perspective

i started drawing an american bison for this bestiary of mine and started with a photo that i thought had an interesting perspective to start with. i'm trying to keep up with experiments while still working on my actual projects. so i took a gander at illustration friday's theme and it is, weirdly enough, perspective. i've been wanting to try taking ball point pen drawings further as the basis for an illustration instead of using brush and ink so i thought i'd give it a go.

i realised too late in this experiment that it looks a bit barren without any real sort of background. i thought about incorporating whatever symbolic imagery that bison might have in different cultures. it seems that they're mostly used as state symbols or in flags. so this is a flag of sorts, but the blue is supposed to suggest the sky.

if you can imagine yourself on the plain and you're sharing opposing perspectives with this animal, your perspective might be that this is such a magnificent animal. his disposition might suggest that his perspective might be that he doesn't like you on his land. apparently these are really dangerous animals to be around; they can outrun us and will attack if provoked. so you're being warned as well.

not sure if i really like the result but it was worth a shot. i'll probably give this a few more tries to decide once and for all. the original drawing is also below.

i'm am slowly going...

...type crazy? my new ampersand cufflinks from veer. boom.

bestiary: aardvark

if you've been following along at all, you might have noticed that i've been throwing animals into the mix of my drawings. i've been thinking about personal projects a lot and have been thinking about selling prints as well. the bulk of my drawings tend to end up in my sketchbooks but i was a bit taken aback when i was told that someone wanted a print of one of my doodles. the 15 nanoseconds of fame i got from booooooom seemed to garner a nice response to the drawings and illustrations i did in my sketchbooks also.

i started just drawing animals for a change. at first i did animals which i was just plainly interested in drawing and found that i loved the freedom and difference in depicting these beings. so i kept going. while the drawings are and will be scattered among many sketchbooks i'm sure, i think i'd like to put them together and make a book out of it. i did some research and it doesn't look any modern bestiaries exist? i guess they're called the internets. or wikipedia. nevertheless, i think i'd like to add an illustrated companion to all of that.

it'll be a while before i finish this but i'll try and post every animal i draw (which i hope to be every mammal, at the very least). for the most part, this will go alphabetically but i'll take requests to have some done earlier. let me know if you think you'd like one.

aardvarks!

propogate

ok. i'm going to try to balance my extracurriculars with....er...extracurriculars. i miss doing stuff for myself but i don't want to neglect the things i should be focusing on too, too much. i took a gander at illustration friday's topic and it got my nerd brainwaves flowing. i tried to add a restriction to keep the work for this short too, as an exercise. my thought process is below but here's the final product.

i actually thought of two things when i brainstormed the topic: transmission/movement and fibonacci sequences. it's interesting to me that the latter occurs in things in nature, like flowers. so i thought i would just draw a flower, pop a colour in and be done with it. exhibit a:

for starters, i don't really like how centred this is, even though it's on the more asymetrical side. also, i have this inherent need to avoid the obvious so i started to second guess my choice of colour. i started to play with simple gradients and things and just couldn't decide on any one colour. so i thought magenta or something wacky and then just thought about picking a colour from good old roygbiv (grade school science for the win!).

then i realised that this spectrum is in light, which propagates. taking it further, it does so sometimes a particle and sometimes as a wave. so then i thought about sound waves. this conjured up interference patterns of sound and water waves in my head, as well as a certain joy division cover.

so to go with the flowers whose petals may or may not fibonacci their way outward, the layers you see are coloured from parts of the spectrum of light. the layers are overlapped to touch on that notion of the interference patterns. to push the wave aspect, the centres of each image are arranged to appear as a sine (or cosine if it suits your fancy) wave. i like to think there is a sense of movement in all of this too, be it from left to right or vice versa or radially from any one of the centres of the roses.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaand scene. this was fun to quickly do. i like my extra-extracurriculars.

packt like sardines...

...in a crushd tin box called the ttc. things are busy! about the only time i have to draw now occurs during my daily commute. i had reservations of drawing people on the subway but i've gotten over that rather quickly. it took a while to get used to the shakiness of the train. and you know, people moving. and leaving. here are a few to start.

just a skull

a couple of websites and a painting have been keeping me so very occupied though i'm not complaining. i love these brush pens. so much more to be done with them. need to find the colour refills.