Wuthering Heights

Finally got round to doing another book illustration... this time for the brooding, strange gothic novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. It's the only book she wrote, yipes!

A linocut style illustration came to mind so I gave it a try. It's kind of tricky to show what's going on without more details, and lighting is really important - the best linocuts can have a really dramatic, moody feel to them due to interesting cast light/shadowing, and that would have worked really well for this novel but I didn't really hit it.

Hipstamatic 2 - Sky edition

Some more photos from the iPhone app Hipstamatic. This is the "sky" series. Basically I had to wait for a train so I wandered round taking photos, and liked a lot of the skylines I found... thought about some nice framings that would feel spacious and balanced.

I'm not sure if it automatically ghosts the images, but it seems they all have it except for the one highly saturated one I have here... so perhaps my hand is just always a bit shaky? I don't mind it, but it would be nice to have *slightly* higher fidelity. There's a high quality option for the app but it takes way too long to develop shots on my phone (it's already about 6 seconds which tests my patience sometimes!).

Hipstamatic Photos

There's an app for the iPhone called Hipstamatic which emulates an old, analog camera that was made in very limited release many years ago. Basically it's just doing the typical retro/weathered stylings which are perhaps overdone, and purists loathe, as it's essentially hipsters (ahh, the name is quite convenient!) jumping onto another trend.

But y'know, i don't really care... the iPhone camera I have is fairly crappy, and this app means that I can take photos that are kind of cool looking. It's making me look at lighting, composition and other photography stuff, which I haven't done much before, and I wouldn't be doing with the normal iPhone camera, so as far as I'm concerned it's opening up new creative possibilities and that's a good thing. I reckon the random snaps I take will inspire other art I do, be it in color choices, composition, subject ideas, whatever.

Here's a few shots I have taken with it, just during my wandering home from work, or around the house.

The Alchemist

I guess this counts as a book illustration. I recently read The Alchemist by Paulo Cohelo, and that's vaguely what I was thinking of when I did this. Really, I was just too lazy to do a proper illustration and just wanted to throw some (virtual) paint around for a few minutes...

But I quite like the colors and although fuziness is a cop out to avoid actually trying, I do like some of the results. This is sort of a bunch of desert people coming out of the hot haze. Gotta love haze.

A Pale View of Hills

This book is by a Japanese author and I wanted to at least slightly reflect an Asian feel in the illustration (hopefully). The tree is really a cop out on my part, as I just didn't manage to achieve the look I wanted and would have liked a tree with much more detail and one that curled around in a beautiful shape... but it wasn't to be I guess.

The Road

Back to the book illustrations finally. Here's one for The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Not sure if I would recommend the book! It is all about the atmosphere really, so I wanted to do something very moody and tried to capture the bleak emptiness of everything.

Also, that's easier than doing anything definite that can be critiqued!

NOTE : this one looks a lot better in the bigger view.

A Bird

Well, I managed to get one book illustration up before I got distracted!

I saw a nice bird on the grass on my way to work. Nothing unusual, but i just liked the look of it and the composition with the road. This is EXACTLY what I saw... colors look so much flatter at that time in the morning.

Or something.