Latest Artwork

I was killing some time in the holidays and I decided to do an altered book. I found a suitable book at the second hand store for $3 - a marriage manual by Hannah and Abraham Stone. It's from 1937 so I expected the writing to be incredibly outdated. Surprisingly, a lot of the information is quite decent and still applies, being as it mainly relates to biology and science rather than morals and social norms. It even says that x rays to the testicles are not a good form of contraception. Who knew?

The book's about gender, in a way. Of course, my ideas deteriorated somewhat. It's barely finished, I'd say I've only altered about 1/10th of it!

You'll have to forgive me for my scans, hardback books don't always scan properly.

Ta da! The main thing with this one was trying to draw them in exactly the same place. I did another one later in the book:

Turns out the pages in the main body of the book don't showcase pencil very well. Who knew?

Don't mind my terrible gender politics here.

I originally intended to do some wallpaper with negative spaces, then I gave up and drew the guy over the top, using only basic colours (a fairly standard red, blue, brown, green, yellow, white and black.)I did something similar later on, except I chose a less standard set of restrictive colours. This is Roisin Murphy, but I drew a beard on her. Along the same lines, this is Robert Del Naja aka 3D from Massive Attack. I chose him to turn into art nouveau because he just has the appearance of an entirely normal looking man. If that makes sense. It probably doesn't. Funnily enough, this is the second Robert for me to turn into Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau's a very bothersome, time consuming style, which I get reminded of whenever I try to attempt it.

Speaking of 3D, I implore you to watch this video for Butterfly Caught by Massive Attack. Although it's by far not the best Massive Attack song, or my favourite, it's very visually intriguing. (When people ask what inspires me, it's usually stuff like this as opposed to fine artists!)This one's done in ordinary crayola crayons. I left my test strip in (one unwrapped green crayon looks much the same as another until you test them and one's lime green and one's forest green.)This one isn't that good. I limited the colours on the face but not on the hair/snail. Snails are hermaphrodites. It's time for self portraits! (Just in case I hadn't already had enough of them.) I also did a strange androgyny/transgender one:And now available with gender differentiation!Apparently the male one makes me look like George Michael. C'est la vie.  Ships are always she,  and for some reason people always presume animals are "he" until proven otherwise. The ship lady turns up in some of my later work, with a face!

Until next time. The book isn't finished, but I've put it on indefinite hold. Run out of inspiration/have too much other stuff to do. Enjoy.

Just a quick update. 

I was given a green egg carton to fill with eggs and decided to take a little more care than I usually do with my carton illustrations (usually just rapid sketches of chickens.) 

I did a Munch inspired one before (Screamin' chicken eggs - a play on "Squawkin' Chicken eggs" which is what I usually call them) with a hen reenacting the scream, but this time I decided to do a Mucha inspired work.

Enjoy. There might be more box art to come later.

I'm not sure how this came about. I think a friend of mine drew a picture, said it was bad (it was actually a very good drawing) and I decided to show him just how infinitely worse I could make a picture of the same subject - so I drew the same thing first holding a whiteboard marker in my mouth, then holding it in my foot. 

This, for some reason, got me thinking. Since a lot of artistic training is in the mind rather than in the hands, how would it be if you used something other than your dominent hand to draw? One's mind still works the same way, one still knows how to draw, but it's difficult to get, say, your foot, to work the same way as your hand, even when recieving exactly the same instructions from your mind.

There was only one way to test this. To draw exactly the same thing in 5 different ways.

• Right hand - control
• Left hand
• Holding the pen/brush in my teeth
• Holding the pen/brush with my foot
• Completely blindfolded  

The last one is important, not a blind drawing, completely blindfolded, so I have no idea what colour I'm using, where the paper is, I can't look at the reference if I use one..etc.

First, a unicorn:

Right:

This is also done with oil pastels - hell in itself. A decidedly crappy medium, I have no idea how anyone gets any sort of detail with these.

Left:

Well it's got that characteristic left-hang-wiggliness about it, but instead of looking like a "bad drawing" (read no grasp on anatomy) it looks more like a drawing done by someone with parkinson's disease.

Mouth:

Once I started holding the brush in my molars instead of my front teeth, this wasn't too hard at all. You do have to use a brush though, it's near impossible to use a media that requires any sort of pressure. I tried with a pastel first and since my face was about 5cm away from the page I quickly scrapped that idea.

Foot:

Got off to a good start with the face, and then..my foot got tired. You can forget this one.

Blind:

I think this one isn't helped by the fact that the media meant I had to take the brush off the page and I lost my place.

So Ok, that was that then. But unicorns are rather too easy, what about doing something I'm a) not used to drawing and b) working from the same reference.

So I chose a beetle.

So we can obviously draw the conclusion that it is possible to do a competant line drawing using a brush held in one's teeth..but what about a proper drawing, with colouring and detail? I decided to try that out, using a picture of Aphex Twin as the starting point. (I'm not a fan of Aphex Twin, but I think his..persona, if you could call it that, is hilarious.)

The Rules:

I can pick up the paintbrush to put it in my mouth with my hands. I can use my hands to change brush size. However, my hands cannot make a mark on the paper. I have to wash my brush and change colours using only my mouth. 

So I had to do the sketch in watercolour, as opposed to pencil, due to the whole pressure thing.

One problem with the lame watercolours I was using.. no black. I tried to use a black inktense pencil to get me some more black, but that wasn't terribly easy to control with my teeth...

And finally, finished! Well, considering I used my mouth I think I did a pretty decent job. Now that's it, and hopefully onto some more serious art.

I was actually intending to do a series of self portraits, but luckily I decided not to, because upon my return to university it turned out that I had to do self portraits all the time. For this task the portrait didn't have to be representational, but somehow I find myself unable to do non representational work. 

Instead I decided to "deconstruct" my face - starting with a realistic feather painting, than gradually doing more paintings subtracting more elements and realism until I was left with virtually nothing.

I had two days, but I knew I would only be able to use one (as the next week I would be in convalescence because I had to get my wisdom teeth out.) Unfortunately..I work far too fast. I was finished all the paintings by midday.

My starting point. This one took me the longest, naturally - probably about 40 minutes.

I'm trying to put these in descending order from "most realistic" to "least realistic" but sometimes it can be a little muddy. I also intended to go from large feathers down to tiny ones, but that got a bit muddy too. However my first feather is significantly larger than my last.

I'm beginning to lose my facial features. The first portrait is 5cm by 5cm on a cockatoo wing feather measuring 24cm by 5cm. The last portrait is 3mm by 1cm on a chicken feather measuring 6cm by 2cm.

 That was all very well but I still had a lot of time left over. So I did these:

I'm not sure how I managed to look so 70s. It isn't just the colour scheme (this, the small orange/yellow feather earlier, and the other feathers below are all hand dyed cockatoo feathers.)

The teacher suggested I deliberately split a feather. I burned the other one.

Finally, a "complimentary", inspired by my classmate's typewriter.

Somehow I don't think she's smiling.

Apologies to Grant Wood and Edvard Munch. No apologies to Leonardo Da Vinci because I don't even like the Mona Lisa, I think it's boring as hell and doesn't deserve to be the most famous painting ever. 

So..I'm not exactly sure how I arrived at this idea but I decided to paint some feathers again..and I decided to paint some trinketty rubbishy colourful cheap and nasty sort of circusy stuff.

first this carousel horse. I got a bit lazy on the mane. Reference from creative commons The photo is more beautiful than my painting..but it isn't too easy to paint on a feather so I'll give myself that much.

This one's from a little still life I set up; a bird skull and beads. I have no idea where the skull is from, I just found it one day. It doesn't have a beak attached..but it definitely seems more avian than rodent, and it's probably only a couple of cm long/wide.

 This one seems more impressionist than the other two. It's inspired by my father mistaking a picture of Alison Goldfrapp in a clown costume for a picture of a dog! (To be fair it was very low light when I showed him.) Not really any reference for the dog. The clown costume is much influenced by the album leaflet in Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree.

I've scrambled the order in which I painted them (cause it looked better.) The still life was first, the carousel horse second and the dog third.

 All three feathers are hand dyed cockatoo feathers, and each one is about 20cm long (including the shaft) and 5 cm wide. The images are painted on with acrylic paint.

I did three illustrations for an illustration major.

They each were based on the idea of travelling or journeys, and different kinds of journeys (different perceptions.) As a jumping off point, each illustration was inspired by a song - the illustrations do not directly illustrate the lyrics but are inspired by the whole mood of the songs.

The Slow Train - (Lemon Jelly)

Seeing as this, to me, is the manifestation of a physical journey I chose to draw a bright, cheerful psychedelic illustration of a happy steam train, like something out of a children's book. The destination is known and excitement mounts.

The Tourist (Radiohead)

The second illustration in the series explores a journey between life and death, or to the spirit world. Radiohead's song, in my opinion, is about a car crash and a near death experience. Dogs are supposed to (along with other animals) be able to see ghosts, and there is a strong tradition of spectral dog based mythological figures such as the grim or the barghest or the phantom hound (upon seeing which, the viewer will die.) The picture is supposed to appear unfinished, violent and arresting.

20th Century Trip (Feeder)

The last illustration is a representation of a journey of the mind. This little track is a short, ethereal outro and brings to mind an out of body experience, which is why I chose to represent this as a person floating in limbo - underwater. 

 I hope you enjoy them all.

 For a religion assignment the task was to create a religious artwork. Commercial Jesus was created. His clothing and halo are made out of advertising catalogues. The rest of the picture is a combination of drawing and painting.

There are many ways you could interpret this artwork, such as a comment on the commercialisation of religion or the corruption of religion which is often run like a business in order to capture the money of the gullible. Or maybe this is just the new way in which Jesus is going to be marketed.

I do not believe the original Jesus was caucasian, but I chose to represent Jesus here as a stereotyped white Jesus as this is the image most recognised in modern media; and like advertising it is just as misleading.

In progress...this is before I added a lot of shadows. You can see what the ads looked like before I partially painted over them

The finished Jesus.

First I lightly sketched in the background and gave the horse a base coat. Since white is composed of many colours, a whole rainbow had to be laid down.

Next I did the same for the rest of the room, blocking in the underlying colours. The section in the middle was detailed a little.

I then refined the background. It looked very wrong until I roughly filled in the beams with brown. The background was still not complete, but close to.

Now, the completed image. I painted the details of the horse and had to make the horse substantially darker, while still having her appear white. The floor was darkened in some places, lightened in others. I refined the roof beams and then I was finished.

 I like the idea of putting a substantially detailed background into my work, as backgrounds are often neglected in painting.

My references for this image were as follows:

Horse

Background (Northwood asylum)

First I started out with this sketch 

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 I started painting. First I approached it by blocking in the colours, then I realised that because of the amount of highlights, this wasn't going to work. I'd have to start with fine details. As it's a watercolour painting it required a lot of planning because the highlights had to be negative space. It's near impossible to paint over dark colours with light in watercolour.

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And that's it finished! It was a marathon effort but I think it was worth it.

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This is a drawing with Inktense pencils on a paper bag. Believe it or not, it's harder to draw neutral expressions.

I'd like to credit Berit Leela Raven with taking the photograph that I used for a reference. 

And this is the image once painted:

This is a large a3 drawing I did on watercolour paper, using Derwent Inktense pencils in yellow, fuchsia and indigo.

The water soluble pencils are extremely bright when painted (as shown below)