Dwarf Competition

I just had dental surgery on Friday, and am currently feeling light-headed because of my painkillers. First time I have been in any kind of surgery, and the anesthesia was a very interesting experience (in a good way).

Anyway, These are the thumbs and illustration of my first project for my advertising illustration class. It's a poster for an imaginary event taking place in a Dwarf city. The original idea was a Beard competition, but I ended up exploring different ideas:

I did a lot of thumbnails for this one (not all are here). I was happy with a lot of them, and the one with the red cross is the one that the teacher encouraged me to pursue. I must admit I wasn't too happy with it, I didn't like it much. But in the end I am glad I did use it, as I am really satisfied with the final result (which isn't all that common):

To anyone that is shaking their heads at it, I'm really sorry about the type. But really, I don't know much about type and the composition without it looks weird.

I hope you like it.

Just a few sketchbook pages to share today:

and a finished illustration, which I am not too happy with:

Still trying to figure out which materials I like to use. I mixed Graphite and digital for this one.

New Tablet

When my previous apartment got flooded, one of my losses was my tablet. It was a wacom intuos3, which had never failed me in the 5 years since I got it. But I guess the final massive water obstacle was to much for it to withstand...
Now I got lucky and won a competition in my college. I was supposed to get another tablet, the same one I had lost but an intuos4. Happy me! Except... wacom apparently never delivered. So a few months after the loss I finally got it myself =)

I must say, it's a very pretty little thing. The new texture of the tablet will have to wait until I get used to it before I really enjoy it. From what I read they were trying to imitate the feel of graininess from real paper... I'm used to a nice smooth surface.

In my opinion the real improvement is on the extra buttons. It lights up to say what's where, and when you change it the name gets replaced by whatever you want to name it.

I'm off to try my new toy.