Haunting News sketches

Living in Chicago has opened my eyes to a world of crime and cruel fate that I had not been exposed to previously, either because I was simply younger and didn't listen to the news, or just far enough in a suburban bubble to not take notice. And while you'd think a case of date rape on my very block or a serial  purse mugger working my trainstop would be close enough to home to warrant a freak-out, it's the atypical stories about tragedy and terrible luck that both bring me to tears and conjure visual scenes in my head that pester me to recreate them. Here are some thumbnails I forced out (as always, click to enlarge):

October 11, 2011 Child Cut From Womb
January 8, 2012 High-Rise Fire Victim
August 6, 2010 Lake Michigan Rescue

The fourth thumbnail is an unrelated idea about strong plants worshipping the sun perhaps to lighten the mood. The larger quick doodle is of a woman shoving the rest of a hamburger in her mouth before leaving the drive-thru lane. And slightly similar to that, the last image is of me pulling a large amount of gum from my mouth, a moment from a dream.

Sampson Color Study

When I visited my parents house this past Thanksgiving, my sister's cat Sampson was curious about who I was. I caught him peering at me from around corners in a guise of daylight and wood flooring. Here's a color sketch I did of the memory with drawing inks:

My original idea was to paint the scene, but after enjoying how this quick mockup turned out, I am considering layering a pen drawing over this with Gimp and keeping this same color palette. I guess I could try both, we'll see. I like how Sampson is in control in the top corner of the image and streaming light from different directions layers between him and the viewer. I also like the idea that the viewer is a stranger but with a familial smell, creating a light confrontation about who is intruding on who.

Tree Composition

I'm not a fan of trying to duplicate a drawing I've already drawn, but I do welcome the act of drawing the same scene twice. It helps me think about what it is the drawing wants to be about. So here's a girl in a tree, reminiscent of this earlier post:

The thoughts I had while doodling this were more about the viewpoint from up in a tree.  And as the drawing inertia dwindled, I became pretty content not finishing the top or bottom of the tree, my interest was more about the immediate area around the girl and those windows between the branches. I sketched out a new composition starting with the sun/moon in the background and layering in front up to the girl in the foreground:

There are a lot of new ideas at work here. I see an opportunity to explore color behind a woodcut plate, using a dark detailed cityscape to illustrate a scene that is both day and night. The trees are aggressively reaching around tall buildings and metal porches while the figures take a more inactive role each in their own blue-white light of technology. The main figure is perhaps in a time-freezing daze while the streets are overrun with animals (coyotes, bunnies, rats, cats) in the absence of humans traversing them. An allegory about taking to the trees, moving forward with new knowledge and backward with respect for the earth, releasing control over our environment for the refuge of our own present minds.

View from the Mirror

Making a self portrait is always a fun way to get back in the groove of observational drawing, and with a new haircut and a new studio set-up it felt like all the more reason to make one. It was a sunny Sunday with coffee and crosswording going on simultaneously. I am quite pleased with how the drawing turned out, but it took me far too long to stitch the scanned images together to create a digital version. Why must white space be so hard to keep uniform... Despite my complaining, I do hope to start working on compositions that are even larger and more colorful.

Pulling the start cord

Thanks to my DVR for being aware when I'm away from the tv, I've been enjoying a show on public tv called 'Art through time: a global view'. The last two episodes I've seen were about hybrid cultures and dreams represented in art- two topics of interest to me. The first made a point about anecdotal information included in artwork as a sort of invaluable way to describe your local experience. An artist showing the close proximity of different items can describe one culture blending into another. And the episode on dreams talked about how an artist's rendering of dreamscapes helps a viewer become more open to an imaginative realm different from their own but still accessible through recognizable imagery.

I made a list of things in my everyday life, things I see around me often. I hope to include more of this kind of jargon in my images. (Speaking of jargon, this morning I had another dream where I pull an inordinate amount of chewing gum out of my mouth.) Also, here is a scratch board image I made last summer about my swimming sessions at a neighborhood outdoor pool. The act of swimming laps until you can lap no more is hypnotic, and the time of day that I went coincided with the sun blindingly setting behind a tree.

Look forward to more frequent posting on this blog as I find a 2012 art routine!

Street Fighter Blanket

FATM Imagery

Dancing Suit

Chilly Fall Faces

Coffee and Ideas

Disabled Camera

One of the digital cameras that I use has been slowly losing its' ability to take accurate photos. Instead, it has been spending its' old-age producing mysterious images loosely based on reality. Here are some of the more interesting results...

Purple Bouquet

The Indoor Skylight Too

Today I came across a post about a product called SkyV that made me recall an invention post I wrote last year. The SkyV is a digital skylight that displays a selected image from an archive of beautiful scenes. It is pretty similar to what I was imagining, but I still like my ideas of having it relay a personalized sequence from a remote camera and incorporating some kind of natural light emitting display.

Fingernail Vermin

A morning post-apocalyptic train of thought about some kind of cross between pets and nanobots.

Summer Dress