Zodiac Series- Works in Progress
While working on my paintings for the Zodiac series, I made two timelapse videos of my painting process. I set my camera to take a photograph every 5 seconds and condensed each of these 10 hours of paintings into a few minutes.
Here are some additional stills from the creative process for my Zodiac series.
Marker sketches for Virgo
Pencil drawings for Aquarius and Sagittarius
Final pencils for Leo
Drawing for Pisces, printed onto cotton fabric and cut out
Background splatters with a Taurus ready to be adhered
Virgo ironed on to her splatter background, ready for paint
A few stills from the time-lapse video of Pisces being ironed onto its background and painted
Process gif of Capricorn
Drawlloween & Inktober
I’ve posted a few drawings for the #inktober2016 and #drawlloween2016 challenges. Both Inktober and Drawlloween are initiatives that give artists a prompt every day for the month of October. Artists around the world interpret the prompts and post them under their corresponding hashtags to Instagram.
Here are the highlights of my own contributions:
Tentacle Tuesday
This is a hashtag I use frequently, because tentacles.
Man-spreading Mummy Monday
Don’t you hate it when someone is spreading their body parts all over the bus?
“Little Medusa”
This one wasn’t included in the prompts, but it is the title of a Groovie Ghoulies song that I was listening to during my bus ride.
Sea Critters- Works in Progress
For my art exhibit through Ghost Gallery at Solo Bar, I continued my “Sea Critters” series, featuring real aquatic animals that are unbelievably strange. The final illustrations can be seen in my portfolio archive, but here are a few behind-the-scenes images of the earlier phases of my process.
I start each illustration with tons of rough sketches, usually done with Tombow brush markers. For inspiration I doodled while watching “The Blue Planet” and picked a few of my favorite species to illustrate.
I keep things gestural, focusing on depicting movement and crafting an interesting silhouette. As the ideas are refined, I draw more detailed images to gain an understanding of the animal’s anatomy. The Vampire Squid has spines along the insides of its arms and bioluminescent lights on the back of its head, and I wanted to make sure my final illustration was posed in a way that could show off these features.
These are the rough marker sketches that eventually became “Vampire Squid.”
These silhouettes are then cut out of fabrics that compliment the features and textures of the animal. Vampire Squid and Caribbean Reef Squid were both made from satin to capture their shiny qualities.
I have to decide which parts of the animal will be shown in fabric and which elements to embroider. For “Caribbean Reef Squid,” I embroidered all of the linear elements representing the tentacles and painted the specular, multicolor reflections of the body and the eyes.
Cut out satin for the body:
Embroidery of the tentacles in progress:
Detail of final tentacles:
Final image: