As per my promise to post random doodles...

Pencil study of a Samurai in armour - this was part of a bit of prep work for an illustration I did a few months back. The brief was to do a simple, vector-based illo of a knight and samurai meeting (it was to be used on promotional materials for a London-based international law firm opening a new office in Tokyo), and I wanted to get the costume details right before I went on to the simplified versions.

I drew the knight as well...

...although in hindsight, I maybe didn't need as much practice for that.

Blog Rules: Supplementary

...I thought of one more: No Swearing.

I am admittedly a foul-mouthed little cuss, but since becoming a purveyor of wholesome children's entertainment I have found that not swearing actually forces forces one to be a bit more inventive. So I thought I'd try that here. As of... now.

Hm.

Balls.

Blog Rules

So, yes. I thought I'd start a blog. (What can I say, I just wasn't quite self-absorbed enough already).

What sort of thing will you the lucky, lucky reader find here at Neill's blog? Art! Random doodles, sketches, alternate designs. Bits of illustration work. Top 5 lists. Things being marked out of 10. (Occasionally I miss Unified Review Theory). Links to the work of artists more talented than myself.

There are a few things you won't find here, and I thought it might be useful to set these down as the Blog Rules*.

They are as follows:

- no bitching. It has been suggested by some of my dearest and closest-loved over the years that I have something of a tendency to negativity (I believe "whiny little bitch" is the popular phrase), so I will be endeavouring to keep it in check here and keep the focus on the awesomer things in life.
- no slating. I have gone several years without getting into a stupid pointless argument on the internet and I would like this to continue as long as possible, so a general attitude of "if you can't say anything nice, keep it zipped" will apply here.
- no irritating smug teases about whatever "exciting new project I'm working on but not allowed to tell you about yet". This just really annoys me - everyone does it; hell I do it, but it's annoying as hell so none of it here.

Those who know me best may wonder what on earth there will possibly be left to say under these draconian self-imposed proscriptions. Particularly the first one.

...um, so I guess it'll be mostly pictures.

* these rules are only for myself, of course. Everyone else is of course still welcome to bitch, slate and tease as much as they like. That's what the internet is for, after all.

Yeah, yeah...

The thing is, whenever I try to come up with a clever / creative sounding title for anything, I end up hating it five minutes later. Hence my company name is 'Neill Cameron Illustration', my website is 'neillcameron.com', my screen name whenever I join any online forum thing is usually 'Neill', and so on...

And each and every time, this is after massive amounts of painstaking deliberation.

In my defence, it's not entirely down to a lack of imagination on my part, there is also some reasoning behind it from a usability standpoint. I figure, someone looking for Neill Cameron's website should fairly directly find their way to 'neillcameron.com', and by the same token, should anyone out there take a notion to find Neill Cameron's blog... well, you get the idea.