Mearso

The Jocktopus

Posted 24 October 07

The Rugby World Cup is over and my time as a student is drawing to a close. I’ve handed the work in to be marked and have to speak to an external examiner next week to complete the assessment process. So I thought that it was about time that I unveiled the illustrations that I’ve been (mostly) enjoying working on over the last 9 months or so.

I’ll put them up over the next few days, and try to talk coherently about each one.

This one was done when I was struggling to find a distinctive representation of how the scots approach the game of rugby. I was finding it difficult to represent a history of chaotic underachieving puntuated by the odd glorious shock, so I thought I’d try a different approach. I’ve seen other places where artists talk about how they’ve created characters and they say that a biography of the character they have in mind helps it to take shape. To that end I started with a name and carried one from there.

The name I came up with was a Jocktopus. Not the wittiest, but it did get me kickstarted, and I began to enjoy just the drawing. It’s always great fun to draw octopus like creatures, just look at Doc Ock . I think it’s creepy life that the tentacles introduce into the drawings.

For the rest of the image I’ve attempted a little homage to the King Kong / Godzilla style monster rampage.

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