Euros Childs

I went with my girlfriend, Sarah, to see Euros Childs live at Bush Hall on Saturday. He's the lead singer and songwriter from Gorky's Zygotic Monkey and has just put out a solo album called "Chops". I was a bit worried about how good it was going to be, the album has a rather DIY sound and doesn't have the richness and warmth of genuine instruments being played, which is one of the things that make Gorky's so good. Thankfully, there was a proper band playing with him that sounded absolutely great and they really made the album shine. Bush Hall is a pretty little venue although the photos on the site don't really indicate quite how small it is. Euros still looks like he's only fourteen years old and he probably always will with his adolescent physique and his teeny, tiny head which is often obscured by his floppy hair. His small head makes his neck look rather large and wide and I figured he was interesting looking enough to try and draw. Not so sure about the chop, I liked the idea of it replacing the old cartoon cliché lightbulb but I ain't so sure it works. The colouring is a bit slapdash but I wanted to keep it fairly fresh and not overwork it. I might have over-exaggerated the amount of hair but it's what stands out most when he's playing live and shaking his head a lot.

Digital tomfoolery

I've been footling about doing some digital doodling today, just for fun.

Middle Aged Food

As promised (although a bit later than planned), here's some more of the Middle Ages food spots. I think these came out quite well, they're fairly solid Horrible Histories work and I can look at them without cringing (too much). I tend to prefer working on something more character based than an image that relies on scene-setting very heavily. That's not necessarily an admirable trait but it's definitely where my interests lie. Despite being supplied with some reference for each illustration and usually searching for additional material myself, I always felt it was hard to do justice to the period in the time allotted and that I was drawing with only a minor knowledge of time and place. It probably didn't matter too much as it's all very cartoonish but I like to feel I'm working with a bit more understanding of the material than I usually had whilst working on Horrible History. I confess that despite having drawn all this history based work my knowledge of the subject hasn't improved much if at all.

Website Update

Just a quick post to mention that I've updated www.fazchoudhury.com, I've added the Horrible Histories double-page spreads that I did. More stuff for the blog soon, honest...

Look out! Jelly coming!

I’ve been working on some illustrations for the Horrible Science magazine and haven’t been posting to the blog of late, I'll try to make up for it. Here’s another Horrible Histories spot illustration, it’s titled Bishop’s Feast but I don’t recall what the story is behind it, a common problem seeing as I've done a fair amount of them. I guess Bishop’s had jelly on some special occasion although I can’t understand why they’d have it without ice-cream! Where’s the fun in that? Is it just me or does this picture seem ever so slightly icky? Something to do with the look on the bishop's face I reckon. Maybe it's not just the jelly he's pleased to see...

This was one of a few spots on food in the Middle Ages, I’ll probably post some more of them soon.

fazchoudhury.com

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I've been busy trying to build my own website, I've finally managed to get it up and running but there's still a lot of content to add. I've put up some of the art I did for the Horrible Histories Collection, namely the cards that were free gifts with the magazine and I've also put up pretty much all of the Hi-Fi Choice work. Some of it you may have already seen here on the blog but I think there's plenty of other stuff to check out. There's going to be some crossover because the blog gives me an opportunity to comment on the work in more detail than the site does.

If you'd like to take a look at what's up so far then please go to www.fazchoudhury.com

If excitement didn't get the better of you and you're still here, the picture below is the rough sketch of the design that I decided to go with for the front page, I kind of liked the sketchy quality of the rough and was tempted to just go ahead and use it but I decided against it in the end. My plan from the beginning was to use a limited colour scheme and try and go with as much white space as possible. I wanted to keep it try and keep it clean, simple and free of anything too fancy looking.

Skills

Utilising my newly learned and yet highly honed (Hah!) HTML skills, I've tweaked the blog's template to get rid of that slightly annoying border that was surrounding all the images. This pleases me.

Here's another Horrible History spot illustration, there's probably going to be a whole bunch of these seeing as they've been my primary output for the last few years. This one was done for the puzzle pages. I think it was a spot the odd one out kind of thing and the guy on the right of the picture was meant to be a little drunk and confused as to which item was wrong. I can't remember what the correct answer is but I'd hazard a guess that it's the rifle.