Anything yet? ... Nope.

That's right... I still haven't done that design piece to kick-start my comic... It seems it's taking a lot of effort to beat this procrastination and it's doing my head in. But, usually what beats my procrastination is to force myself to do something big and beautiful. So, I'm going to do a HUGE picture (in my comic style, just so I don't lose the motivation for this style) of all the different Iron man suits... There's over 60 so I should be well occupied doing this for quite some time...
This isn't the first time I've done some huge project to get out of a rutt, this piece unleashed my digital painting talent and it took me a month, before this I could barely digitally paint at all:

Another reason why I STILL don't have any work done is because I recently installed WINDOWS 8!!!!
I know, a lot of people hate it, but I love new. And this kind of new, is definitely worth the 12 hours I spent getting the thing up and running.. I was one of the first to accept the move from XP to Vista, and because of it, I was more than ecstatic with Windows 7 as Vista was a steaming heap of...
Well, I'm very devoted to microsoft. I was Xbox over Ps3 and I'm MOST ABSOLUTELY CERTAINLY PC over Mac. I see past all the lies and scams and flashy outsides of Apple products and see the limitations and uselessness. If you ask me, even as a Graphic Designer, PC far outweighs Mac in all aspects and I find nothing more frustrating and anger-inducing that using a Mac. ESPECIALLY when it comes to graphic design, It's like Apple hate making things easier, the shortcuts are absolute crap too. You have to Ctrl+Click just to right click for christ's sake. Anyway, I hadn't intended to go off on a rant... I just wanted to offer up an update just incase I actually have some viewers who care what I jabber on about and/or are looking forward to my comic...
Thanks for reading :)

Procrastination Sucks

In all honesty, I have been procrastinating a bit lately... All I need to do is design the bandit leader and I can get started on the comic... But I've been toying with a few different ideas, I was thinking of having the bandit group a different race, who were subject to discrimination, but since laws passed (like the pass of the apartheid) and they became free from discrimination instead of being forgiving and just glad for the peace, this race is angry and sour towards the Draezyl and spend their time terrorizing and using them.
Like I said, it's just an idea and i don't know if I'm going to follow through with it..

So, as always, I have been using my spare time... I've been watching the amazing T.V Show, Dexter, About a serial killer, which I've been enjoying greatly, I also did a couple more drawings and went to a Hallowe'en party dressed as tony stark. Here are some pictures:

Well then, I'm sorry i didn't have much else to say, i should get that concept done soon but right now, I'm very, very tired...

Light - a 3-page mini-comic

So, I finally finished the comic I told you all about in my last post. It's simple, nothing great happens in it, but I made some great choices with lighting and accomplished some really cool effects in this comic. I don't think I've ever got colouring more right in my life and I'm actually pretty proud of it. Basically, the test was a success, the style is a good one and it works just fine.
Well, as promise, here it is:

Thank you so much for viewing :)

2 new creatures and a mini-comic

It's been a while but I've finally got something new to show you guys :)
I haven't been procrastinating again and I've definitely been busy. First of all, extending on the comic I told you I was working on, I've created a couple more creatures for the comic, and here they are:

On the left, the cow-bison-deer thing, is called a 'Bisalces' it's the general cattle-type creature in this world and I think it looks quite quirky and cool, with it's 6 legs and moose antlers. 

On the right, the large bull-bear is called an 'Ursaurus' and it is the natural predator of the canverien, the main mount I showed you guys earlier. This creature will also be the main mount of the protagonist. 

Now, I haven't spent ALL THIS TIME drawing those... I wanted to test my drawing style as a comic before actually making a comic using the style. And so, I've produced an incredibly short cliffhanger of a mini-comic which has only 3 pages. I've drawn all 3 pages but they still need colouring, texturing and shading.I haven't come here empty-handed mind, I've brought you one small sneaky peak. Here is the first page, uncoloured, untextured and unshaded :)

I don't want to reveal anything else about this comic, so ill just, lucky for you, stop here. Thank you so much for reading :) 

Also, it's a little like begging, but I'm struggling for visitors and followers here, so if you find my posts interesting in any way, please let others know, show them my blog, send them a link or tweet them. Also follow me on twitter (@TheDblTap) Thanks :)

Bored.

So, i came to town today to cancel my jobseekers allowance due to me now having a job... I then decided i would wait around for my girlfriend to finish college... But i have no money, my girlfriend doesnt finish college until 4 and its now oly half past 2. So, to kill time, and avoid spending what money i do have on a mcdonalds i decided to look around waterstones and price up the game of thrones collection for my dads christmas/birthday presents and the walking dead comics for myself...
I left, after finding out that both things would cost a helluva lot, deciding i would try to find them at a reasonable price online...
During this time i contemplated the fact that there are many things in this world which i cannot comprehend. After turning this thought over, i got out my phone, leant on a bycicle stand outside carphone warehouse and connected to their free wifi in order to bring you this incredibly non-art-related and frankly boring blog post about things i cant get my head round...
The first of these, came to mind as i saw some in waterstones... Erotic novels. I mean, sure, a lot of people read them online and a few actually reach publishing stage and are kept in quite racy stores and charity shops... At least thats how things were. With the release of 50 shades of gray into the public, things changed. 50 shades of gray is a very popular erotic novel, read by women all over the world and reaching fame insanely rapid. People i know, such as my mother, her friends, my best friends older sisters, his mother, all their friends... Theyve all been roped in by this erotic novel hype. And i just dont get it... The outcome, as stated by many of its readers, is that they get some kind of sexual satisfaction from reading the books. Now, i hate to be old-fashioned... Who am i kidding? I love it. But, isnt that wrong? To sell something so racy and sexual in major stores around the world? This book encouraged many other erotic novel writers to come forward with books of their own to publishers. And after having read through some of the pages in many of these books, i find that the writing in them is awful and pathetic, as though amateur writers have come forth simply to share their sexual fantasies with others, in a rush so as to catch the hype. Frankly, my 15 year old sister writes better stories. Personally, i also see reading something like this as a mechanism to become turned on, whilst with a partner, is quite an insult to them. Much like watching porn would be an insult to many girlfriends or wives.
Enough about that, onto another thing which i find completely incomprehensible. Fangirling... If thats the correct term... Going above and beyond to become the worlds most infatuated with a certain celebrity. The main two centrepieces of these kinds of obsessions being canadian singer, Justin Beiber and british boy band One Direction. I should state, before going any further with this subject, i seek not to upset or displease anybody, simply just to state my confusion. Groups of mainly girls and homosexual males dedicate their time, money, harddrive space and internet to certain people. And the thing which confuses me, is why... Why do people go to such an effort to obsess over somebody who doesnt even know they exist, wont notice that youve bought all their albums and t-shirts 3 times and have their face on your wall. I have never had a celebrity crush and never found myself particularly attracted to a celebrity. It seems ridiculous being infatuated with somebody you will never meet, who has never once in their life even thought about you and who will likely not even be who they seem to be when you meet them in person. Sure, you can listen to and analyse all of their lyrics, buy and read all their books and biographies and study their face and body in great detail, but you will never know this person. Surely these people must reach an age of adulthood and levelheadedness at some point? And surely at this point, they regret the time they wasted scribbling i heart bieber into their schoolbooks instead of working on a proper lifestyle. Maybe, if they were that much of a fan, they could build their life up to becoming a music journalist or band photographer and one day meet this person. But spending all your life, or even just the majority until the next heart throb steps into play, longing after and aspiring to meet somebody who will probably never remember meeting you if you ever did meet them, seems like a waste. Aspiring to be good at your job, or a great person to be in a relationship with, seems like a better use of your time... Imagine if you ever do meet a proper crush, somebody who you could make a future with, but they know about the obsessive nature, your longing for somebody far beyond your reach and their level, that would drive them off, or even leave them feeling quite bad about themselves.
Im not one to say my opinion is the right opinion, or that youre living your life in the wrong way, i just wanted to get my point across and burn some time...
Well, its 5 to 3 and i still have an hour until my girlfriend finishes... Ive completely bored you with a totally tl;dr and highly opinionated post and now ive nothing to do... Im hungry but were having a large meal this afternoon... What to do...
Well, thanks for reading, if you even made it this far...

GREAT NEWS!

Great news, friends, The drawing tablet which my wonderful girlfriend bought me did arrive today, as I said it would, but, even better, I did get chance to swing by her house and pick it up!
I was so excited, that as soon as I finished work at 10pm, I got on my laptop, plugged it in and started drawing... non-stop until just now... 1.30am... And this is what I created:

!!! EDIT !!!

It's 3.21am and I just made an adjustment to this out of curiosity... I wasn't sure which looked better so I decided to post both on here... You can let me know what you think on my twitter @TheDblTap

!!! END OF EDIT !!!

I used my girlfriend as reference (which I do a lot) as a tribute to the fact that she bought me the drawing tablet. This piece was also inspired quite a lot by E.D.I of Mass Effect:

Now, this post has turned out stupidly short... As it happens, I don't have a lot to say about that piece, it doesn't have a backstory or a specific style... I was just playing around with the flow settings on photoshop and my drawing tablet....

So, to fill some space in this post, have some other pictures I've drawn with my girlfriend in them...

Nothing at all

Well, disappointingly for anybody who has been religiously looking out for updates on the sci-fi/western comic I've been working on... I haven't done anything new... Anything at all. But, it's not down to me procrastinating, or being lazy, oh no... Somebody broke my drawing tablet... Snapped the wire clean in half... without it I can't do a thing... Well, I can, I'm quite good with Photoshop, but not good enough to draw with a mouse... And using the pen tool would detract from the style of my hand-drawn methods. My wonderful girlfriend bought me a new one on next-day delivery, which should have come today with which I could create all of the many things, all of the many ideas in my head that have come to mind while I've been without my drawing tablet... Unfortunately, either the seller or the royal mail are useless bags of... Rainbow... And haven't got it here in time... I can't see my girlfriend tomorrow due to work so, at the earliest, I won't have a drawing tablet, or coincidentally, any artwork for you guys until thursday... So until then... .... Uhh... Idk... Look at this thing I did ages ago...

Thanks for reading!

Time

I haven't done any artwork recently and that's down to one of my worst enemies. Time. An unstoppable force. Yet all a concept. If you were to tell an alien that you will see him in 2 hours, assuming he is familiar with our language, he'd have no idea how long to wait, without one of our human-created apparatuses. Our concept and measurement of time is based around day and night, the position of the sun at a certain 'time' of day. Time, like the cycles of the sun, is something which never stops and is a strange, strange thing... Difficult to fathom...
Imagine there was no sun and no moon, there was a natural occuring light in the atmosphere and it was possible for all life to go on as it has... There wouldn't be much to relate points of time to, much at all. Of course, as humans, we would find other things to relate time to, like the cycle of normal human sleep patterns. Time is something which IS there and ISN'T... There's no doubt that it happens, it passes, there is such thing as a history, in a few moments this blog post will have been read... Past tense, it happened, it's history. Yet 'TIME', the word, the measurement, the cycle are all things relative to our planet and the human race. Other planets have different cycles, and would have different measurements...
Maybe I'm thinking too broadly. Maybe that's why time is a concept which has always eluded and baffled me... But it is a difficult concept. Time travel, while ludicrous, isn't impossible, but I'll get onto that later... What I'd like to talk about first, is the concept of time in film and media. I hate. HATE. Time travel-based movies or shows, because there are always too many errors to count, so many easier, yet avoided, conclusions or loopholes in the story-line. Even in Dr.Who, but I have to admit, I very much enjoy Dr.Who. The concept of the future is always ridiculous too, so far ahead. Like we could ever reach such a high level of technology in such a short time, with restrictions on development like religion and the depletion of fossil fuels. Maybe, if self-sustainable energy is established, but still... However, I recently saw Looper... And I have to say this film was great. Despite the disappointing and inconclusive ending and how stupid Joseph Gordon-Levitt looked with Bruce Willis make-up on. The representation of the future was one of the most realistic I've seen. Obviously, not everybody in the future would be able to afford high-tech equipment, the better things get, the higher the cost will become, there will be a LOT of homeless people and with recessions getting worse, it's even more likely. There are a lot of people (bearing in mind it's set 32 years from now) driving cars of our time with D.I.Y solar panels wired onto it. The concept was also great, it wasn't too unrealistic or unbelievable.. EXCEPT... The concept of time travel... As mentioned before, I'll get onto that now...

If time travel were ever to be invented, we would have time travelers around right now... right? Well, while that is a possibility, it's not exactly definite. It's possible of course, that in the future, like in Looper, time travel is outlawed. Or maybe, it's illegal to travel into the past, but even then, there are always people who break the law, and there are always people who will find a way to. There are many conspiracies too, for one example, Charlie Chaplin's time traveler, a woman in a Charlie Chaplin film who seems to be on a phone... There are several possible explanations for this, but check it out and make your own decision...

Something which I believe is that if Time Travel does ever become possible, it will be like a phone, to contact another person, you both need to have a phone. So maybe, to contact another time, both times need both a sender and a receiver node.
Now, several different scientists have several different theories but we have no definite proof that it's impossible. Scientists in Japan have perfected a machine capable of breaking down light and recreating it in a different location. Isn't that amazing? A teleporter! If this were perfected to be able to break down and recreate solid objects we could be looking at our first teleporter, and the first steps towards time travel! (http://news.discovery.com/tech/teleport-light-experiment-110418.html)
Well... This was a very long-winded way to tell you that time is an almighty bitch and sometimes, just sometimes, it gets out of hand, sometimes, my obsession with time and organisation isn't enough. Sometimes things happen, unexpected variables in any plan. Plus, I'm still adjusting to working my time around my new part-time job, I have a lot of things to fit into a week... Time with my girlfriend (@PyxiCakes), a movie night with my best friend, a weekend with my father, some graphic design time, some gaming time, my new job and last, and most certainly least, sleep. I sleep about 4-6 hours a night, which once used to be a difficult thing to deal with, but now, being the norm, it's easy to tolerate. This is all down to me getting the most out of my time between 9pm and 3-4am. that's a whole 6-7 hours which would usually go totally unused and, quite frankly, wasted.
However, I've spent a lot of time doing several things other than design work... I've been playing Faster Than Light, a great strategic sci-fi game which is both addictive and practically impossible, I've also been playing Borderlands 2, my creative muse for my current project and I've been paying Dishonored, an amazing new game which just came out. Aside from playing video-games too much, I've been working very hard at improving at my new job.
Well, I guess I'll end this here before it drags on anymore... But thanks for reading!

Beaked lizards and such...

So, it's 10pm, I've just returned from work and I'm KNACKERED. So, for that reason, this may be quite a short blog post...
Now, you may or may not know by now that I've been working on something which I've neglected to reveal information about, and yes, I'm going to show you it for the third time...

I am now going to reveal more information... These are the main protagonist characters for a comic I am hoping to begin creating. Of course, due to limited resources and time, I will be uploading this comic (page by page) on a separate blog (accessible from here via the bar at the top). The main purpose of this blog post today, is to show you a few concepts I've done for this...
First of all, I have the main, indigenous, race of whatever I'm going to call this planet (which is oh so similar to our own). This race is called the 'Draezyl' and they are homo-reptilian. No, that doesn't mean they're homosexual lizards. It means they are humanoid and reptilian. They wear clothes like a human, but have a tail to account for and their feet are rough and solid, meaning they have no requirement of shoes and they were never invented. Also, the things which appear to be hairs on their head are actually thick fingernail-like spines. You may have also noticed, that quite unlike reptiles or humans, they have beaks on their faces. This idea was taken from dinosaurs. Unlike a regular beaked creature, these reptiles also have a set of canine teeth, no molars and no incisors, just canines, although, almost like a dog's, the canines to the bag of the mouth curve around a little to enable chewing where required.
I have a concept image of the creature here:

The next creature I made came from the desire for the character 'Razer' to have a dog. Obviously, I didnt want to just give him a dog... So I started playing around with a few ideas and came up with a kind of... iguana-dog concept... This creature was named by @LiviaTheirin on Twitter, 'Lacariza'. 

These creatures are docile and friendly. they act and behave how a dog would, but have the skin of a reptile, they have several thin spines along their back and on the end of the tail and are much faster and more agile than a regular old dog. The concept image for this is here:

I think its very cute. 

The next creature I designed came from the fact that, since this comic will have an old-west theme and feel to it, there would definately need to be horses... Or would there? Sure, I'd need a mount, but who said they had to be horses?... So I started looking at other kinds of indigenous creatures of desert/canyon areas and decided I wanted to base this on a coyote... So I took the basic shape of a coyote, but made it bigger and bulkier. I also added a few spikes and an extra couple of eyes and it was looking awesome already! This creature is much faster than a coyote and even faster than a horse, its huge powerful stature and muscles make it a force to be recconed with! Despite it's immense power, however, it is, much like a horse, quite a docile creature, It likes the company of a Draezyl and would do anything to defend it's owner. This, too, was named by @LiviaTheirin and has the very cool name of Canverien!

I also thought I'd put them together in an image to help you get an idea of the size of these creatures, if you imagine that the Draezyl are the regular size of humans, this image should give you some idea:

One other thing which I've done so far is to map out the main town which the story will be based around, it's not a very good or very detailed map, but it was just for my reference. I also made a few signs for certain locations and stores within the town. Both these images are here:

That's all I've got for you this week, sorry that, once again, I turned a short paragraph into a short novel, but thank you so much for reading! And a very big thank you to @LiviaTheirin of twitter for the great names!

Borderlands 2

Hi guys, I'm back again.
"So soon?" You ask?... Yeah I... Don't get out much...
Anywhoooo... I would like to talk about something which has inspired my recent works, which I mentioned in my previous post, but I will show you again should you be a newcomer...

As some of you may know, I am a massive fan of comic-books, ESPECIALLY Marvel comic books. And because of this, I have spent a lot of time attempting and re-attempting to draw in a comic-book style, to no avail. Here are a few of my previous attempts:

Sorry they are so disorganised, I tried to put them in order, but Blogger and I had a creative disagreement. They are basically my attempts over the years, some are okay and others are... Not-so-okay...

I then went on to play one of the, in my opinion, greatest games this year...

Thats right, Borderlands 2!

Like many, I hadn't enjoyed the first borderlands much, it got boring QUICK. But I did love the style, A LOT. Which is the only reason I gave Borderlands 2 a shot. Right from the beginning with this game, I could see that this was a HUUUUGE improvement over the last. I love the character classes and the game is even funnier than before. There are a lot of easter eggs thrown in there too (like the minecraft cave and the hangover-referencing psycho). People do complain, however, that they spend a lot of time looting and it annoys them... This is a ridiculous excuse not to play an amazing game. You don't really NEED to loot, unless you want money or ammo, you can be pretty positive that there won't be any weapons better than the ones you have unless you come across one of the big rare item chests. However, I don't see this as a bad thing at all, I'm an obsessive compulsive gamer, which means I make sure I explore every nook and cranny of a level and cant help but loot every lootable object in the vicinity. Overall, I would definitely recommend this game to others, ESPECIALLY if you played the first one, just so you know how much of an improvement this is. It took me a long time to persuade my best friend to play it just because he was so disappointed by the first one in relation to the hype it received. 

But, I digress, the whole reason I brought this up was to tell you what inspired the works I've been doing lately. I simply wanted to try and emulate the borderlands style using 2Dimensional media. I don't feel I was successful in doing so, however I feel I WAS successful in producing my own comic style as a bi-product, one which I am very proud of and happy with. I like the style of this game so much, I got one of the release posters from work and brought it home to sport proudly upon my bedroom wall. It's also a good creative motivator when I'm procrastinating, just to look up at that is enough to recharge my creative energy.

That's pretty much it for today's post, thank you so much for reading.

My First Post

Hey there, and welcome to my very first blog post.
My real name, if you must know it, is Connor Handley. I have achieved little in my life so far, but aim to use my creative talents to bring me some sense of accomplishment. I have attempted, using many medias, to bring my works to the eyes of many. The first of these, which I have updated since my 9th year of education, is my deviantArt account, which you can find here: http://www.iamherecozidraw.deviantart.com/ This contains a large gallery of my work from the past 5 or so years, however, I've neglected to update it lately as I keep forgetting, it doesn't get much 3rd party attention. My second major failed attempt to draw attention to my works was via YouTube, if you would like to see my channel and the unconcluded and abandoned videos which it holds, go here: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDblTap. My third attempt, while not a complete failure, is still somewhat unsuccesful, although I feel it grows more succesful with each follower. I of course, speak of my Twitter page, which you can find here: https://twitter.com/TheDblTap
So, as you have probably noticed, the need to create this blog comes from some strange, deep-set desire to get my work seen by others, to make it all seem worth it, to make my life, and the amount of it which has been spent hunched over a laptop on photoshop creating ever-improving artworks, has not been a total and utter waste. So I reach out to you people of the internet, you glorious wonderful people, in the hopes that you will not only enjoy the work which I bring to you, but feel the desire, which I do, to share my works with  people, to tweet and re-tweet about it, to spread the word of how the somewhat unseen Connor Handley has dedicated his life to the alias of 'DoubleTap' and how his every waking hour is spent producing works of art, both terrible and wonderful, all with the purpose of bringing wonder, amusement and inspiration to hundreds, even thousands, of people he doesn't even know exists.
But of course, I always expect much more than reality brings forth, I'm a very naive person and it will forever be my downfall.
Now, to get onto what, I expect, many of you came here for, my artworks. I will not talk of everything I have produced since the dawn of my talents, I will simply begin where you have joined me, in the present. If you should ever desire to delve into my creative past, I would suggest that you click on the afforementioned deviantArt link posted above, and hope that you find just a few minutes of amusement from the creations I have stored there. But, as I said, I shall begin with present works and we, I and whomever wishes to join me, shall venture into my future, untold and unknown creations together. At the moment, there are two main projects which I have dedicated myself to. The first of these is a collection of digitally produced portraits I have painted within photoshop.

These images are in order of when I drew them, as you can see they progressively improve. The first one, the one which started it all, I actually did because I was on Cobie Smulder's twitter (as I am a huge fan of both the Avengers and How I Met Your Mother) and I saw that she had been retweeting and enjoying a lot of the fan-made artworks of her characters, I decided to give this a shot in the hopes she would see it, alas, she did not... The second painting, I did because Barney Stinson is my favourite character from my favourite TV Show (HIMYM). At the time, I thought this was the best thing I ever did, but as it turns out, it paled in comparisson to what I was about to produce... The Doctor Who painting, this painting proved a huge success on twitter, with over 50 retweets and equal amounts of favourites I was incredibly happy with the result. This, so far, remains to be one of the best paintings I have ever done. The next painting, of my favourite actor in one of my favourite movies (I drew him as Sherlock Holmes because I have drawn Iron Man/Tony Stark many times...), while a great painting, was still not as good as the Dr Who one. Although I am especially proud of the detailing on his waistcoat. The final painting (so far) is of Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper. I am not very pleased with this painting, 3rd party onlookers frequently tell me this is a great painting, but I feel it is missing something... It doesn't quite look like him...

Unfortunately, while I still uphold this as an 'ongoing project', most of my time has been spent at my new part-time job and working on my second project. I do not wish to give much away about this project as I am hoping it will become something much greater than originally intended, but what I will offer you is this image...

One last thing I'd like to mention before I end this post, this is, in my own opinion, the best thing I've ever done, I did it as practice at first, around the time I was doing the digital portraits, but it soon turned out to be a really great, realistic digital painting and one of my best pieces, EVER...

Okay, well, thank you all so much if you read this, and please, continue to read on, I'll try to keep these a little less wordy in the future, I just had a lot to say for my first post. Don't forget to follow me on Twitter! @TheDblTap