I’ve been meaning to get back into drawing more regularly for some time now. In my high school years I used to love it and spent a lot of time doodling and sketching in my workbooks. When I went to uni, the workload built up and I lost interest in drawing to instead focus on my work. Since I finished my studies, I’ve wanted to get back to the skill level I was at before I started.
My boyfriend gave me a huge tablet for Christmas and I’ve been feeling guilty of not using it much except for cleaning files and general experimenting and I’ve felt pretty bad about it 🙁
Time for another favourite artist of mine! Today I’m featuring the wonderful LA talent Kevin Art, whom I believe I discovered via the Grain Edit.
I love his work because it’s that classic 60s illustration style. His Yuki 7 images are especially awesome to me because they have that whole female spy thing going on and as a fan of James Bond, it’s right up my alley. I also really love the background paintings he’s done – they remind me of the lovely scenes you see in series like Samurai Jack or Pixer/Disney concepts (he’s actually worked for Disney!).
Over the weekend I decided that I should showcase artists/designers that act as the inspiration for my own personal artwork (I need to start drawing more again!). I have a few in mind I’d like to feature over the next couple of weeks and then whenever I find one after that.
Sylvia Ji is an LA artist that I discovered last year while perusing the Semi-Permanent speakers of the 2010 Melbourne Conference. I was instantly awestruck by her work and soon found myself trawling through all of the galleries on her website. Her style is very distinctive and different to what I’ve seen before which I believe is why it sticks with me and why she was the first artist that came to mind for this post.
From her bio, her artwork is described as “a passionate appreciation of simple aesthetic pleasure fused with intimately complex subject matter”. My favourite paintings are those with the Day of the Dead make-up as well as those with old 1700s European fashion influences. There’s such wonderfully fine details and bold colours to sit and stare at, even in her earlier works, and the subjects all have this exotic beauty with their cultural clothing and face paint/markings. I love how she gives life to these girl’s hair even though they’re painted quite flat on the canvas. It makes me wonder if the effect would be lost had she decided to detail it as much as she does the rest of the body. It’s interesting to note that when I look at these pictures, I find the subject’s have both a strong and intimidating presence along with appearing somewhat vulnerable. I would love to see these works in some animated feature in the same style.
Another month has gone by which means it’s time for a round-up of my inspiring images. It feels like I posted some of these on my Tumblr blog ages ago even though April seemed to fly right past me.
So lets have a look at what themes/trends I can find 🙂
I’ve really wanted to see the exhibition “Lumia: art | light | motion” at the State Library of Queensland since I saw it advertised at a bus stop and because we had another long weekend it was the perfect opportunity to go check it out. The reason that I was so keen about seeing it was that one of the creators, Gavin Sade, was my lecturer for my main course units during university. I had seen lots of his conceptual sketches as well as videos of the final pieces and now I had the chance to actually go and interact with these projects and test them out for myself.
So this is the second post of my long weekend Melbourne trip, you can read the first part here. It seemed appropriate to start with a picture of Federation Square that’s across the road from Flinders Street Station (first picture in my last blog). Unlike my last post that was a old historical and architectural buildings bonanza, I think this one is more about modern Melbourne – the new developments and the current events going on in the city.
Whenever I get the chance and there’s enough time, I always try to make cards for people’s birthdays. For me, making one is a little more personal than a standard Hallmark card and it also gives me an excuse to practice drawing. On Sunday it was my Nan’s birthday and I wanted to make a card that tested my skills a bit more.
Does anyone else like using the mass-editor part of Tumblr? I find I love using it to review what pictures I’ve posted over the months and I wish I could collect more data from it, like the number of items you gave a particular tag. Part of my reason for starting my tumblr blog was to use it as a place to store inspirational/beautiful images instead of clogging up my pictures folder (which I need to go through and post some things from!).
For the last couple of months though, I’ve found myself more interested analysing what I’ve been posting and finding particular themes, colours and styles that I’ve been tagging. I’ve definitely been noticing that my posts have certain trends in them, for example I find that for some months I’m more likely to post pictures with particular colours one month than I am the next. So I thought I’d start analysing month by month, seeing what are the main traits of my month’s posts.
