Psychic Origami

With dConstruct just over a week away I’ve received my moo cards with plenty of time to spare.

All of the designs are from illustrations/paintings I’ve done, so at least they are nice and personal. I could have done with spending a bit more time in Photoshop before hand though, as the transition from screen to print is never quite as I’d like. I suspect also that as I was submitting non-photo images that I should maybe have kept the resolution a bit higher.

An assortment of sketches from my moleskine. In order – a sneaky sketch of my sister, several drawings from Istanbul (which I visited with a friend earlier in the year), a rough acrylic of Heather and a sketch of Lolita (Heather’s sister’s dog) from Barcelona:

Another red haired girl. Sticking to same style/colours etc as previously. Think this might end up being a series of very similar paintings, which hopefully will let me slowly improve my technique with each one.

So playing with a bit more paint I thought I’d have a go at drawing something from my head. I’d just been reading the Diamond Age and had vague ideas along the lines of drawing Nell with the primer. Didn’t turn out quite that way (just went with what seemed to be working). So instead here’s a painting a girl with a backdrop of the circuit board from an Altair 8800 (one of the first publicly available computers for consumers). It’s kind of silly, but I quite liked how it turned out.

So I’ve decided to try more painting, rather than drawing and inking. So needing a subject matter, Mr Bowie seemed to fit the bill. I also happened to have young americans on vinyl, so there was a picture to hand. I didn’t spend too long on it, but here’s the result:

I like some aspects of it, but it does show I need some more practice.

Here’s the original for comparison:

As can been seen I’ve managed to mess with the proportions a bit too… Still it is fun to play with paint. In this case acrylic which has the advantage of being fairly opaque and hence easier to correct mistakes with. Something that is quite hard to do with ink.

Another one for the open house.

Two more… Hopefully there’ll be a few more after these too.

Well last night and today saw me performing a similar feat as last saturday, except I was wielding pencils, inks, gouache and brushes this time around. I’m part of an open house for the fringe festival in May and given it’s April tomorrow I thought I’d best get working. There are a few previous pieces I’ll use, but I felt I needed to get some more up-to-date work out there.

I have still been managing to do some drawing over the past two years, but it’s mainly been limited to birthday cards and presents. Whereas during my MSc I managed to get quite a bit done. So being involved in an open house is a good motivation to get drawing.

Firstly, I finished off one illustration I’d been working on. I mainly tweaked the line work last night. (Some of the leaves are painted in gold, which doesn’t show up too well on a scan…)

Yesterday I started on my first proper gouache painting and finished it off today. It’s of Richard Feynman whom I’ve always had an admiration for (mainly from reading about his antics during the Manhatten Project). Quite happy with how it turned out – it is really only a copy of a photo, but it’s nice to just concentrate on the paint for a bit. (credit to Shardcore for some of the inspiration behind painting Feynman)

Next we have a collection of monster illustrations. Been doing similar ones for birthday cards and they always turned out pretty well.

I’d like to get quite a good collection of pictures finished, so I have plenty to choose from for the final showing. Given there’s only a few weeks to go I’ve not got too much time, but at least now I’ve made a proper start.