Restfield

Nothing too special - just a sketch. It would have been better if I had finished the background. Oh well.I watched Crumb the other day and of course I had to work with a pen.






Detail

Vanishing Talking Points

Architecture teaches me so much about composition. If you reduced a Frank LLoyd Wright house down to just lines, it would still work as an evocative layout.

So here I am, enjoying a few rhythmic lattices on this disheveled Thai apartment building. Or was it Korean? I can't keep track of my flickr travels. Please don't sue me for using other people's pics - I can't afford to fly to Asia every time I feel like drawing.

Here's a detail, I love the look of magnified drawings. It's like listening to your favorite song with headphones and hearing the little things, like sounds reverberating in the drums.

BTW - this is my little sketchbook. I hate the glossy paper and the way pencil looks on it, but this disdain has actually given me more freedom to draw without hope of a masterpiece.

My other sketchbook has become so ridiculously precious to me that I barely touch it.

The Drapery Monolougues

I'm pretty happy with the way this cloth study turned out. I did it quickly and stayed fairly loose (for me at least).

Heisei Era II

I've recently been confronted with questions about the meaning behind my work, which leaves me sputtering and grasping. I think what I'm exploring in this series is the sad and beautiful contrast that occurs when cultural artifacts creep out past the oppressive structures of modernity.

It's like grass growing in the sidewalk cracks. There's a zen saying about how the reeds make the moon look more round. Sometimes we need the contrast to get us to really see things.

I went out and bought a new ballpoint pen for this piece. It was frustrating because the pen would stop working after almost every stroke and I would have to get it started again on another piece of paper.

Sorry about the poor photo quality.

The Treaty of Sinchulu

This piece is inspired by, among other things, old Bollywood movie posters. I imagined an historical exploitation film, completely distorted and "dramatized".

The piece could probably be better but I had only one week to complete it in order to show it at the Murray Hill show.

After about the fifth day, I could see tiny details in the reflections of passing cars. I'd never drawn so much before and I think my eyes became hyper sensitive to detail.

These images are huge, I can make smaller ones if anyone wants them.

Riches Forever

This is the last of the series.
I wanted to finish with an interesting women.
I also wanted to find an animal that felt calm, graceful and feminine. The deer, with it's small movements, felt like a nice choice.

I tried really hard, but I could not squeeze this piece into the colorful format of the other two. I wanted a soft green shape, but it always looked to harsh. I'm glad I decided to strip it down to just the drawing and the signature seal.

St.Francis

St.Francis is one of those icons that seems to inhabit interesting places for me. Claire told me a lot about him and how he would live outside and tend to the animals. He seemed like such an interesting and gentle man.

So the thing that fascinates me about this statue of him is the stark, almost Leninesque depiction. I'm intrigued by the duality of spiritual leaders. Jesus is often painted as the kindest, softest being ever to have lived, but almost every story in the bible has him scorning non believers with such intensity.

So with that, I needed an animal that would reflect the intensity of St.Francis. The rhino seems to be charging standing still. Lyrics from some old dub song keep coming to mind: "He is calm like a lion"

El Haj

This was the first piece in an informal series of three.
The series is inspired by the complex compositions and exotic iconography of middle eastern and Asian money.



The white area on the left is similar to the watermark security feature of currency. I was interested in the way the negative space had to be worked into the design. Arguably, I could have done a better job. I had trouble working with the almost square format.

Manekisattva

Claire and I went on a 10 day meditation retreat at the start of the year. It consisted of around 10 hours a day of meditation starting at 4am, absolutely no talking, and intense back pain. After a few days without books, radio, music, internet, television or conversation, I began to start seeing things in my head. This image came to me on the seventh day I think.

To me, this piece is hilarious - a maneki neko as a bodhisattva. Not sure if anyone else is getting it.

Anyways - the drawing was done on fancy arches paper that I had to rip myself. It was a real pain to draw on because I didn't want to go very dark and I am used to working in much more forgiving mediums, like wood, that hide your mistakes and shine when you add white.

Heisei Era

A departure from the old and rustic.
I wanted to play with more angular and jarring shapes and colors.
The building is blue ball point pen and the sign and woman are from a printer.

The red at the bottom would be a Chinese signature seal that I hand carved from a piece of soapstone, but the watercolor texture has rendered it illegible.



If you could hear it, this piece would sound like the little things that happen in a city..but far away and echoey. Footsteps, people talking at a bus stop..nothing too exciting.
Very Quiet.

Smokemon

My sister and her husband and I have been exchanging japanese lucky kitties (Maneki Neko) on holidays. I think it's hilarious. The lucky kitty in the corner is one I got Claire.

Anyways - I had fun with the depth on this drawing but I regret not following it more. I wish I would have drawn a neon sign following the same angle as the hip bone - then I could have drawn perpendicular lines coming out from under the sign.

Oh well - the next sketch should have some more depth.

Pachyderm

I drew this around 6 years ago I think. I gave it to my dad, who has always had a fascination with elephants. I suppose I recently inherited it. It's nice to have on my shelf.

Over the Hills

Another night in the groupboard. When things are chaotic enough, subjects start to emerge. My friend Sam used to play this game in highschool called "Find the Piggies". He would make sheets of paper covered with dots and hand them out early in the day - the idea being, you find pigs in the midst of the dots - like constellations. It was interesting how the pigs always bore the stylistic traits of the artists.

Figure studies

I finally got around to posting the figure studies from the class Scott and I have been going to. Every class goes the same, an hour or so of hating art and not being able to draw at all, followed by an hour of being bored and finally like 20 minutes of decent work, or something like that.The first here was really stressful because he started shaking after around 5 or 10 minutes and after that it was a white knuckle, sweat drenched, bomb-defusion ordeal. I like how the back turned out though. I am trying to get my contour lines to merge better with my shading - right now they seem like 2 different styles stuck in an unhappy marriage.


I'm moderately happy with the way this one turned out. I really like the knees - I live for little areas like that. I also got lucky on the hand - even though it looks a little wooden and small - I still like the structure of it. I also really like the way the shading and contours came together, especially on the leg.





Check out that hair clip and hair texture! It looks like a real illustrator did that part.
The rest is pretty dull and uniform. I am constantly getting stuck in these angles with no discernable tonal variation - why is it that figure drawing classes always insist on turning on ALL the spotlights, ALL the way around the model??? Why not leave a few off on one side so we can get some cool shadows and gradients.

This one is pretty decent. I may go back and watercolor it. The little shading contours didn't come out so well in the pic here but they give the figure a neat wet shiny look. The foot looks too small - I dunno. I spent a lot of time working out the proportions on this one.


Well, Overall I like the studies and I could feel myself getting incrementally better a few times but overall it's more humbling than anything. I would love critiques on any of these and sorry for the poor photo skillz.

Canyon

I drew this at a pseudo mexican retaurent called qDoba. I think I got a southwestern influence sitting in there. I seem to be getting a little better with rocks. Some foreground rocks would have been interesting but that requires planning or layers or something.

I'm going to go back and color this tonight.

Fish

I've been going to figure drawing classes lately (I'll probably post some of those later) and it seems to be making my mental images more vivid. The other day I kept seeing all these cartoons in my head and they all had this dead fish eyed look.

So here's one - it has elephant feet. Notice the recurring halo / aura / ten thousand burning buddha thing above the fish.

Claire loves the sea horse.

cloth study

This is a study for a painting I would like to attempt. Scott (who never posts) and I found a collection of shelves that we decided would make a great base for a collection of paintings. If you look with a careful and heartless eye you can see the errors in proportion when I went from the thumbnail to the full size sketch. Hopefully these are the kinds of issues I can now avoid when i go to the 11 x 40 shelf.

Anyways, the big cloth drawing took about 5 hours to do. Typically when i draw tight things I need to get up like every 15 minutes and go do something else, but this time i was really driven to keep with it till it was finished. (street fighter 3 matches not-withstanding)

Oh also - adding the white was amazingly fun.

I forgot what these are called

I drew these really fast. Ball point pen and printer paper.
I was waiting for Claire to get done with her work so we could go home.
The shading on the hummingbird's head was so fun. I always mess up that type of thing....a shaded pattern..with a pen. I can't believe how well it turned out.
Claire seems to identify with the top bird...nice and humble...and naturally i identify with death from above hummingbird.

EDIT: I forgot to mention how this was a direct product of Scott urging me to spend more time blocking out the shapes before diving into the details. If I were left to my own devices these birds would be living tragic lives with disproportionate heads and eyes too far apart.

Bird skull

Here is a drawing of a bird skull i did while my family was playing cards. I can't stand cards...i hate the way they look and the whole world of gambling just leaves me uninterested.

Anyways...if it runs slow you can turn up the speed and right click and select quality: low.

Bird Skull

web-slinging action

I drew this while claire was out of town and spiderman 2 was on tv. I always try to get this particular effect with smoke and i always miss it. It's like a straight vertical line...rising and then a quick series of curves at the top like a sudden change in air density. It looks fluid in my head but i just can't make it work. If the pen hadn't died i think i would have made the shading encroach into the center shape a bit more....like near the name.