shartist

This one is interesting in a way I shall explain after you look at it. 




Pencil, 2010

We were talking about Escher in class and Mr C pulled up the picture of the pair of hands sketching themselves into existence. We talked about self-referring a bit and suddenly I realised hey, I do that a lot. Not in a deliberate, polished way, like in Escher's work, but it just seems the most natural thing to do when I'm sketching my surroundings. I think when I was watching The Village in 2008 or something I paused the telly to sketch a scene and ended up drawing my sketchbook in my lap along with the entire living room. Of course it looked a lot noobier than this. Anyway it's a funny thing that happened and now I know what I'm doing is self-referring. I used to just call it meta, you can see where i doodled "meta woo" on the sketchpad within a sketchpad. Yezz. This is my bedroom at home, note the piles of shit on my desk. I'm lying on my bed. What's pictured here is basically three-fourths of my room, it's a pretty small space but I like it. 

On the artwork itself, I think I was just trying to get the forms, proportions, perspectives right. I think I succeeded in that, but find myself wishing I'd taken a little more care with detail and such. Not the strokes and quality of shading, I kind of like the sketchiness of that, but I mean the coarse, rubbish lines that don't really add anything, like around the laptop and my lap. I guess i didn't have the patience. It was a good exercise, though. Reassured myself I could draw things from life. Sometimes when I get stuck in a rut doodling I go back to drawing from life, it's like taking a nap. Art therapy. Probably also part of the reason I didn't bother to fine tune it. 

 Coursework Paintings! The Ugly, And Why They Are Ugly, And Then Some Paintings That Are Okay

Starting with this:



This is a muddle of uncoordinated colour! I think it would make interesting background image if it were cropped, but as a painting on its own there is no focus. It looks like my box of paints threw up on it. Random in a way that reminds me of Jackson Pollock, whose work I think is fun to make but awful, jesus, don't get me started. 

There are some interesting techniques I figured out how to use here, though. There's spraying paint in a muddle then swiping at it with your hands till it's all melty and you can see the white of the paper beneath. I think I used steel wool on the part where it's all scratched up, middle slightly left of centre, and there's newspaper stuck to it in places where I tried to smudge it up with that. At the top, printy textures I made by spraying corrugated presentation board with random colours mostly blue and tapping it onto the paper while it was still wet. So, a bad painting, but a learning experience!

Now let's look at this:



Spray paint, 2010

More experimentation here. I sprayed yellow over orange over red in various permutations, let it set a little, then stood it upright and allowed the colours to slip and bleed around a bit. Then I think I put a spray can over it and covered up the rest of the orangeyellowred with blue. I think I should have used a darker blue, the contrast here is kind of nauseating rather than being interesting. Also maybe I shouldn't have stood it again after putting on the blue? But it looks kind of flarey and cool, like a fire, or a flower. There are some places in the blue where the background colour bleeds in, I think that's pretty cool and it adds depth. A lot of this is also just trying out how certain colours look next to each other. I'm terrible at colour, this post is probably going to be the only colourful one. Bottom right, a light white spray makes things look kind of Star Wars and epic. It's not exactly light here, but I used it to I think good effect in these next paintings:





Spray paint, 2010

Layering is great! Layering is a thing you can do really easily and get great results with just a little foresight. And loads of experimentation. Both these paintings were made in similar ways. The orange one is probably something like red right at the bottom, black covering maybe two thirds of the top, orange over black, more red, gold, and then a crumpled sheet of newspaper spread over the wet lower half and peeled back. White spray for the rest of the black. I really like the colours and textures meshing here but I think I took too long reaching for the newspaper, because the peeling didn't come off half as interestingly as in the blue painting! The process is more or less the same: blue, black, silver, white, maybe green? Gold. I kind of like the yellow and black smears although they look kind of accidental, I haven't decided if that makes it more interesting or if I should try and make it look more deliberate and controlled. Maybe spray the crumpled newspaper, then lay it on simultaneously, as both are wet. These two were painted on the reverse of each other, I can't remember if I did it deliberately but interesting symmetry there.

Here're another page that looks like a car liquified on top of it.



Spray paint, acrylic, 2010

I think I was trying to see how effective/interesting allowing the paint to drip would be. Not very, as is evident. I guess the bubbling is pretty cool in some places but rotating it was a bad idea, it looks like a crudely constructed comb with a yellow pokemon sat atop. Or something. Anyway it was a fun experiment and I may apply drippiness in future paintings! Also there's some dried acrylic up there I tried to lump on then got bored with it. Maybe I should have used more of it. 

Part of what I love about spray painting is how it's so deliberate and well thought out, yet appears so haphazard and surreal. The fuzzy, smooth blending adds an artificial real-ness that's contradicted by the bright colours and abstraction. And the pace suits my short attention span - spray paint is a definite medium in which less is often more. So much depends on timing and planning, and yet it's so spontaneous and I get to try out any crazy ideas that come to mind without wasting too much time. And if you've ever seen street spray paint artists, watching them paint is almost like a performance. They know exactly what they're doing and what effect it's going to give them. In some sense maybe that makes spray painting formulaic? But maybe because of my newness to the medium I'm still all bright eyed. 

Okay I decided the next part on paintings will be about failed pages and why they didn't make it! Wait for it!

 We did a printmaking assignment in 2009. Though I haven't been able to locate any of my prints or my original lino block, the prep is pretty interesting. 



Pencil, 2009

These are the preliminary sketches. I am uncomfortable with making self portraits. May I remind my audience that these pictures are a year old. I should stop smoothing over imperfections. The bottom right picture is just... who is that person. No seriously, who? I want to know, because she's pretty and I want to date her. 



Pencil, Marker, 2009

This is more or less what the final piece looked like. I did the pencil drawing first, then the marker sketch. I think I tried doing the shading by outlining the blacks, like I would if doing a vector drawing, then layering circles to fill in the lights and darks. It looks kind of chiselled and defined which I think is nice, shall try that more.  The initial outlining is also like a primitive version of what I was doing here. I think I used the strengths of the lino medium to good effect in my sketch, blocking out wide areas of colour. I don't know if the real thing was quite so nice.  I focused mainly on the face, but the weird zigzag lines and the hair are meant to be partially filled with black, I think. It's kind of an early example of me experimenting with text, too. 

Speaking of self-portraits, here's something I did in 2008 when I was an emo fourteen year old.


Pen, 2008

It doesn't look anything like me. And I dunno if I used the word singular right. I meant weird. But it's really just banal. 

But linking back to the post mentioned above, it's an early manifestation of my outlining contours thing.

And that's all I got.

Here are some people you may know who are in 414. Hover over the pictures to see their names in the alt texts!



Pencil, July 2010

Okay you won't know this one because I didn't draw her head. To be fair she kept shifting, then she decided to go home.



Pencil, July 2010



Pencil, September 2010

Did you read the text? Yeah, I don't think it looks like her either.

And this is my dear friend Esther's campaign poster for when she becomes President Of The World:



Pencil, June 2010

I drew this on a bus in the UK, somewhere between Oxford and Cambridge I think. It's really half-baked because I got demoralised while drawing and started bemoaning my sad rendering skills, then I decided to make a joke of it and this was born.

I think the best likeness is the first. Somehow she's just draw-able, I have done other sketches that look better than my attempts at other people. I wonder if she'll ever read this.

I should put more effort into making my work look more finished. Pencil looks really weak when scanned but in real life it looks okay. Or is it just my imagination? Lots of the subtleties of shading are lost in translation. Maybe I should look into other mediums. 

I think human figures and weird creatures are just about all I ever draw. I really like observational drawing, but buildings and landscapes(unless they are foresty and busy and full of interesting plants and forms and textures) and still lifes really bore me. Animals, humans, sometimes plants are organic and real and interesting. 



Pencil, July 2009



Pencil, August 2010

That said, landscapes and buildings can be interesting too. It's just that a lot of the time they are not, and I don't really have the time to sit and draw them(I wish I did, I'm planning a drawing expedition after the exams on the marking days). And they're more difficult to make up from memory, because I think I examine and observe them less than I do humans. This probably also has something to do with why I draw girls so much, but there's a post waiting in TextEdit about that already, so I'll save it for two minutes later. Right now I'm just copying and pasting, ha.

 FRIENDS! IT HAS HAPPENED. I PRESENT TO YOU: THE GREATEST THING I HAVE EVER DRAWN.





You know how it goes. You're doodling and suddenly the thing you scratched out in five minutes is better than the drawing you spent five hours on. Not that I have the attention span for five hours. But isn't this great. BFFS 4EVA