Happy Easter!

Tales from the Brothers Grimm: Another preview of things to come

The reason for no posts lately has been partly laziness, partly busyness. Anyway, here's a very small preview of the book I've been working on and preparing for self-publishing...

Sandwich Bullying

As we all know that triangle-cut sandwiches look better - and somehow magically seem to taste better - than rectangle-cut sandwiches...

Tales from the Brothers Grimm: The Wolf and the Seven Kids

I don't want to share too many images from my personal project translating and illustrating some of the stories by the Brothers Grimm, but here is another image I'm particularly fond of, which I finished this past weekend. This picture comes from "The Wolf and the Seven Kids", a predator-prey story with clear echoes of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Three Little Pigs" in which good eventually triumphs over evil.

The wolf breaks in

I drew the image traditionally and coloured it in Photoshop. The shadow effect, I feel, works particularly well and adds a sense of menace and drama; having seen it without the shadow, it loses some of its impact.

Throwback Thursday: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Originally posted here, this is something I created this time last year. A Midsummer Night's Dream was the first Shakespeare play I was introduced to. I came to know it through a series called Shakespeare: The Animated Tales - an anthology series of abridged versions of some of the most famous Shakespeare plays, each animated in a different technique. This was a co-production with the great Russian animation house Soyuzmultfilm, renowned for their use of different animation techniques under one building). I saw the adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream from the series as a seven year-old after my grandmother borrowed the VHS from the library. What has always stood out to me, both as a child and as an adult, are the fantastic scenes and the enchanted yet somewhat sinister imagery. Indeed, the fairies here aren't the flittering female creatures from a Victorian fairy story but the elves and goblins of old English folklore - dubious nature spirits of pagan origin feared by a superstitious population. Of course, as a child, I wasn't able to completely get the sexual undertones of the play (only the romantic ones); I suppose this picture was my way of visualising the sensual themes.

Throwback Thursday (on a Friday): Corporate Wolves

So I realise Thursday has been and gone already, but I thought I'd run a strand to show some things that I've done in the past and shown on my old blog.

"Capitalism has an intense, rich flavour"
- Wolfgang P. Loupine, 2012

I originally posted this in early 2012 - only chancing upon the post again on my old blog did I find the additional caption and my supposed naming of the main wolf in the foreground. I'm surprised to have found that it's the first picture that actually pops up in Google Images as of March 2015 when one types in the term "corporate wolves" (in the plural at least - not in the singular "corporate wolf"). I'm not a huge political activist, but this picture ultimately summarises my feelings on the types of dubious people who often manage to infiltrate banks, political parties and large corporations.