It was recently brought to my attention -- and by recently I mean six months ago, and when I say 'brought to my attention', I really mean 'dredged up from the viscous swamp I call a memory'.

So scratch that ...

Six months ago I was reminded of the fact that I have no style. It was a Thursday. I was entertaining the prospect of enrolling in an animation school and the rather frank, though not entirely unpleasant Director stated that while I can on occasion draw and such, I actually have no style. He may have sugar-coated it a bit more than that, but I forget. My mind has no room for extraneous details.

What he said though was true, I am still an artist very much in search of a style. Actually, I still have trouble considering myself an 'artist', I'm really just someone who likes to doodle in pencil a lot. Doodle. Such an odd word. But in that vein, I had some time spare this evening and decided to try my hand at developing such a thing. Via doodling.

I took a photograph, this one, and did a short 90 min exercise in pencil where I replicated the image a number of times, each time moving further away from a straight realistic representation. The results are below:

The last one's just silly, but hey, you've gotta go as far as you can go right? Sometimes even to the edge of 'crazy'.

I'm tempted to try the same exercise in colour, but all my colouring points are currently being utilised by the comics I'm working on. And besides, before I colour anything else, I still have to add colour to that Rock Band pic. *sigh*maybe if I slept more I could actually work more. That seems counter-intuitive and yet oddly promising.

Anyway, if anyone else would like to have a go at re-interpreting the above image in their own style (in whatever medium), give me a heads up and I'll do a follow up post.

Otherwise I shall end off with a few more of my random sketches.. Goodnight everyone!