More envelope art

I haven't posted here in a while... taking photos has instant gratification I guess. Now if only I could photograph all the things I imagine in my mind but don't have the skill to create, I'd be happy :)

This was the envelope for a birthday card that I just had to draw on (I couldn't help myself). I drew the "accessories" in the same theme as the card itself. I forgot to photograph the card though... silly me. It said something like "When I grow up I want lots of puppies and ponies", so of sourse I had to make the card a bit more "edgy" seeing as the recipient was celebrating her 15th birthday and the card wasn't age appropriate whatsoever.

Typical chrome and black dub style with paint markers. I don't like the "G" however, but no biggy, I'm not a real writer anyway.

Illustrated envelope fun time

So, when the theme is a glamorous Pre-Oscars party, and you have a birthday card with an unbelieveably boring envelope and a box of felt tip pens, you obviously customise the envelope. Obviously!

(felt pen on... an envelope!)

From cruddy ball-point sketch, to pencil outline, to fill in.

I should have stopped there, but the back was as dull as the front was before I got my grubby mitts on it, so I did a little Googlin' and found some images of the official Oscar envelope design, for a little inspiration.

The back of the official envelope...

...and my humble little homage/rip :D

Any excuse to customise something :)

Destroy

(Update, 6th August, 2011: Also submitted to Illustration Friday for the topic 'imperfect')

Kinga's and my personal illustration project is a little overdue, but I'm done. This time it's my topic of choice. I decided to break the pattern of monosyllabic words thus far and chose 'destroy':

(acrylic and pen, A3)

This was a weird one. It started off with a photo of a swan that I'd taken a while back. I thought to myself "it looks too clean...".

I started off in a painterly style, and the water leant itself quite well to it. Part way through I was watching a TV documentary about Impressionist painters, notably Monet and Renoir. I was inspired by it and made the water even more brushy-looking than my usual style normally dictates. The swan didn't really lend itself too much to a painterly style however. I wanted the appearance of fine details so I drew them in with white Posca pen. This gave the swan's body the suggestion of feathers, rather than looking like a milky, washed-out blob. It also made the swan pop out from the watery background, which was a nice after-effect.

After the first pass it looked like this:

I could have just finished here and called this something like Swan #1, but seeing as the topic was destroy and this had no kind of destructive quality about it, I had to go on.

The next step was to sketch a rough piece to overlay. I had a few choices for what word to use. I could have just went with destroy but that was way too obvious (and too long). I could have gone the corny route and used something like style or urban, but those feel like buzzwords used by the media when they portray or describe graffiti. Instead I went the more 'intelligent' route (sure...) and went with mute.

Why 'mute'? Because the swan I painted is commonly known as a mute swan. Makes sense now, doesn't it? I used the typical "dub" style of chrome in black. It's simplicity is in contrast to the complexity and roughness of the painting. Opposites are good.

Silver pen. Shiny.

Nothing like the juxtaposition of a majestic swan with a line of graffiti on it's side.

rush

If you saw my previous post then you might recognise this. Part something in Kinga's and my personal illustration project. Lady's choice this time, her topic was rush:

(acrylic paint on canvas, 60cm x 51cm/24" x 20")

I mentioned way, way back in one of my old posts that I had a blank canvas and an idea for a painting. Well, that never surfaced and I moved the blank canvas up onto a shelf. When I was given the topic rush back in March (1st March to be precise, I still have the text message... Wow! That was a long time ago) my initial ideas were to do with being in a rush, velocity/speed/moving too fast etc.

(detail)

A few days after the topic was announced I was sitting at my computer when all of a sudden a memory popped into my head. Nothing weird about that, you might think. People think about random stuff all the time. The problem this time was that it was a memory that felt very real but at the same time didn't make any sense. It felt incomplete and I tried as hard as I could to figure out what it was about and what the missing parts of the memory were. Do you know that feeling you get when you have a word on the tip of your tongue but you just can't seem to say it? As if it's there but it isn't? That's how I felt except it was a memory. For a good 10 minutes I sat there baffled, trying really hard to make sense of it, as well as figure out if what I was thinking was real or if my imagination had pieced together a bunch of different memories together and made something up. It's really difficult to describe in words the actual thing that I was trying to think of, and reading this back looks like the ramblings of a madman, but at the time I was really confused, definitely freaked out and actually a little upset. The next day I didn't care any more and the details of the memory were hazy. Strange...

(more detail)

After that weird episode my idea changed from being in a rush, to the feeling of a rush. A head rush, if you like. It also (for a different reason) made me finally paint on the canvas. My first revised idea was a person screaming with their head split in half and a whole mess of crap spewing forth (my memory) but that felt like it was going to be too complicated to do. I eventually refined that idea into what you see now. There's still a whole mess of crap but it's a much more organised mess.

First, I sketched my idea on tracing paper with brush pens. They were nice to draw with and I liked the blocky colour and sweeping qualities I was able to achieve with them on the smooth paper, particularly with the black outlines. It was like painting with a slippery paintbrush onto Teflon. Shame the paper was yellow though.

It wasn't possible to translate the brushstroke effect with paintbrushes. Yes, that seems like a contradiction, but it was because I was using acrylic paint which, if you've ever used in it's basic form, absolutely LOVES to dry out after a few minutes and fluid strokes turn into smears after a couple of passes. I tried thinning it with water but that made it too runny and transparent and I wasn't going to buy a retarding agent just for this. I ended up using a black UNI Posca pen instead. This made the black outlines less brushy and more graphic. Not what I intended to do but a nice (and probably better) compromise. The rest of the chaotic details (arrows, stars and other assorted bits and doo-dads) were drawn with black and white Posca pens. Posca pens are my new favourite thing. The name is also fun to say. Posca Posca Posca...

(from tracing paper to canvas)

I was going to paint the background black and flick in some white paint to make a white-to-black gradient, but that seemed like too much hard work. I then painted over the black with green and dark blue to introduce some colour but it was so transparent that it looked I just painted on black all over again. I ended up mixing the blue with white and that killed the transparency. Having a colour background meant that I could outline the figure in black, instead of outlining in black then highlighting it in white.

This took about 2 weeks from start to finish, on and off. Mostly off. It probably would have taken about a week if I didn't dilly-dally and keep screwing up. The most time-consuming part was obviously the details, but it's the details that makes this interesting, so I didn't want to rush (ba-dum ching!) them. Painting over failed colour choices also didn't help. Good thing I didn't do this in oil paint, I might still only be half-way through.

I'm not really happy with the eye, so I might work on that some more, but I guess the emphasis is supposed to be on the crazy hair and the patterns rather than the face. Also the face looks better in my first sketch, but the hair looks better in the painting, grr. I haven't signed it yet (hence all the watermarks), I don't know whether I want to sign it with my normal arty "squiggle" or tag it. I'm leaning towards a tag as the style of this is graffiti-based, but I don't know which tag to use. I might just sign the back of the frame. Decisions, decisions.

I have since tried to remember what the subject was that was lost in my memory, but it's just a vague recollection. All the details are gone and the urgency and confusion I initially felt is no longer there.

On a lighter note, after I painted the hair I suddenly had a craving for rhubarb and custard sweets.

Yum.

I didn't give in.

Enough with the wall of text. Enjoy rush.

(Click here for Kinga's take on the topic)

I am not a vandal (Happy birthday, Morgan)

I made this as a birthday present, not because I was raging against the system:

(spray paint on... a wall, derp)

The closest I'd ever gotten to writin' my name in graffiti on the wall was when I was a teen and did a few simple tags here and there, but that really isn't in the spirit of graffiti, or writing (if you're a graffiti snob). Plus that spirit involves hitting spots at crazy hours of the morning, hiding from the law and racking your paint, none of which I really fancied doing. I'm still a huge fan of graffiti and it's place in hip-hop culture, so for the most part my graff has been kept on paper, until yesterday.

My cousin and his partner pretty much asked me to draw a little something on their daughter's wall for her birthday, with the words "lil' star" incorporated into it. I normally do the usual greeting card but with an unusual design on the envelope (a la keeping it on paper). My cousin suggested that this would be an extension of that tradition but on a bigger - and vertical - surface. I'm pretty sure he wasn't thinking the whole wall but I already was.

from the paper to the wall

I ended up having to stack the words on top of each other as it would have been too long to fit on one line. The funny thing is that they will be rehoused in a few months as the council are supposed to be demolishing their building to make way for a new development, which means that this will also fall into a big pile of rubble. Kind of sad to do something like this only for it to disappear down the road. But I guess that's one of the things about graffiti, that it's never supposed to be permanent, even if this was legal and not going to be buffed out by anti-vandalism cleaners :)

I like that the time-and-tested combo of chrome and black really stands out. I did have a few problems with it though:

• I have NEVER drawn anything as big as this before, in any medium... ever, so I got a bit excited with the size of it. It's a little too big.
• The paint kept dripping. This was most likely due to the wallpaper not wanting to take the paint properly. Wallpaper isn't a very good surface to spray on unless it's matt and super absorbant, which this wasn't.
• My white spray can kept sticking and clogging. How annoying is a can that splatters instead of sprays? It also made adding the highlights harder, and made my fingers hurt from pressing down so hard.
• I got tired at the end and my fingers were starting to cramp, so the final simple details kind of went a bit wonky.

Fortunately the pictures hide most of the drips and smudges. It probably is best admired from afar. Maybe if I had more than a couple of hours, a better surface and much more practice it would have been cleaner and crisper. But for a first attempt at anything more than a tag in about 15 years I'm pleased with how it turned out.