The watercolor series of cast members continues with our brand new couple, Michelle & Hsin. I’m a little disappointed about how Michelle came out… I can claim that I was working on it in a badly lit room when I was working on it but I’m afraid that excuse only goes so far… Also I’m still getting the hang of darker skin tones.
Still I like the shellshocked expression Hsin has, not able to believe he’s in this relationship.
This week I decided to go with watching a few young adult films (or at least ones with young adult protagonists)
The first film in my selection, Secondhand Lions stars Robert Duval and Micheal Caine as two eccentric Texas brothers spending their twilight years in their dilapidated farm fishing with shotguns and taking potshots at salesmen who had heard rumors of their hidden wealth won from past adventures.
Into this comes their nephew, Walter who is abandoned on their doorstep by his mother (with instructions to find their treasure.) From there comes a sweet story as the brothers for all their cantankerous faults turn out to be the best parents that Walter could possibly have and in the process providing a civilizing influence (for example getting them to wait for the Salesmen to tell them what they are selling before they shoot at them) Along the way we hear about the brothers adventure and Walter gets a pet lioness named Jasmine.
This was a fun with great performances for both Duval and Caine (though I caught Caine’s accent slipping twice)
Holes is an a Disney adaptation of the popular young adults book of the same name about a correctional facility in the middle of the dessert where boys are sent to dig holes to “build character” and the boys who have been sent there.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this film. It has a great ensemble cast including Sigourney Weaver as the warden with Jon Voight as her chief enforcer as well as a great first performance from Shia LaBeouf as Stanley our main protagonist.
The story was tight going back and fourth between the hell of the camp and a back story about a tragic multiracial romance torn apart by bigotry. All of which is far more upbeat then that sentence implies, and it all comes together in the end in a very clever way.
It occurred to me that I haven’t done one of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies for Tuesday Rhapsodies for a while, so here’s Number Seven performed by Georges Cziffra.
Well I missed the deadline on the Character Design Challenge again, next time I’m really going have to look up the date next time so I can start at a reasonable time rather than rush it unwittingly after the fact. So this month the theme was Vikings and most of the entries didn’t look like them at all. Don’t get me wrong, they all looked great but they all looked like fantasy northern barbarians and valkyries. Having lived in Sweden for a year in high school I can be a little pedantic when it comes to valkyries, no horns and all that… so after looking at all the pictures I decided to do a more accurate Viking woman. (though maybe now I’ll be seen as sexist drawing a seventh century housewife rather than an empowered warrior.)
But what really excites me about this is that it is the first image I’ve done completely on Manga Studio/Clip Studio Paint!
It’s been slow going and obviously I have a long way to go. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult it’s just that when you have to finish something on time you go with what you know. Despite this I’ve been finding it much more intuitive for sketching even though sooner or later I’d move the image over to photoshop to finish. So to have sketched, inked and colored this on Manga Studio in one sitting on my laptop was a really nice feeling. It’s going to be a bit longer before I switch over completely but this feels like a nice first step.
The second of my watercolor studies, this one of Kate and Brian. I was pretty happy how Kate’s fair complexion came out.
In an attempt to clean my palette from last weeks material I found myself leaning towards comedy but since the I was feeling just a little snarky I went for the dark cynical kind. Especially the kind of dark humor that the creators of Great Brittain excels in.
The first of the films on my list, Four Lions, is the story of four ordinary blokes form Sheffield, South Yorkshire who just happens to be Jihadi terrorists. Fortunately they’re not very good at this and hilarity ensues. This is a hard film to like. It’s cynical view of the world where the only reason our “heroes” are even remotely successful is because the police are nearly as incompetent as they are. Which frequently leads to terrible things including a hostage situation where they can’t distinguish the hostage from the terrorist and shoot him, a police sniper being unable to distinguish a bear costume from a Wookie costume (an important distinction when you have both in your sight.) and mistaking the conservative more devout brother of one of the terrorists for a terrorist simply because he looks the part of a cliche muslim, and shipping him… somewhere, (Omar, the lead terrorist wears western clothes.)
Despite this it’s not completely hopeless. Despite the protagonists going on about western decadence, nearly everybody treats them well but in the end the level of their incompetence is deadly killing all of them, three bystanders and a sheep.
The next on my list, Filth, is based on the book of the same name by Irvine Welsh the author of Transporting staring James McAvoy as Bruce Robertson, worst Detective in all of Edinburgh. Robertson is a truly terrible person who extorts, drinks and maturbates as he tries to win a promotion to Detective Inspector as his life falls apart around him. I know it’s all acting but it’s still hard to believe that this is the same guy who plays the young Charles Xavier and Arthur Christmas.
This was a hard film to watch with it’s dark uncompromising look at the human condition I’m sure there was plenty of things in it that I missed as I watched as it goes back and fourth between reality and Robertson’s hallucinations and while darkly humorous I’m not sure if I would call it a comedy. Still if you have the endurance it’s worth a shot.
