Inspiration

Pencil sketch from last night, musing about the nature of feeling inspired. Sometimes I feel like my hair could stand on end when I have so many ideas coursing through my head.

Fawn, bound

Something I scribbled in pencil in my sketchbook last night. Very rough idea that I didn't think out enough in advance, so there's a lot of messy erasing and drawing-over-drawing in it. I want to go back over it in Prismacolors and lend some greys, greens and dark leather colors to it.

The figure is surrounded by roughed in thorns on vines. I wanted to juxtapose a calm and content creature with symbols of restraint and sharpness, in an attempt to lend some visuals to the sense of centeredness one can feel when at the focus of bound and painful physical attention.

I'm going to try to push myself to work into this in traditional media, then take it into Gimp and try to clean it up into a glossier digital form. I could use the practice, and I think I like this image enough to continue playing with it.

Blog aside: I tweaked the margin weights for this page, so some of the images that I think were getting cut off should be here in full now. I like stretching out into the margins of the page more, too- it feels more comfortable!

The Dangers of Sappiness

This is a hastily drawn joke between me and a certain person, who finds it impossible to avoid getting sappy on me, which led to me imaging what would happen if he did, actually, get sap on me. (There would be blushing and a huge amount of apologizing, no doubt.)

Sketches from blues dancing

I'm in Portland! As you may have noticed, my art output tends to decline sharply when I've got an exploded tour all over my hands and am trying to make my way cross country. But now I'm safely landed, in Gaylord's Paradise (not a slang term for Portland, in fact, but the name of my house) and I have the opportunity to Make Things again. This is exciting.

Tonight, I went to support one of my oldest friends (who I seem to inescapably keep ending up in the same cities with) at a blue dance competition she was participating in. The environment itself made me hugely uncomfortable- it was like walking into a room where heterosexuality was so thoroughly coded into the action I felt suffocated and overwhelmed by straight people being capital S Straight. The close quarters didn't help much either, of course. I mostly focused on the queer couples and scribbled in my sketchbook until my friend was done dancing.

Text reads: "Planet Queer (is very far away from planet blues dance)". My usual coping mechanism for uncomfortable spaces continues to serve me!

Trapeze

Another one from the sketchbook I kept in Sao Paulo. I went through a pretty difficult time for awhile in Brasil, and as usual, my aerial work helped keep me grounded (....heh) and sane. Sometimes, when I'm in particularly dark places, I feel like my trapeze is all that I'm clinging to to keep myself together.

In pleasanter aerial news, I have a performance in Manhattan this Saturday! It's this event at Santos Party House. I'm excited and nervous-I haven't had nearly enough time to prepare for it because I don't have a studio to rig in back East and I've been relying on the kindness of my friends at the Baltimore Free Farm who let me practice in their warehouse. Send me all the luck on Saturday night, and if you're in the New York area, come out and see me!

Tank Genderqueer

Okay.

Updating daily while in the midst of bringing a show into existence and splitting my time between four cities may have been....ambitious.

But! Here's a sketch I did in Sao Paulo, while watching Tank Girl. It's a gender ambiguous tank creature, who enjoys wearing hot pink tops and whacking things with it's equally ambiguous weapon thing.

It uses it pronouns and enjoys all things neon.

PS. Hundred and first post!

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 3

This is the last of the Wandering Dream Circus sketches I did during my trip back to the US- if it hasn't been abundantly obvious by now, I get suffused with creativity when I find myself in any sort of limbo with lots of time on my hands. I'm less enamored of this one, though I like the positions and posing that came out of my initial thumbnail sketch.

Drawing these has made me very sad that I don't actually have a giant moon to do aerials on (or trapeze boots that go to my thigh, or hair that actually looks like that). Being as the hair and boots are unlikely to come into my life outside of drawing, I'd settle for a Moon's Eye for all my future airborne play.

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 2

A second piece I knocked out during layovers when I was traveling back from Brasil. I'm not sure what direction it wants to go in- I like the sketchy pencil quality it has right now, with the line work. I'm always hesitant to add detail to work that appeals to me in it's unfinished state- I'm convinced (due to experience) that I'm going to pick the wrong direction to take it in and mess it up when it's still brimming with potential.

Ideas, internet?

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 1

OH MY GOD IT'S HUGE.

(I finally figured out how to make images larger in blogger.)

Now that I'm home from Brasil, work is going full speed ahead on the Next Big Thing- the Wandering Dream Circus, a project that my performance bestie Nathen and I are putting together for a tour in June. This is some of the concept art I knocked out between flights yesterday, and it's one of three pieces that I'll put up here as I scrub the extraneous pencil marks off them in Gimp.

That would be me with the hedgehog hair sitting on the moon, by the way.

The website and facebook page for us Wandering Dreamers should be up by next week, but here's a taste of who we are and what we do:

"The Wandering Dream Circus is a fantastical exploration of a world beyond our own, steeped in darkness and whimsy, brought to a boil under a bruised and roiling sky, and served hot with a sliver of moon and a wink. Using acrobatics, juggling, fire and aerial arts to tell the story of two night travelers who find themselves lost in a strange world of darkness and dreams, the Wandering Dream Circus will conjure up stars in your eyes, spark wonder in your hearts, and plant deceptively simple questions to blossom in your mind."

The current tour, which is subject to change, takes us through Phillidelphia PA, Baltimore MD, DC, Carrboro NC, Chattanooga, TN, Tucson AZ, Monteray CA, San Francisco CA, Ashland OR and Portland OR.

What's that you say? You want fantastical circus artists to come to your town, conveniently located roughly along our current route? CONTACT US. My email is hungrily awaiting more Southern venues that we can cast out spell of childlike wonderment over. Feed it with ideas here: mishkotek@gmail.com.

New art toys!

My shading is getting better, thanks to the FIVE BRAND NEW GREY MARKERS I laid hands on at Art Things in Maryland yesterday. Funny story- this art store has known me since I was two years old and living in England, because my aunt did a goku birthday card for me that was up as a how-to in the shop for yeeeears. I've been making pilgrimages to there ever since, but I don't think they've seen me since age 16, so the owner got a bit of a shock when I walked in yesterday.

Other stuff from the sketchitybook includes a rough for a graphic short I've been tossing around in my mind for ages. I tend to get it in my head whenever I find myself romantically entangled that I should start illustrating my relationships-I used art to process everything else, why not that? It'd be damn good reading, if nothing else.

This particular one was a reflection on falling into love for brief periods at a time- weekends, weeks- as tends to happen when you travel (or when I travel, at least). For the first time recently I fell with a lot of awareness as I was falling, like Alice floating down the rabbithole and examining the objects on the walls as she descended.


Enough for today- more on all that tomorrow as the ideas germinate.