirely innocent with the monster simply delighted by the flower or perhaps his intentions are more menacing, implied by the well behind him.

I played around with various fun approaches to the girl character-some quite abstract but ultimately settled on more conventional shapes as I wanted her to look normal compared to the monster's distorted shapes.


Small, rapid thumbnails searching for some kind of background to lend atmosphere. I was looking for elements that wouldn't be too distracting from the characters & would evoke the atmosphere of the 1933 'Frankenstein' film sets.



This next one just happened after I spilt water on a pen drawing & the bleeding ink effect appealed to me so I splashed water all over it! Then I couldn't resist taking it into Photoshop to 'finish'. Putting him on a black background & adding some negative fx helped give that electric jolt to the original drawing!



This was another aberrant drawing that came out of the doodling process. It developed from Shelley's original description of the monster but my drawing ended up looking like some kind of New York disco junkie Freak!


Check out frankensteinia.blogspot.com for the ultimate collection of 'Frankenphilia'.

Anniversaire!

I moved to Nice one year ago TODAY! To celebrate here are a few more beach sketches from the summer-

Bande Dessinée

I picked up a couple of great comic books lately. 'Trois Ombres' (Three Shadows) by Cyril Pedrosa is the story of a small family living an idyllic pastoral life torn apart by the arrival one day of three shadowy figures on horseback. Charming character design & exquisite brush drawing make this book a pleasure to read-all 268 pages!




Carlos Vermut's 'LE BANYAN ROUGE' is superb-originally published in Spain, it plays like an Indian version of 'Samurai Jack'. I was really taken with the loose, inky character designs & gorgeous colouring.

MOEBIUS REDUX - A Life in Pictures

The new documentary on Moebius that recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival is up on YouTube.

Full film here:http://www.altertube.tv/view_video.php?viewkey=6a219db15cf575aff282

A selection of interviews with some quiet, unassuming professional comic book nerds; Giraud calls Ridley Scott 'an enlightened amateur', Phillippe Druillet says American superheroes have no genitals, Dan O Bannon proclaims Moebius was possibly 'the biggest genius of us all' & Jodorowsky would like to 'shit on the U.S.!

Weegee

While in Paris I caught the Weegee exhibition at Musée Maillol before it closes mid-October. I first became aware of Weegee or Arthur Fellig & his work in the early 90's when THE PUBLIC EYE was released starring Joe Pesci as a character based on Weegee. I remember seeing a documentary too & I was fascinated not just by his photographs but by this character Weegee that he assumed.



Weegee spent long hours waiting in his car & listening to police radio for news of 'incidents'. He said he lived out of the trunk of his car, presumably as, judging from photos, it was bigger than his pokey Manhattan apartment! He even had a fully functional dark room in the back of his car!


Much like Weegee, Stanley Kubrick started his career as a photographer on the streets of New York & contributed era defining shots to LIFE magazine. Kubrick admired Weegee's photographs & during shooting of Doctor Strangelove employed him as a stills photographer. When Peter Sellers heard Weegee speak he apparently used Weegee's peculiar voice as the basis for that of Dr Strangelove!



During hot summers of the 1940s reputedly 1 million New Yorkers would head out to the beaches at Coney Island! Weegee captured this incredible shot by shouting out & clicking when everyone turned towards him. It's unnerving to have a 'million' people stare out of this photograph at you.





This shot above scandalized America at the time. These high society grandes dames flaunting their wealth during the post war depression made the cover of LIFE magazine. However the fortuitous meeting between the riche & the 'bag lady' was later proved to be a set-up. As a photographer, Kubrick too was known to et up certain shots & it must have been a widespread practice at the time. The competition to get saleable shots must have been fierce.


Excellent collection of Weegee photographs here:
http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/weegee-collection?p=1



Here's my own Weegee-like photograph, taken in Paris last autumn.