Fuck titles.

I was at Oxegen on Saturday. I'm kinda tired now though, so I'll post about it in a day or two. It was great though, aside from the shitty weather...
Attached pic is of my take on an old obscure Wonder Woman villain named The Blue Snowman, who is actually a woman behind the mask. Yeah, confused the fuck out of me as well.
Someone anonymous on the internet kindly coloured this for me and it looked twice as good, but I forgot to save the damn thing. Shame too, considering how little colour work I do.

The only Borders store in Ireland is closing down very soon. It was a great, if a little expensive bookstore that had an awesome selection of comics.

Fuck the sun.

Today I walked from Maynooth to the next town, Kilcock with two of my friends, Richy and Brian. We travelled along the canal. When we got to Kilcock, we stayed for a while in Brian's grandad's house. His grandad was an incredibly interesting guy and all round nice person. His house was just as interesting as well! It was lined with old decorations, clocks, porcelain figurines, newspapers, small art prints etc. that kind of thing.
We ran a quarter of the way back, since we were getting tired. Doing soonly proved how unfit I truly am, hahah. I think in total we walked around 8 miles. I'm pretty happy with that.

Man, this fucking heat is killing me. I can't stand days like this, where the flies are everywhere, your trousers stick to ya, the computer overheats, and you just don't feel like doing jack shit.
All I ask for is a petty breeze! Christ...

The drawing above is something I did yesterday. Its Dream from the Sandman comics having tea with Paprika from the anime feature Paprika.
Man I'm getting great use out of that black Letraset marker...

FREEEEDOM!!

Aah, my Leaving Cert is finally over! And thus, my life begins anew. The fact I'm finished school forever still has yet to hit me though. I still feel as if there are some upcoming exams to finish, or essays to hand in. Weird. Hope I'll shake it off soon, or I ain't gonna get a thing done all Summer.
And speaking of, I do hope to get a lot of things done, including;

- Watching tons of films, be it from my own DVD collection, on Film4, or at the cinema. I'd like to maybe watch over fifty films over the Summer...
- Do a lot of life drawing. And improve anatomy skills in general.
- Start work on a comic and hopefully find some way of publishing it. No real ideas yet though.
- Start walking at least once every night. I'm not overweight, but I'm not terribly fit either.
- Get a job. If that's at all attainable, in this current economic climate. But really, I seriously need some fucking money.
- Read a lot of comics, and subsequently more novels as well (to the library I go!)
- Take up guitar.

Well that's my aims so far. Are they realistic? I dunno, but I'm gonna give them a crack anyway. I don't want to be stuck in my house everyday playing the PS3 for hours upon hours. I'd rather be stuck in the house drawing for hours and hours! :P
And now for some art. Below is a request for a fellow on a certain comics board; The Gentleman Ghost, a villain from some Batman comic. I haven't heard of him before, but fuck he is cool.

Ya Got Tha LC Blues

Sooo... Leaving Cert's coming up in less than three weeks now. Fuck. Not looking forward to this at all, but at least it'll be done and over with by next month!
Got my history study report (on the use of gas warfare in WWI) done in the last minute a few weeks back, and I finished my art practicals last week too. Imaginative Comoposition was OK, nothing spectacular. Life Drawing was handy, seeing as it comes quite naturally to me anyway. And the Poster Craftwork was great fun. I picked the fantasy film title ("Architects of Ruin") and drew a pic of a beggar stood in his tracks as a robed figure stares at him from the top of a hill, with a massive fantasy background of caves, mountains, forests and shit. I inked it B&W, and was overall very happy with the result.
Thankfully, I get the Poster Craftwork back after its been marked. Good thing too, it might look good in my portfolio...

And speaking of portfolios; I got the offer to do Animation Drawing Studies in Ballyfermot PLC two months ago. And today, I recieved an email from Dun Laoghaire saying I got 480 points out of a total 600 for my portfolio, for their Animation course. Nice! I'm pretty sure I'll be going to Ballyfermot, but I'd be equally happy to find out if I get offered a place in Dun Laoghaire as well.
And while I'm discussing animation, I'm currently reading the excellent Your Career In Animation, by David Levy. Highly interesting stuff, there's a lot of advice that suprised me in it, and I'm sure it'll be an even better book when I actually get into producing animation.

Watched Coraline recently, and I have to say; ITS ONE OF THE FUCKING GREATEST FILMS EVER MADE IN THE PAST DECADE. Seriously. Go see it, now. I'd love to see it again. Fuck. I'm convinced it has surpassed Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas as well, and it takes a lot to top a classic like that. The pacing, the backgrounds, the character design and voicework, the score; everything is near perfect in this film. Goddamn.

In other nuacht, I'm thinking about buying a table at the Edition Book Arts Exhibition in July. I'd like to get my name out there a bit, but I'm worried I might not have enough material to put on my table...
Well, even if I don't buy a table, I'll definitely be down on the day to check out what the usual Irish comics crew are at! :P

Oh and one last thing; I've started a Twatter account, on which I post infrequent shite;
http://twitter.com/C_L_O_U_D_M_A_N
Below is a work-in-progress Watchmen piccy, drawn wiv mah tablet.

Just a quickie...

Things've been hectic lately...
Had my Ballyfermot PLC interview for the Animation Drawing Studies course last Friday, which went swell. They liked my stuff and said to expect an offer in the post this week.
Had my Dun Laoghaire IADT portfolio assessment today. Even though I had to wake up at fucking five in the morning, it wasn't as bad a day as I expected. Unfortunately I don't get the results from them until May.

While in Forbidden Planet, I picked up Liam Geraghty and Philip Barrett's excellent Gazebo, issue #1 (would've done so earlier, only FP's major leakage problem closed the Irish comics section off; the horror!). I really fucking dig Phil's cleancut and precise artwork, and Liam is a fantastic writer (can tackle humour and a serious slice-of-life tale greatly) as well! I highly recommend it!
Also finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, good stuff as well. Amazingly, I became just as infatuated with Kurtz, just as Marlow did...

According to Rob Curley, a new (and bigger?) Sub City will be opening up on West Essex St. later this year!

(pic attached is part my own drawing, part a shop from the lovable folks of 4chan)

Epic Con 09'

It's been a while, eh? I probably wouldn't be writing this right now if tomorrow wasn't the beginning of the midterm break! On with the show...
Yesterday and today, I attended Epic Con 09' at NUI Maynooth, which was dead handy since I live only 15 minutes away from there. Here's some photos, and here's the haps';

SATURDAY

• Got up later than I should've, thankfully Dan (who was coming with me to the con) woke up late as well. Mobile phones are not good alarm clocks, goddamn.
• Got to the John Hume building, paid for entry and shit. Picked up free Viz Sneak Peak volumes and two posters (Bleach and Death Note)
• Had a quick look through some of the dealer rooms, suprised by the amount of manga on sale (did they get it all from Chapters?)
• Decided to take on the Torture Room Challenge, in which you have to sit 7 hours or so of four shit films, which included;

1. Mortal Kombat II : Annhilation (FUCKING BAD FIGHTING, SHITTY ACTING)
2. Starship Troopers 2 (WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON, WHY IS THAT CHICK NAKED FOR NO REASON, WHY DID THAT GUY DECIDE TO STAY ON THE BUILDING)
3. Super Mario Bros (Yes, the live-action film. Better than I expected, though completely directionless shit. And why didn't Luigi have a tache...)
4. Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter (BEST WORST FILM EVER!! GO WATCH IT!!!)

The last film made it worth staying the entire thing for. We barely had any breaks at all, and to win you had to clock up the most time spent in the room. Unfortunately, we were told at the end of the day that today's time would be added onto the four films tomorrow, and there was no fucking way I was going to waste my day again, I wanted to do other shit.

SUNDAY

• Got up late AGAIN, fuck you phone. Missed part of Cliodhna's talk. Actually, I practically missed all of it by the time I got there. Thanks for the advice anyways Cliodhna...
• Finished off a fantasy-setting drawing I did overnight for the art competition
• Listened to the talk on Space Warfare. presented by a very energetic fellow. Highlight of the talk? Power-armor suits are a possibility! Fuck yes.
• Fucked around taking photos of people and shit (link to my Flickr account with some later)
• Bought two volumes of the anime series Haibane Renmei for only a tenner (big thanks to the cute chick with the goggles who owned was selling that stuff!)
• For the last hour, visited the Sci-Fi/Anime screening room and watched;

1. Darker Than Black ep1 (seems very interesting, would like to see more)
2. Invader Zim Halloween Special. The scene where Zim squeezes himself into the portal in Dib's head was fucking sick but awesome. I like that show, but the random humour does my fucking head in some times...
   
3. Samurai Jack (watched the last episode due to the demand of the four people in the room including me, and IT WAS GREAT, mainly because of the hilarious reaction faces Aku and Jack pulled for five minutes straight)
4. The first few minutes of Hulk VS Wolverine. It was suprisingly well-animated, I think I spotted Masao Muruyama's name in there so Studio 4c must be involved...

• Everyone was then assembled into the talks room for the ending ceremony and prize-giving. There was more people than I expected, and the whole room filled up. Me and Dan thankfully sat away from some of the giddier cosplayers thank fuck. Eventually the staff-folk came in and put the selectable prizes on the table. The first prize awarded was to Keitaro, the brave soul who stayed in the Torture Room the longest (me and Dan were determined to beat his ass, but realised the futility the next day). True to his predictions, he ended up with a shit prize of an hourglass! I imagine that was the only thing he could pick, as the rest of the prizes were novels (and his English mightn't be good enough etc.). Second prize winner was yours truly for the art competition, of which only three others entered;
  

I only got to see one other entry, and it was nicely-coloured but typical anime-style girl (it also had a fucking Deviantart stamp on it, fucking christ), and I think I saw a bit of what seemed to be a doodle on a lined copy page, hahah. I picked up H.G. Well's The Invisible Man, as I've been wanting to read that guy's stuff for a while.
Cosplay winners were announced, the main winner was Vincent Valentine from Final Fantasy, fairplay to him.
After that, two winners from the RPG games. And after that, the raffle prizes. Long story short, I won a copy of Sandman volume 1, which I'm over-the-fucking-moon with.
To round it off, a fireworks/explosives display with mad fucking chemistry, put on by Professor Ken from the college. It was damn awesome.


T'was a fucktacular weekend.

Neil Gaiman signing in Easons

Attached photo is of me getting some of my stuff signed by the great Neil Gaiman (creator of Sandman, Neverwhere, Stardust). I was at his book signing the day before Hallowen, along with two nice folk from Boards.ie (Brendan and Nichola). Gaiman arrived around seven, read an excerpt from his newly-released The Graveyard Book, had a humourous Q&A, and eventually signed people's swag (he was very generous about how many items you could have him sign; I got my copy of The Graveyard Book, Neverwhere, a poster and my Merv Pumpkinhead bust-up signed).
My minute-or-so with Neil seems almost like it never happened. I don't even fucking remember saying much to him! He's a great chap nonetheless, and I'll never forget his amazing voice either...
There's two other photos I have of me with him, and several others taken by Brendan, but I'm not sure if he'd like me linking to his Flickr account, so you'll have to do with that one.

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In other news, I got my first tablet on Monday; an Aiptek 600U Premium Slim, and its pretty nifty. I'll post up some art I drew with it soon, but for now, just a quick sketch I drew with it;