Whiskers

Cats have obscenely long whiskers. Have you ever noticed? They overhang their petite faces like structurally unsound, delicately balanced see-saws.

One of the cats I live with was recently hovering over me, drooling, (as she's wont to do), and I got taken by the absurdity of these insanely thin long THINGS that sprout from her face. So I shoved her off me and picked up my charcoal.

I want to keep this piece simple, but still work into it somehow. I'm thinking about picking a single color, probably in watercolor, and working it in in shades. Or I might just define the lines in ink- not entirely sure yet.

EDIT: Oh hey, I just realized it's Caturday. Unintentionally appropriate art is!

Fawn, bound- finished

I ended up working into this more with colored pencil than marker- I still don't really trust myself to pull out soft shading with prismacolors, though my small collection of greys are subtle enough that I trust them a bit more. I've been slowly training myself to work up to dark colors slowly and lay in the quiet shading first.

Cleaned it up a bit in Gimp and put in that cloudy effect around the top of the image. Not exactly the glossy effect I'd really like to achieve someday, but at least I got some practice in.

Art production and focus has a direct correlation to my mental state, which has been set to "off" and "down" lately, for a variety of reasons. Paper and markers continue to be cheaper than therapy.

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!

Self-Surgery

Got whacked with the desire to work into a new piece tonight and since I'm in dire need of self-care, it started along the path of being somewhat therapeutic and introspective.

I've had the idea of a figure with a heart cut out in my head for awhile. When I still had a studio space, I had the idea for a full sized human cut-out from butcher paper tacked to the wall with a 3D heart-shaped box of some sort in the appropriate place that I could place things in. I can't make boxes, heart shaped or otherwise, so it never came about, but the idea stuck in my head.

I played around with the human form as a physical space for inscription and incision awhile ago in this post, "Parts of Me Were Broken Long Before My Heart Came Into." I'm worried I'll run into the same roadblock with this one as I did with that one, shading large expanses of the human form that isn't the face or hands. I never actually finished that piece.

Some initial sketches and thumbnails for the idea. I'm trying to find my balance between exaggerated and realistic here and it's a struggle.

Second layer, chalk pastel

I finally took a moment tonight to work chalk pastel into this. After a good week not allowing myself to steal the time to get into it, I finally gave it half an hour and brought some depth out. Still on the first, roughed out layer of shading.

Beginning

More to come. Lots of thoughts and images to get out of my head right now, but I thought it would be good to document the very first and absolute roughest layer of this as I lay it down.

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!

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.

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.

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".