Errantry

With the Illustration Friday topics, I usually pretend the illustration is to accompany an article on that theme and go from there. I went a little further sideways with this week’s topic and decided to do an illustration for a piece on neologisms and the fun (and problems) of watching language develop through popular media. The reference, of course, is to the Buffy-ism of forming nouns by adding “-age” to, well, everything.

The house is intended to look invented and fantastic, but is also an only-slightly-edited version of the view from my verandah. The hill opposite is so steep the houses on it appear to be balanced on top of the trees.

Comments and critique are always welcome.

(And there are still free bird (and other) prints available).

1. I had an epiphany at a Turner exhibit – the importance of boldness. This was the biggest lesson: to be bold in terms of time, line and materials. I have always tended to pale, tentative sketches. The limitations of time and materials forced me to far less subtlety, and I think that is a good thing. You can get away with a lot more if you do it with confidence and flair. I’m still working on both of these, but I am aware of the difference now.
2. To appreciate markers and coloured pencils. Not always like, but appreciate.
3. The joy of having the book constantly up to date.
4. Paying attention to little scenes. I remember places keenly because of a knitting girl or a moldy pumpkin.
5. People complicate travel sketching. I am conscious of their possible reaction (both to my sketching and to others’ reactions), time constraints, the need to move at a joint pace rather than individual, the vagueness it lends my half of conversations. I need to practice drawing in company and to stop being rritated by conversations which on drawing time.
6. I have become much more comfortable with drawing/sketching from life and have continued this in other sketchbooks since returning.
7. I like having a visual record. It is more legible than handwriting alone, I look back at it more frequently than a written journal, and I think it is more self-contained and interesting than a photo album alone.
8. I feel less self-conscious about inviting people to look at sketchbook than at photo albums. This is partly vanity and partly because I am never convinced people actually want to look at photos (and I have to sit there and explain them).

Next time I will:

1. Take less.
2. Ignore perfection – better at all than never.
3. Draw more.
4. Be bold.
5. Make hi-res scans the first time around (still, better at all than never).

Disclaimer

I don’t generally read category romance. Not because I write it off as a genre. Like all genres, it has its problems, most of which dovetail with my reasons not to pick up a book. I do at times read non-category books which are packaged as romance (and historicals and ‘novels’ etc), especially Ibbotson and Austen and Heyer. I did spend a miserable week at boarding school laid out with a bad back (or was it after I had my wisdom teeth out) reading through the house mistress’s stash of Mills & Boons because I couldn’t concentrate on a story which took more than 50,000 words (the misery was due to lack of concentration, not what I was concetrating on). A few of the books were astonishingly well written. And the circles I swim in overlap with romance readers and writers from time to time, whose opinions I respect.

So, with that in mind, I read an email today and reacted as follows:

(more…)

1. Beds: unmade, double and low.
2. Dishes: unrinsed and left in the sink.
3. KFC: the one at Indooroopilly.
4. Houses: without books.
5. Story: absence of.

Just don’t give them names!

An illustration in fine black marker and food colouring on watercolour paper. The latter is not the most permanent colour but it has such lovely strong colours and I haven’t found shades of ink which are quite as satisfactory.

Comments and criticism are always welcome.

And in housekeeping news, I have internet access at home again so should be back to more regularly scheduled, not-exclusively-art posts after the long weekend. Oh, and commenting, too.

This Illustration Friday picture was drawn in Corel, which was less daunting after a break. I also tampered with it in Photoshop:

You can see larger versions by clicking on the pictures. I like the second one best, but my mother prefers the original. There is also a blue version.

Comments and criticism are always welcome.

I’m back! Well, I’m back from Thredbo after a rather unexpected jaunt to the “highest mountain on the flattest and lowest continent”. I’m not fully back in action as we don’t have internet access at the house yet, but it’s pending!

More about the media junket, hellish movies and mothers in fiction (or possibly gnome emoticons) to come. In the meantime, here are the left-overs from my encounter with photo printing.

They are all 10X15cm (4×6″) including a narrow white border and printed on DNP Centura photo paper (if you needed to know that) and signed on the back by the artist. Also, they are free!

If you’d like one (or a few) let me know what you’d like in the comments and email me your postal address.

Here’s what I have (click for larger views):

Miss You: 1 gloss

Humbug: 1 gloss, 1 matt

Primitive Bird: 1 gloss, 1 matt

Gold veil: 1 gloss

Hair nest: 1 gloss, 1 matt

Eat your greens: 1 gloss, 1 matt

Stargazer: 1 gloss, 1 matt

Empty speech: 1 gloss, 1 matt

Tea and theories: 1 gloss, 1 matt

Dark and stormy bird: 1 matt

Red bird: 1 gloss, 1 matt

A cut paper illustration of shadows to cast upon the wall with the hands. Alternative title: How I Wilfully Make Life Harder for Myself.

I drew a rough pencil sketch on sketchbook paper, then put this on top of the black paper and cut it with a blunt stanley knife on a deteriorating cutting mat, lifting the sketchbook paper at intervals to clean up fiddly bits of black paper under a bad light late at night.

Comments and critique are always welcome, as are suggested mnemonics to encourage me to, oh, use good tools, bright ideas and a decent light all of which I have.

The Jane Austen Book Club (twice – double booked, not enthusiasm) – I am operating on the assumption that the book was better, because if it wasn’t they wouldn’t have made a movie. Some good moments shoehorned into a woodenly-scripted frankenstein’s monster of preachy literary allusion which devalued Austen, failed to succeed in pointing out that some men like Austen, made cringe worthy attempts to do so and ended with cheese. However Hugh Dancy’s programmer, SF-geek, over-caffeinated, alternative-energy character was really great, and I could almost sit through the movie a third time for him alone. Among many things, it was great to see an avid SFF reader (first met at an SF convention) with a slightly bizarre and intense outlook on life who was funny (and true!) but not made fun of and who succeeds in promoting science fiction, female authors of science fiction, science-fiction-as-real-books and persuading another character to stay up all night reading Ursula Le Guin and prompt my sister to ask if I had any of her books. That blew me away.

Juno (again) – Still like it. It falls somewhere between Thankyou For Smoking and My Girl.

St Peter’s Chorale – Some beautiful pieces, including a haunting Australian composition by Sarah-I-did-not-write-her-name-down in which the voices at times sound like didgeridoos.

The King of Kong - I won tickets to a preview screening, but it is worth paying to see even, and perhaps especially, if you don’t know much about video gaming. Well told, with marvellous characters who at times are so appalling that it is a shock to remember they are not fictional characters at all, but real people (allowing for a documentary director’s viewpoint), and often very funny. The story continues after the credits.

Moulin Beige – I’m not sure cabaret is my thing, but there were some inspired moments (the Two Men in a Box skit which felt like something out of Cirque du Soleil, but without acrobatics or a budget) and The Joynt has excellent chips.

There Will Be Blood – This would have been a better movie if they kept the original title. It would have drawn it together thematically and given it relevance instead of just being a bald statement of the plot. It’s like calling Die Hard “There Will Be Sardonic One-Liners” or Juno “There Will Be A Baby” or Snakes on a Plane… oh wait. Only There Will Be Blood sounds like a pirate movie, so more like, “Avast! A Swaddled Infant” or “Arrr There Will Be Defeated Terrorists”. Deb disagrees with me on this. I am not ruling out my opinion may be influenced by the lingering disappointment of discovering (before I saw the movie) that the title was not a subtle allustion to The Princess Bride. There was some vivid acting, but though never boring the movie was not fulfilling. It reminded me of The Aviator, in which acting calibre could not redeem a movie that otherwise only had its historical overview of a phenomenon to recommend it. But Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) was awesome! That boy can act!

This week’s picture was drawn in pen (unipin), scanned and coloured in Photoshop. It is very loosely based on DaVinci’s portrait of a lady with an ermine, and if I’d had the reference around, I might have had fewer problems with the sleeve!

Comments and critique are always welcome.