Louistrations

A quick drawing of Charcoal. The vast majority of my doodles and sketches are of Charcoal and her derivative characters. I'm always reluctant to show them to anybody though, I've still not finalised character designs as of yet.

I tried my best to use simple yet effective colouring for this. It's usual for me to spend weeks - sometimes months - colouring my artwork, so I really need to learn how to work faster!

This started out as drawing practice for poses. I was whining to Artie about how awkward it was going to be to draw clothing on this particular pose. She suggested that I should leave the drawing as it was because she thought Chipper had a cute hiney, hehe! So it's ended up as a picture of Chipper rolling around in tea leaves whilst in the nuddy, just like a cat rolling in catnip! It seems like the kind of thing she'd do, the girl loves her tea!

Stereoscopy version below:

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Wait, before you start reading this; go get "Wind of Change" by Scorpions and make sure it's playing. Have you got it playing? Yay, thank you! That sets the atmosphere nicely, such a beautiful song. As you may have already gathered, there is definitely change in the wind. Or maybe it's just volcanic ash, I'm not sure.

Anyway! This is the updated design for my character Holly. It's taken me a while but this is what I'm happy with. The hairstyle is a bit of a throwback to Holly's early years, hehe.

There were several reasons for the change. Some practical, such as the smaller pony tail gives me more space in a comic strip panel (the old ponytail was such a bother!) and other changes are ones I've just been wanting to make for a while. I wanted a slightly younger and more whimsical Holly. I feel that she's better suited to the stories that I have in store for her.

I've laid out some old drawings of Holly so that you can see how her design has changed over the years. I can't believe I've been drawing her for over 18 years now, that makes me feel very old!

It's that time of year again! I present to you the 6th annual Louis' favourite tea chart:

1. Jasmine Tea, Luk Yu (New Entry)
2. Yorkshire Tea (+4)
3. Redbush, Tetley (+1)
4. Ooi Ocha, Itoen (-2)
5. Yogi Licorice Tea (New Entry)
6. Morocco, Lipton (New Entry)
7. Make Mine a Builders (-6)
8. PG Tips

Just like the previous year, every cup of tea was accurately recorded for prosperity. The grand total of cups consumed in the year 2009 comes to 1152, a few cups short of the previous year's total of 1192.

However, I know that a mere tally is not enough to satisfy the needs of the modern data-hungry web user. With this in mind, please find two charts posted below illustrating the year broken down by both month and hour. Please feel free to print them out and pin them up on the community board at your local town hall.

This is a 3D anaglyph image, to view the image you'll need to use the standard red and cyan 3D glasses. Other versions for use with different glasses are at the foot of this post.

If you have trouble focusing, please try sitting away from the computer.

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An art collaboration with my friend Artie; she drew the original pencil drawing and I created the lineart and coloured the piece. Artie made my character Chipper look so delicate and floaty, I love it!

It's finally finished, woo! This is a request made as a prize for being my 100th watcher on DeviantArt. I had a lot of creative freedom over what to draw, he requested something either Victorian or steam punk and I ended up doing a little bit of both.

I had a lot of fun making this, but to be honest I think I was overly ambitious which was detrimental - a lot of the time I felt too daunted to even work on it! I've worked on it on and off for several months so it has a long history; it was inked traditionally, the characters went through a lot of alterations and just recently I had the opportunity to work on the colouring while traveling on a train!

The characters are original but I don't intend to use them again. Please feel free to think of your own names and backstories explaining why they're riding so recklessly on the front of a moving train!

A quick drawing based on a close friend of mine, made for no apparent reason or occasion.