In New Zealand we call the people who first went there from Europe "the Early Settlers" and they have a kind of rustic RPG goldminer/seafarer mixture.
This painting is not going great, but it's what I came up with today.
The larger file is here: http://www.30dayartist.com/images/bimg/oct06/30days_cove_big.jpg

The last day I was in New Zealand before I flew abroad into the great unknown for the first time, my friend and I drove to the beach on the Dunedin harbour peninsula and fossicked for magic mushrooms. When the light failed I was captivated by the view of the beach grass which rose above our heads. It created a permanent memory of that day - either the expectation of leaving home, or the scene being so detached from personal life, I made an effort to store it in my spongy cortex. Beaches in Dunedin are often completely empty and run up into farms or patches of native forest. The damp air, clouds and dimness gathered overhead around a spot in the dunes sheltered from wind, with no real horizon. My friend found his mushrooms, and I went to the bus stop to wait for the midnight coach to the airport in another city, wondering if I was doing the right thing to leave home.


The larger file is at http://www.30dayartist.com/images/bimg/oct06/30days_grassy_big.jpg

When I was young I liked Jacek Yerka (I think that's correct spelling, he's Polish). He did a book called Mind Fields. I did this town in the ground drawing thinking about that. Then I painted the girl - there was no reference or goal, then I distorted things a bit and it looked funny so I gave up for the day. I didn't paint a person for a long time, so I might start doing that a bit more. Today I watched the Terry Zigoff documentary about Robert Crumb, called 'Crumb' and it's very intriguing, similar to the one about Philip K. Dick (obsessive oddball visionaries).

This is eleventh day painting, though now the clock has ticked over midnight (as usual). Today I had the animation class I teach, and that was quite fun, but I had
only three hours for painting, one of which I used to watch a Miyazaki film 'Whispers of the Heart' which is one of those cute modern day Japan kid's stories. It's a very elegant and subtle of normal daily life - right down to the Family Mart and home laundry, but it has a fairytale world aspect too, not as far out as recent Ghibli films. In Korea they don't seem to have an equivalent success in animation films, but they're quite big on game production, particularly massive online games.

Anyway, the painting here is a study for a panel in the comic I'm labouring over - a bit of colour work over the storyboard thumbnail. The characters are an extract of ancient extinct aliens species, so they have four eyes, and a very yoga type culture, so I was trying to portray something at first a bit scary looking, and then you might notice the peaceful aspect on a second take. The idea is they can place their attention on two things at once. People claim women parallel process - but it's not human to have look in two different directions. Fish do that, so I'm trying to put across that kind of situation. In the next panel, the girl's top eyes look up, the CLICK of the neck. I've never had that kind of chiropratic massage - it makes me nervous to watch people do it.

PS: This picture is a 2nd stage study and today I had limited time, so I'll hopefully manage to fix the messed up hands and things like that in the next round.

Sometimes what I want just doesn't come, but that's the struggle, to know what I want. Free time can be a tease, because it doesn't have the cut to the chase aspect that having a set task has. Still, even if what happens isn't what I want, it's still interesting to see what does come to life there on the screen. The cute one I did a few weeks ago - just put it here for contrast with today's bit of ... humour?

"Shooter Wearing Helmet", 400x700, Red pencil sketch with digital touches.

This is a saved off underdrawing for a larger resolution painting that crashed.
That's okay though, I was just practicising pencil work, so the digital part I didn't worry about. I grabbed this state using the print screen button. Love that! Makes up for no autosave (sometimes).

I'm not too fussed on the head - the body seems fairly balanced - might look better with a different face, as I was drawing the head at a scale hard to detail with pencil.

I bought some grey paper which has a bit of texture and toothiness. I like to just draw spheres once in a while. This one seemed to have a pearly effect. The pastel drawing tends to change in colour values when photographed and opened on the computer, and it's interesting to overblow the contrast and saturation because the pastel thickness comes up. I was gong to add some elements to give an impression of vast scale but then decided to let it go on its own, neither big nor small.

The 1:1 scale version (screen/paper) is shown here:
http://www.30dayartist.com/images/bimg/oct06/30days_pastelbouncy_big.jpg