Elizabeth of Columbia

Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite. I though I’d try something different so I added some value with a 4b and used my kneadable rubber to lighten some of it, I’m pretty happy with the result.



Done

So, I’ve finished this beauty. I’m by no means happy with everything, and I had to cheat a bit with a multiliner to clean up some of the lines but it is what it is, and that’s pretty good.



When I finished the inking I decided it needed something more to communicate some of the form, so I went over it with some water colour pencils. As you can see I was far to terrified to actually do the whole “water” bit.

Well, that’s that, on to the next thing to stave of the boredom of unemployment.

P.S. Up yours, school friend who told me I couldn’t draw women because I spent my days “staring at naked men”



Almost there

I didn’t get round to doing any of this yesterday, I kind of forgot I had art class for the whole day.

This is going to be the first fully inked picture I’ve done with a brush since getting out of my wrist brace, so I’m laughably rusty (which in sure anyone with the perceptiveness of a blind turnip could tell) 

Anyway, I should have this baby finished today.



Poison ivy

Waking up at 2 in the morning isn’t my favourite thing to do, but it does yield some surprising results, like this. 

I’ve never been good at drawing women, but I’m quite happy with this, but I’ll attribute my success to a groggy morning brain. 

I spent today finishing it up, and I’ll be inking it tomorrow 

Edit

I doubt this will help me make friends with any feminists.

Update on posting schedule, or lack thereof

Sooo, my computer died… 

I’m pretty technically literate, I’ve never had a virus on my computer before, but all it takes is one mistake.

Anyway, for the next week or more, my posts will either be very short, or nonexistent. BUT I will have a plethora of new things ready by the time my poor, decrepit laptop is ready to go again.

Conan?

I didn’t really start this drawing with anything specific in mind, I kind of made it up as I went along. He looks like Conan the barbarian, so I guess he is Conan the barbarian.



Another drawing

So I was up at an ungodly hour the other night trying to keep the cat and dog apart and decided to entertain myself with a bit of a doodle (that sentence was not intended as a double-entendre). I finished it last night, and I must say, I’m pretty happy with it, apart from the head, which is far too small



‘Alien’ and weird sex, part 2 of 2: Stuffing up maternity. (potentially NSFW)

So last week we took a look at how the aliens in the eponymous movie quadrilogy are, above all, good ol’ fashioned disturbing because of the confused sexual imagery that surrounds and forms them.

This week we’ll be looking at how the movies subvert our expectations of reproduction (which I did touch on in the last post) and maternity.

If you don’t actually know how the aliens reproduce, allow me to elucidate you. The aliens begin their life as an egg, layed by the queen of their hive/brood/I-can’t-remember-what-it’s-called. When they hatch, they are a small-ish, almost reptillian creature with a body reminiscent of a horseshoe crab, this phase of their life has famously been reffered to as a ‘Facehugger’. The creepy little critters will then attach themselves to the face of a host, and impregnate them via their mouth. They will eventually detach, the host will wake up and, in time, will “give birth” to a bouncing baby beast, a xenomorph. The xenomorph will grow and shed it’s skin until it has reached full size, and the full capacity for destruction.
So that’s the xenomorph reproductive process, yuck, am I right? The fact that the way the  alien’s reproduce is (when we break it down) weird, bestial, face-rape, is unsettling, and more than enough to disgust us on our own. As with the appearance of the aliens themselves, their reprduction takes something we are familiar with (sex) and (most of us) view in a positive way, and uses it to freak us out by turning it on it’s head and turning it into a terrifying, disturbing and weird process. But they don’t stop at the subversion of human sex, no sir, they take what should be the most secure, safe and comfortable place (physically and psychologically) and pervert it as much as they do sex. What I’m talking about is, of course, maternity.

The emphasis on the perversion of maternity is particularly evident in in both Aliens and Alien: Ressurection, but moreso that latter.

Whilst Aliens still presents a perversion of human maternity, it uses it mainly as a contrast to the relationship between Newt and Ripley. One of the main focusses of the film is the mother/daughter dynamic that their relationship has. They clearly care about each other, and Ripley fights relentlessly and self-sacrificially to save Newt. Having ‘lost’ her own daughter (or rather her daughter lost her) when she was a similar age to Newt, Ripley takes on full responsability for the orphan. It’s clear in every way that essentially Ripley has become Newt’s mother.

It’s my belief that the xeno queen was introduced in Aliens solely to contrast the relationship between the heroin and her ward. Sure, it introduces a new threat that is greater than the normal xenomorphs, so the fight at the end has more of an epic feeling, but size and danger alone aren’t good ways of raising the stakes in a story, there needs to be an emotional facet to the conflict too, which the queen provides brilliantly.

Alien: Ressurection is where things get real weird. Ripley isn’t really Ripley, she has an alien “child” of sorts, and her maternal instincts are now directed towards a person that isn’t really human. Instead of having two different mother/offspring-type relationships like we did in Aliens this time we actually have two conflicting offspring type characters. Call isn’t (by any stretch of the imagination) anything close to a biological daughter to Ripley, firstly, they aren’t related, secondly, (and slightly more importantly) Call is a robot. Despite not being a ‘real’ person, Call has very human qualities and characteristics, so much so that I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to say that she is, in her own way, human. Conversly, Ripley and her alien bub are indeed related in a biological sense, but in no way does this creature share the same human qualities as it’s mother, or even it’s rival artificial sibling.

This film doesn’t give us a stark contrast between wholesome mother/daughter relationship and a perverted and monstrous form of reproduction, it slams them together. No longer do we have a human duo to root for, knowing full well that they are the epitome of good in the movie. Nope, now we have a skewed relationship that despite having touching moments, is deeply unatural, and wholly unsettling.

There’s a lot more that can be analysed in the Alien films, and I’m sure at some juncture I’ll end up writing more about them, but for now that’s it, I hope you enjoyed reading.

‘Alien’ and weird sex, part 1 of 2: Alien naughty bits (this post contains creepy space creature genital stuff, potentially NSFW)

In my opinion, Ridely Scott’s ‘Alien’ and it’s successors have had one of the greatest creations in the horror genre, H. R. Giger’s (and later Tom Woodruf jr’s) terrifying aliens.

The aliens are scary and unnerving, they are scary and unnerving because they are brilliant, they are brilliant because they take things that we’re familiar with (and in certain situations, are aroused by), and pervet them until we want to cry.

Here is a very bad photo I took of some of the concept art of ‘Alien’ drawn by H.R. Giger. If anything in those pictures looks like a robotic human reproduction organ, worry not, you don’t have a dirty mind, it’s meant to look like an androids junk.

If you’ve seen any of Giger’s art before, you should be able to get a pretty good idea of what he was trying to evoke in these pictures. Much of Giger’s art (particularly Necronomicon) contained elements of warped sexual imagery (and by ‘warped’, I mean seriously warped. If you’ve ever wanted to see a picture of an androgynous critter giving fellatio to its own tail/genitals/whatever-the-hell-it-is, you should definitely check out his work), as ‘Alien’ was strongly influenced by Necronomicon it has a very similar aesthetic. This weird, psuedo-sexual imagery through all of the films is what makes them so brilliantly unnerving.

In the alien quadrilogy, the humans are very distinctly male or female, their ships and equipment are mechanical and modern, and we accept this as the norm. We see the clean-cut angles, smooth lines and flat surfaces as comfortable and safe in the context of the films, we’re even clearly shown early on (by way of sweaty, undressed emergence from sleep capsules) the gender of each of the human characters. These things are what our brains accept as the normal, safe things in the films, and as the aliens are everything that the humans aren’t, they are unsafe, weird and “alien” (see what I did there?).

The aliens (save the queen) have no clear form of sexual dimorphism, their architecture is strange and foreign and their reproduction is nothing short of disgusting. To add to the already foreign nature of the aliens, they actually have human-like characteristics. Initially one might think that a creature having more human-like elements, or at least something reminiscent of them, might make them seem less strange, but when put together in a certain way, they make the creature just that much stranger. The aliens are have what you might call a stereotypically feminine body, they have wider hips, small waists and ovoid ribcage, but this doesn’t make them seem feminine, the giant, phallic head makes sure of that. They are a disturbing mix of male and female that we’re not quite sure how to deal with; The same is true for their reproduction, a spider that looks like two hands with, well…   with an alien vagina that shoots a penis-y thing down people throats to impregnate them (*ahem* there’s something I never thought I’d ever write), more mixed up sexual imagery, and you know, space creature face rape, that’s a thing there too I guess…

So basically, the ‘Alien’ franchise confuses us, we don’t know how to feel about the aliens (other than scared) because we don’t understand them, which makes for an overall unsettling experience. Next week, we’ll be taking a look at how Aliens and Alien: Resurrection take what should be the most normal, safe, comfortable and familiar thing in the universe and turn it into something terrifying.

Batman!

An ink drawing of batman I just finished, I haven’t been able to draw properly for a while because of a wrist injury, so it’s great to be able to get going again (even if every small line looks like crap)