Finally Moving
Been lots of art from the past few weeks, but I haven’t been sharing it because it’s been mostly experimenting with new media. But it occurred to me that it’s of more worth to take note of my thoughts about the media I’m using than to just play with them and then set the experiments aside unexamined. So, as usual, beloved congregants, you must be my Shelf Skull and absorb my self-involved musings and unfinished art.
Starting with the second thing first, we have some new art for Bluebird, which is now fully up to date on its own page, so you can catch up on that. I’ve been sketching Bluebird themself lately, so perhaps soon you’ll get a glimpse of exactly what this robot person looks like! This is a view of the Ampheres weather station stranded offshore. My ongoing issue-slash-challenge with drawing things for Bluebird is that it features a lot of 1) machinery, and 2) very large machinery viewed from a very great distance. Making things look big is a challenge for me - I’m okay at perspective in terms of arranging geometrical objects on a surface, but I’m very bad at foreshortening, and I struggle with horizons and making backgrounds fall away, etc. So this piece involved a lot of practice around that.
One thing I’m realizing is that I need to adjust my setup such that it’s possible to work on a larger scale. With the tools I’m using, it’s not really possible to get great detail on an 8.5x11 sheet, and that’s about the size of the drawing surface I have available. I’m hoping to get out of this apartment in the next few months, so perhaps we can work on that. I’ve always dreamed of drawing something continuous on a roll of paper, but that’s right out under the present circumstances.
The little flying goblin dude is a test of my new pens; I picked up some Staedtler pens to try alongside my Microns, see how they feel. They’re a lot smoother than the Microns, which is good and bad - they’re more comfortable and pleasant to draw with, but harder to shade really delicately with. The tips are stronger and I feel less like I’m about to break them with my giant meat-paws, though, so that’s nice.
And the fox and building pictures are experiments with Dura-lar; one of my metamours gave me a few sheets to mess with and it’s very interesting - basically a translucent film to draw on, and then you can layer it like you would in Photoshop, but with traditional media. It’s incredibly smooth, which is a different experience in itself, no tooth at all. With the fox, I just used straight up markers on it, and while I was able to scan it and work with it okay, I left it out to dry for a week and a half, I shit you not, and it was still wet. So using the markers on the Dura-lar seems like it’s going to require a lot of blending and Q-tip/finger work to make it functional. The building was some of that kind of action - I was using cotton swabs to smear it a bit, and got a really lovely watercolory feel. The interesting thing - and I’ll try to get a picture of this sometime this week to show you - is that after a few days, the ink on the Dura-lar changed color. That building isn’t brown on the page anymore, it’s green. I have no idea at all why this happened, but I guess I’m excited to find out more? What a bizarre material.
