Shower

Blatant lies from yesterday about putting up the fishey prints- for some reason all I felt like today was watercolor. Nice, attention consuming, detail oriented, watercolor. Didn't feel like asking anyone around to get naked for me, so I pulled a picture of myself from a recent photoshoot for reference.

I love the aesthetic of detailed, soft shading and hard graphic lines- but I really haven't got the feel for it yet. I struggled with those stupid swirls for way too long.

My page of sketches before I got into my piece. Pencil lines and watercolor for some reason just appeal to me implicitly. It's gotta be the illustrative quality.

Speaking of, Terrible Yellow Eyes has me pumped up on inspiration on a daily basis. Check it out- all gorgeous work based on Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are".

Mer

When I was living in the print studio last term, (I was a little ink-splattered serigraphy monkey for three months in Fall), I noticed all these scraps of heavy weight, expensive paper lying around the studio. They were all left-over from cutting paper down to size, and I always wanted to take advantage of their ubiquity around studios to make really cool art with weird skinny dimensions.

So the other day I took one of my cut-off scraps of butcher paper and tried to make an image that worked with the dimensions. And I really liked working like that, which is convenient, because now I'm never going to run out of nice paper to work on.

This is piece is really reminiscent of the illustrative quality I like to try to put into my work sometimes. And again, I was thinking back to a beautifully illustrated book I had as a kid. When I head east over the summer I'm going to raid my store of children's books and drag them back to the west coast with me.

I know the concept behind this blog is "a piece a day", but I never actually specified a POST a day (loopholes!). I'm still going to shoot for it regardless, but the internet isn't going to come crashing down if it doesn't happen. THAT said, I'm spending this weekend doing Cirk du Fantastik shows at Folklife, so there probably won't be any updates till Monday.

(Cirk du Fantastik will be performing at the very exclusive, VIP "sidewalk 30 feet outside the venue" stage all weekend if anyone cares to look for us. We will be the loud ones wearing silly clothes and asking for your money.)

Have good weekend adventures y'all!

Sleep

So when I said I was putting up a piece a day no matter how badly they turned out....this proves I meant it.

Creating work while physically compromised (exhausted, drunk, ect) can turn out brilliantly. More often than not, for me, it really doesn't.

I was trying to evoke exhaustion and unconsciously referencing a children's book with illustrations I loved when I was a kid about this princess that was only awake at night. She slept in this big, flowy hammock that looked so ungodly comfortable I used to dream about it.

I should've gone in and worked this one more, but I feel like it's too far gone. C'est la vie. There's always more art tomorrow.