Saints and Sinners.

Hey blogniks, here's two more sketches from my moleskine which I'm posting bit by little bit. I figure there's no fun in uploading everything in one go, gotta keep things episodic n'est pas? To the left we have a pencil study of St. Sebastian Being Cured by Irene by Luca Giordano (1692 - 1702) which hangs in the Victorian National Gallery's European Collection. To the right is a detail study of John the Baptist from Parmigianino's The Madonna and Child with Saints which hangs in England's National Gallery.

Drawing in English museums and galleries is the greatest pleasure. All the treasures of the world plundered by our glorious pirate motherland and at your disposal with free use of fold-out stools.

In other news here are some interesting, if morbid, book covers I discovered while researching a Medieval French bard named François Villon.

Notepad Adventures

Here are some examples of me ruling neat blue lines over someone else's drawings.

Drunk she stumbles down by a river, screams calling...

... London.

A few drawings I made while in the UK.
Drawn with ballpoint pens, blue, red and 2B lead pencils.

Allons-y!

Without further ado, my new showreel:

The 2009 Show Reel of Benjamin Drake from Benjamin Drake on Vimeo.

Star Trek Special

(Ben Ji Mine, in Chinese!)

What's this Benny, some kind of blog-update?

Yes, that's right. Here's a bunch of drawings from my moleskine sketchbook documenting my adventures. There are one or two colour water-colour (tortological statement) drawings in there but the only scanner I could find was a lousy black and white one. These are the breaks.

Oh well. Say, have you seen the...

...Abram's Star Trek movie? Yes! Twice! There'll be more Trek related goodness on this blog in the future I can promise you that so stay tuned. With my handy ClustrMap gadget I can actually tell whose watching this blog and where from! That said I would like to shout out a hearty:

GREETING TO ALL VISITORS TO THIS BLOG FROM ABROAD!

Your little red dot on the map means a lot to me! Especially that big red dot on what I think is Alice Springs! No idea who you guys/guy/girl/girls are but I warmly receive you my rural brother and sisters unto my digital breast. Also, the current Benjamin Drake International Viewer Award goes to the United States of America which is currently ahead with 28 hits, followed by Japan with 10 and Canada with 6. The United Kingdom and the Russian Federation are neck and neck for fourth place. Australia maintains a strong lead by unfair advantage.

Retrospective

When I was a kid we were lining up to ride a donkey and when it was my turn the donkey-keeper put me on the saddle backwards for a laugh. Little did that man realise that this new point of view would give me, more than a decade later, the necessary inspiration for a...

BENJAMIN DRAKE RETROSPECTIVE ! ! !

Yes, that's right. It's time to look backwards!

Whatever for dear Ben?

Well, because all the new drawings I've done are un-scanned or unfinished, and because I've found a few things I've never uploaded on the internets in my archives.

Queensland Year Project, 2007. I worked with Jasmine Hambling and Patrick Culleton on this one.





One of the first drawings I ever did with a tablet, 2005.



Comic, 2006.

High school comics.

I drew this before I left Bunnings for a woman that worked there.

Alright, alright enough! I'm sick with nostalgia!

Me too. Here's a work in progress, and a new comic I forgot I had to clear out the stink of mothballs.

In other news, I'm trying desperately to create a new demo reel and all my friends have web pages now! Damn! If all my friends were political superpowers I feel like, I dunno ... Australia. Or Canada. Check out these awesome pages!

SENimation - The Sense of Imagination.

JOYBOX - Art and Craft with Alex Grigg.

and

Emily Nelson's Art - Art by Emily Nelson.