Haunted Planet

Astronauts would tell tales of witnessing ghosts in the vicinity of Kepler 22b, that would appear at the windows of their ships, scratch on the glass and even float down the corridors. But of course, they're only stories, right?

I haven't drawn Trooper in a while, so here we go. An episode of The X-Files taught me that extra-terrestrial ghosts are scarier than human ghosts. It's like, two kinds of scary.

Reynard

Loosely based on Reynard the trickster fox. About 3-4 hours work.

The Bone Collector

My piece for this week's sketch jam topic "movie poster". I decided to invent a movie based solely on the title of another. For a while I've had the idea for an ever-changing creature that is entirely comprised of the bones of its victims. I came to call the Bone Machine, or The Bone Collector... I've yet to find an original name for it.

Here's the creature on its own:

In this form I imagine he runs on all fours, but might stand up on two legs to fight or intimidate. One thing to think about is that in most situations, it has no real desire to kill you, it merely wants your take your bones. You might survive...

EDIT: 'Bone Chilling'. 'Bone Chilling'! I spent so long trying to come up with a tagline, why didn't this wording cross my mind until now?

Nessie vs Kraken

My pic for a sketch jam theme 'myths and legends'. Not the most original choices, but I don't know that I've ever seen them together.

Ceefax

I hear that Ceefax is being closed down today, which is a real end of an era for people my age. As far back as I can think, it's always been there. And for nearly all that time it always felt so delightfully retro. So simple. In terms of art and design I've always felt you can get really nice results with a very limiting medium. It's a fun task to see what you can create with only a few colours and a tiny resolution. I'm sure this is one of the reasons people still enjoy creating pixel art. There's a real challenge to it, to get across the required detail in such a small picture and still have it read well...

But I digress. Here's a picture I did. I even drew the text.

He's Going to Eat It

A sneak peek at a personal project I'm working on. Stage 1 of 3 is finally complete - a little behind schedule, but all the hard work is done now.

This was meant to be Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty from Blade Runner, but it ended up looking a lot more like Gordon Ramsay. I've changed him since, but I still feel that this looks more like Ramsay than the new one looks like Hauer. Bit disappointed.

The Sky Tonight

Another clear night with the heavens on display, so I took some photos. The Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Pleiades (the Seven Sisters) are visible.

Cruach Ardrain

Some photos I took on my latest hill walk.

New Design, Fonts, Browsers - Help!

I've changed the design of the blog slightly and am using some of Blogger's web fonts on the site. However when the page is loading or if you're using a browser that won't support them, it displays a basic font like Arial, Verdana or in the case of any of their hand-style fonts, Comic Sans. I can't find any reference to Comic Sans in the edit HTML feature. Does anyone know how I can change the backup fonts in Blogger? Adding a coma and another font after the web font name seems to disable the web font.

I'm told that it's just (older versions of?) Internet Explorer that doesn't support web fonts. How many of you use IE?

regards,

M

Hey look, an Elwood Comic