Hybrids

Speedball ink with brush and nib pens on butcher paper

Nov. 2010

Speedball ink with brush and nib pens and pilot rolling ball pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

Here is a slew of animal/human doodles. I'm still distilling the buffalo in clothing idea--she is the animal character I am most excited to learn more about through drawing her and her world, but here are some of her compatriots. This 1960s lioness has been intriguing me recently. I started drawing a lion face one day in my sketchbook, and her mane just became a 1960s flip-do, which got me interested in what fashionable suits she might wear, and the rest went from there...

The antelope/giraffe drawing stemmed from thoughts about sacrifices for fashion. The story that was running in my head is that the giraffe wants to be fashionable with a bow around her neck like the antelope, but she tried too hard to make her long neck fit into the fashion ideal of the shorter antelope neck. Here, the fashion sacrifice becomes humerous.

Some of these characters are really a hybrid of animal and human, and some of them are just animals doing human things. The difference between these types of characters, I think, can be the different between creepy and cute, or between mythological (think minotaur, centaur, etc) and storybook. Anyways, all good tangents to go on, many things to think about...

Silhouettes

Ballpoint pen on paper

April-May 2010

Cut magazine pages

Sept. 2010

Cut paper

Oct. 2010

Speedball ink with brush in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

For awhile now, I have been interested in silhouettes...particularly riffing, in my own work, on Victorian silhouette portraits. The top ballpoint pen drawings are from many moons ago, done last spring at Bowdoin College as part of my senior thesis project. I've included them again here as reference because I have continued with my fascination with the silhouette in works directly leading from these earlier drawings. The most recent iteration of this idea is the bottom drawing, a set of doodles I did the other day...ladies with buffaloes, ladies with long creepy fingers, buffaloes with parasols, all in silhouette. Above them are some paper cutouts I did earlier in my residency at the Quimby Colony, and I suppose they're pretty self-explanatory.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Speedball ink (brush and nib pen) in sketchbook

Ever since I read it for the first time during my freshman year at Bowdoin, I have been fascinated by Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. I would really love to do a larger scale illustration project about Dorian Gray, so that might be a coming attraction... stay tuned. I'm interested in using some visual saturation of meaningful patterns, like the one on the couch/background here, to demonstrate Dorian's world of excess, and I just love the ideas in the book about artwork and its inner life, the dangers of immortality, and superficial beauty covering something rotten inside. Here's a pretty straightforward picture of Dorian, as I get used to ink and nib pens and stuff. The quote written in the background is from the book, and it says: "You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

Drawing at Alex's House

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Black magic ink (brush and nib pen) on vellum

Nov. 2010

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Black magic ink (brush and nib pen) on Canson drawing paper

Nov. 2010

Alex Rheault very kindly invited me over to her house a few times last week to use some of her drawing materials, including my first introduction to vellum, which feels smooth as buttah to draw on with a brush. These are some larger scaled drawings, with whatever imagery came out of my hand. It felt good to loosen up and work larger, with bigger brushes and such. I'm trying to make working larger a drawing habit.

Tattooed Ladies

Speedball ink, brush, various nibs on pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

These ladies and their tattoo patterns just flowed right out of my hand, especially the one on top. Leading from Alex's advice on illustration, I've been trying to experiment with different materials, especially in terms of line width--brushes and nib pens have been very useful in this exploration. Soon I'll be posting some bigger experiments I've done with Alex's ink and brush supplies. The top drawing, like I said, just kind of happened...I had no idea she was going to be tattooed until my pen started tattooing her. While the drawings are related, the second one is inspired by a sketch I made several years ago after seeing "Eastern Promises"...not one of my favorite movies, but I was totally drawn into the culture and social hierarchy of tattoos in the Russian mob that was depicted in the movie, and made the sketch that inspired this drawing. She's got minaret-type designs on her cheeks, rainclouds and rain/tears on her forehead (it seemed like everyone had tragedy/issues in their lives in that movie), and long beetle-like, encompassing legs around her jaw--like the inescapable grasp of the mafia after you get involved with them. Anyways, that got a wee bit in depth! Enjoy.

Musings on Fashionable Bison

Ballpoint pen in sketchbook

Oct. 2010

 

Pilot rolling ball pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

Ballpoint pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

It's a long story, but there are some people in my life who shall go unnamed who call me Baby Bison. It's not because of size or hairiness or anything...the nickname came about because I tend to knock things, including people, over so often I am akin to a newborn bison struggling through the world on unsteady legs... While this is a term of endearment I find very endearing, I thought, why not illustrate this bison idea? What would I wear as a bison, myself? Perhaps a nice Elizabethan ruff or corset? Some corsets from a couple hundred years later? Why not. The bison you find in these drawings has evolved from a self-portrait to a character at the very beginning of her story, and I think we'll hopefully hear some more from her in the future...

Victorian Ladies from Harper's Bazaar, 1867-1898

Pilot rolling ball pen in sketchbook

Nov. 2010

Alex Rheault, of Quimby Colony fame, lent me this wonderful book to look through, copy drawings, find inspiration from: Victorian Fashions & Costumes from Harper's Bazaar: 1867-1898. I've been flipping through it kind of obsessively, drooling over the extravagance of bustles and the shapes of the women's corseted bodies, and also trying to figure out my own rendering style through copying the delicate lines of the fashion plates. This exercise has been extraordinarily helpful in my costume design practice, to pinpoint silhouettes and learn more about how the Victorians adorned their bodies. From an illustration standpoint, it  has gotten me to learn how to simplify and think about the rendering of different fabrics.

First Few Quimby Drawings

Ballpoint pen on butcher paper scraps

Sept. 2010

These drawings were done this past September during my residency at the Quimby Colony in Portland. I did them to work through some ideas for performance pieces during my stay at Quimby, and also as an opportunity to explore ballpoint pen a little more. The hair/mouth lady is inspired by Lavinia from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus--her tongue and hands get cut off during the play (perverse Elizabethan penchant for gorey entertainment...), and I thought an interesting illustration of those wounds and the lasting devastation they cause would be having hair grow out of the wounds. While hair is often a symbol of femininity (refer to the Victorian fixation with it), here it also represents time and the continued visceral nature of Lavinia's wounds--hair takes an insanely long time to grow, and here it appears it has been growing from her mouth and stump wounds for years.