Latest Artwork

This was an image I drew for a drawing competition. I ended up leaving it "artfully unfinished" cause I didn't have enough time.

It turned out pretty wonky but still fairly satisfying, considering it's crayola. The original photograph I was working with was from a project I did where I took photos of me with my face painted to match my shirt. It's not a particularly flattering picture, but interesting enough.

 I'll try and update the site more often as I do work. It's just hard to get around to actually scanning and digitising the work, particularly as I have rather a lot to juggle, and my computer is an old dinosaur.

Don't expect frequent updates, despite my good intentions

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 It's from 1937 so I expected the writing to be incredibly outdated.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.

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.

So in my class at uni we had to do self portraits. I decided to knit mine..so I dyed a whole bunch of white wool in different colours (everything has to have colours!) and then sorted it by value - dark, mid, light mid and light. 

Then I drew a picture of me peering down on a mirror, and charted the pattern. Blue is dark, red is mid, yellow is light mid and white is light.

My face stops where my scarf was. I wasn't sure whether I'd have time to knit the scarf so I turned the chart upside down and knitted from the top of my head down my face.

This is what I ended up with.

It's knitted using fairisle, but I did the fair isle pretty badly so the gods of Fair Isle would be down on me like a ton of bricks..

The colour variations are because I'd pick a light tone, a dark tone, mid and light mid, and I'd change colours whenever I ran out of that colour/OR I got bored of it. I had heaps of that pale apple green but I got sick of it after a while. I also couldn't be bothered knitting the scarf hence the brown and blue bands at the bottom.

My parents tell me it looks better further away. Over all, I'm pretty pleased with what I've done since I only had one day to do it in!

(Recycled food colouring dyed yarn..not sure what ply..um..8 ply? 4mm needles, it distorts a bit but roughly it's about 11.5cm wide by 18.5cm)

My brother cleaned out his room when he left home and I got his letraset. 

I want to use it..and I keep planning to..but when I finish the drawings I was going to put the letraset on..I realise they look better without it.

The first one; a self portrait..making green look wary and anxious and sinister. Colour choice is partially because I now have phthalo green hair, at least for the time being.

Then the next picture is in yellow, trying to make yellow look sad and empty. I'm having this thing with trying to get the colours to represent the opposite of their cultural associations...it would have been very obvious to do this next picture in blue, wouldn't it?

the reference credit for this intriguing ovine

I hope you enjoy, more of these "trying to get the colour to symbolise the opposite of its cultural origin" pictures and more of me trying to use the letraset will doubtless come soon.

And hopefully a few updates since I haven't posted here for ages!

Well I don't normally do self portraits because I always feel disappointed by them, as if I'm not able to capture my face. I'm not normally the sort of person I draw, and it always has to be a good likeness. 

I found a fairly good photo of myself and decided to draw from that. This is just a sketch, I'll do a proper picture later. But I'm pleased with the way this is going.

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