keeping things spicy

i have largely been working on the bestiary drawings but i miss other media. so, i'm going to throw in the odd experiment here and there for no good reason other than to provide some variety.

i have good days and bad days staring at this. i chose to self impose a basic colour combination and only paint in gradients. i'm going to try some other so called basic combinations as well. i'm going to guess they'll be ugly / uglier.

surrender

the topic for illustration friday this week is surrender. my first thought was to do something more suggestive or passionate but ambiguously so. i thought if i depicted someone's hand tightly gripping someone else's hand that might depict surrender if the other hand were limp. at the same time, a tight grip on someone else might suggest conflict as well, where people tend to surrender. and, according to hollywood, conflicts that begin like this, seem to somehow end up in the extreme surrender of pants coming off.

but with what is going on in egypt right now, that just got me thinking about conflict in general. these things seem to seldom resolve in stalemates and only one side seems to ever benefit and that's only if the conflict comes to a close. that last little tidbit got me thinking about the the never-ending feud between israel and palestine. it seems so much more extreme considering neither side seems willing to surrender or back down. i'm not very versed in the history of that conflict or even the present state but it doesn't seem to me that either side is tremendously "stronger." it seems like someone will have to let go to end the cycle.

deja vu

illustration friday's theme is deja vu this week. the first thing i think of is...."a deja vu is usually a glitch in the matrix." also, i finally saw inception recently so the whole what is reality theme must be a bit more present in my, um, subconscious. or something. where's my totem?

natalia

just some study fun with brush pens. kind of a fast one so the likeness isn't amazing but hey. photo by hedi slimane. natalia vodianova in moleskine.

23012010

a couple of weeks ago i was able to finally go to life drawing for the first time in months. i was out of practice but it felt pretty good. i should probably mix up the media i use more but i still find it challenging to capture something i'm completely happy with. every once in a while i'm ok with the session. the drawings below from an earlier session occurred on such a day. life drawing at ocad, in moleskine.

one minute poses.

five and ten minute poses.

twenty minute poses. i think i'm going to break out the brush pen more.

speaking of mixing it up, i really love francis vallejo's life drawings.

his other work is, uh, ok too. check it out and you'll see what i mean. this kid's a machine and seems to really breathe through his work. check out his blog here, too.

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.

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.

jd salinger

a quick one. not much to say that everyone probably doesn't already know. jerome david salinger in moleskine.

andy warhol

i had no idea andrew warhola actually worked as an illustrator for a time. not an earth shattering tidbit of info but i find that interesting, nonetheless.

liisa

liisa is a toronto girl that you've probably walked by and maybe noted her 5'11" frame (amazons!!!) but you've probably seen her in many a fashion magazine and not realised it. her mouth is what helps me immediately recognise her but she's otherwise quite chameleon-like to me like another model i seem to like to try and draw. i'm told she is quite the antimodel, from an attitude perspective, which is always a good thing. i can't remember where i got this image from but i may try and take this further, illustration wise. liisa winkler in moleskine.

it's blitz!

i guess maps was the song that first made me pay attention to the yeah yeah yeahs. i think their latest album is one of the few i wasn't disappointed by this year. it sounds a little more produced than i expected but it works for me. i like the balance of synth they put in; some bands have tried hard to do this and it's just been baaaaaaad. yes i'm talking about you, coldplay. i'd say my favourite track is zero. brian chase, karen o, and nick zinner (not in that order) in moleskine.

studying hedi

i'm actually busy with projects if you can believe that so posting frequency is getting even lower. not much to say about this one. photo by hedi slimane, in moleskine

studying: drawing or painting?

i have tried some staedtler brush pens in the past but the nibs are essentially foam dewdrops or something with no bristles. they're decent for some effects but i think i like their results more on smoother drawing paper. texturewise, well, it's not so easy to achieve this (for me, but i could just suck). i should probably just watercolour more but the lazy genius in me loves the compactness of brush pens and i've found one that works for me so far. i wish they'd release coloured inks for it here. it's not without it's quirks as well but the range and precision can't be beat in my books. you judge? above is the pentel. this is with the staedtlers.
also, i don't know what to call these? drawings? paintings? the ink seems waterbased so....watercolours? my ignorance knows no bounds.