Emergency Lemon

There's a story behind this one that I'm sure is only amusing to me and the person on the other end of an IM conversation. It involved Trader Joe's, lamb kabob, and a very dry serving of tabbouleh (or tabouli, or tabouleh, or however you want to spell it). Thus, the Emergency Lemon was born.

Personally, I drew the box with the lemon and smiled. I added the reamer and laughed out loud.

Ironically, we had just gone over perspective in my drawing class when I drew this. I even had a debate with the instructor over one-point perspective and the fact that, unless you are looking dead straight on at the subject, there's technically no such thing as one-point perspective and that it's just a convenient shortcut because the actual perspective is hardly discernible in that case. So yes, I'm well aware that the front plane of this box is utterly wrong. And yes, it does bug me.

A series is born

Ever since I finished my first mixed-media piece I've been contemplating trying my hand at it again.

That first one came from nothing more than a desire to have something colorful and graphic on the wall. If I were to try again, I wanted it to come from a place of a little more meaning and be a little more thought out. I had doubts that I'd be able to come up with a vision and execute it.

I'm pretty pleased with the results. It's not precisely what I set out to accomplish, however the final result came about very organically and satisfied my overall intent. I won't go into great detail about the inspiration, other than to point out that my vast fan base of regular readers might recognize the base image and I'll mention that I've titled it "Windy City". It's not meant to be particularly literal, but for me it all has a connection.

I'm encouraged. I may continue to delve into this format.

Lost

Third in my college doodle series. Yes, it has a solution. No, I don't have it solved anywhere. Yes, it took me forever.

Poolside Inspiration

3 days in Palm Springs does wonders. Drew this in October on what's become an annual getaway over Columbus Day weekend. Three days of a tight-knit group of friends, secluded in a rented house (for used to be a small hotel, but that's no longer available. Sad story...) with nothing to do but eat, drink, swim, and create. Heaven.

Can't say that this represents any particular piece of the backyard's landscape, but it's got elements of the foliage back there.

Into the archives

Sometimes I forget that I have a whole stash of drawings to, well, draw from.

Dating from ca. 1997/1998, this followed the completion of the doodle seen in this post. In creating this, I made a conscious effort to create negative space, though I did my best to NOT consciously direct the overall composition of the whole. It was an exercise in tedium and took me months' worth of lecture hours to get this far. I developed a sense of wanting to balance the size of the individual boxes as well as the size and spacing of the negative space. Like I said, I was trying not to direct the end product, but I definitely would decide things like, "I've done too many small open areas, time to leave a big one," or, "That last set of boxes was too regular, I should start adding a bunch of weird shaped ones."

I think I had the goal of filling the whole page. And I don't think I chose to stop where I stopped, I think I just ran out of school year and never picked it up again.

The full size image is pretty large, any smaller and the detail started to go away.

Over done

I loved this at first, I'm less in love with it now that I'm revisiting it.

Pleased with the Untitled legs piece earlier, I've been considering doing a series of similar mixed-media pieces, exploring digital image manipulation combined with hand drawing. That first one started as a photo, became an abstract digital canvas, and was finished with a digitally altered scan of hand drawn sketches. Each piece had its own reason and purpose and came together to a nice whole.

The process here was entirely backwards and I think the results speak to that. This time I started with the hand drawn sketch, with which I am very pleased. I should have just left it at that, and when I get a chance I'll likely revisit it as a standalone image.

I like the digital additions in theory, but I realze now that I was too conscious of the overall end result, so rather than creating a piece of background that had its own artistic reason, I was trying to fit it into a false constraint of "a piece" and ended up with something...canned. I look at it and see graphic filters, not a complete image. Meh.

Fun Guy

I don't know if it's simply the increased amount of drawing I've been doing, the confidence that posting it publicly has given me, or the results of the artist's program I alluded to in a previous post, but it's getting harder to stay true the the name of this blog. I keep ending up with drawings I actually like, which is a whole new experience for me. So if you're here for the self-deprecation, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint as it's being replaced by self-confidence at an alarming rate.

But enough of that, on to the latest entry. I'll be bold and say that this one's a triumph. Six years. That's how long I've been trying to get this one down on paper. After six years it is, of course, radically different than I first pictured it. But after countless doodles and aborted attempts at making something of it, it's exactly what it needs to be.

And for the first time it's something that carries some personal meaning beyond being aesthetically pleasing to me. I probably shouldn't be too specific about what that meaning is, thought the post title does give a clue as to what spurred the original vision. Yeah, "vision", I'll stick with that word. Definitely something I saw in my mind's eye that's stuck with me. The final product is more interpretive of that vision than representational, but it gets the point across.

Color was vitally important. I spent a lot of time pinning down exactly which to use and how. And I couldn't be happier with the results. Finally having this down on paper, concrete is a big relief to me.

Triumphant Return

So, returning to blogging and posting this may be a mistake, setting myself up for a fall. I'd like to make myself use this blog regularly as a place to work on my process for exploring my still-novel-to-me need for creative outlet. Rather, use it to FIND a process as I currently have none. And posting what is a finished piece, and in my eyes a high watermark, certainly stands a chance of setting my own expectations too high. I can't let myself only post "good" stuff, "finished" stuff, "pointful" stuff if this is going to do anything for me.

That said, this is a project that I started many months ago and let sit unfinished with no idea what "finished" might look like for a long time. Meanwhile I've recently started working with some friends to focus on this creative urge, with the help of a sort of self-help book for artists. The book and the author are as nutty as my skeptical side imagined they might be going in, but I'm doing my best to look past the surface issues I have with the author's views on the world and the mind and trust that there is value to the exercises she lays out, relying more on sounding off the group of friends for analysis and status checks rather than what the author writes.

Making it much easier to do so is the fact that it's paid almost instant dividends. Case in point, the untitled image I've posted. A combination of photography, hand sketch, and digital manipulation, it started with a need for art on our walls. Wandering the likes of Z Gallery or Urban Outfitters, I found myself drawn to canvas prints of colorful, graphic images. In a surprising bit of inspiration, I actually felt like I could create something myself that I would dig. I did some research and found that it's pretty darn affordable to get a giclee print on canvas of anything you like. So I went for it.

I'll spare anyone reading this the details of how I made it, how it sat for months and how the finishing touches suddenly became very easy. The most interesting process note is that 8 months ago when I walked away from it, I considered it nearly done, just in need of finding the right tweaks to "really" complete it, but nothing I tried really satisfied me. When I went back to it, I went straight for a major shift, and the end result fell into place almost immediately. Both frustrating and encouraging. Frustrating to realize the inevitability of getting stuck in those "forest for the trees" situations, encouraging that the reason I could never get the small tweaks to satisfy me was because I was likely aware on some level that it wouldn't be complete without a much larger change.

The piece itself has little meaning. It's a graphic piece, done purely for my aesthetic enjoyment. I think it's going to look good on canvas on our wall. Now all I have to do is make a decision about the many giclee printing options...