Recent Adventures

Been working up a huge pile of works in progress over the summer and I need to guilt myself into finishing them:

Started a peacock painting with acrylics sometime last month. I hope to get more comfortable with painting -since I seem to literally more of a pencil pusher.

Still working on my Handbound book project. I’m thinking of fixing the cover with some cool stencil or something. Maybe a cool branchy tree. I’m also gearing up to write down text on page 13:

Nice pair of eyes.

 Also working on my very first sculpture with some exceedingly old original scupley clay. If it had an expiration date, it’s probably way past it by now. It’s consistency it a bit chalky and I’m not sure if its supposed to be like that or it’s spent too many hours in a stuffy room. Either way, I’m hoping to get the feet done, smooth out the face and body, and put a pair of wings on him before baking.

And on the side I have my good ol’ standby- traditional art with pencil, paper, and micron pens for inking. It’s a scaly, two-eyed creature. The more I draw scales the easier it gets. Sure it’s a little tedious, but with a bit of patience, the end result is always impressive.

Hopefully I’ll be getting it all done soon.

Rogue.

Handbound Book: Page 10

Felt like drawing some jellyfish in a more realistic way than I usually do. I took the photo on a grey day, so the pictures are slightly blue-er than what they really are. The darker scribbles on the jellyfish bodies are actually a shade of orange.

Page Technique: Sky was done first in plain ol’ blue highlighter (because I love highlighters- cheapest and fastest color ever. Next I pasted several cutouts of buildings I received from an ad or brochure. Next I sketched in the jellies with the use of some photo references. I outlined them in dark blue pen from my trusty set of old markers. I later added some lighter maker. In order to color the jellies in more, I used my prismacolor pencils to add in blue and purple on the caps and light blue and a scribble of orange on the tentacles. I outlined some buildings afterwards because I thought that they would stand out more.

Detail: (Supposed to be orange scibbles on the jelly.)

Later I might add a phrase at the top. I haven’t thought of a clever line of words or a quote I like yet.

Rogue.

Handbound Book: Page 11

Page 11: Lost in Lines

Finally finished page 11. It’s a whole page with crazy lines and patterns and doodling. I don’t think I managed the patterns very consistantly and from far away the thing looks a little crazy, but it is done. Frankly there’s no way to fix it or any space to add anything.

Page Technique: Pretty self explanatory from the photos. It’s just some roofing paper and covered in outlines in pen and sharpie. I just kept doodling and making patterns till the page was full.

Here is a close up of some of the detail:

You can see there is som difference in the quality of the ink in certain places. The ballpoint pen is slightly off-black (?) and reddish, while the sharpie is very dark. Towards the end, I was getting tired of the sharpie fumes and switched to an old color pen.

I’m also working on page 10 at the same time:

It will be next after a little more marker work and maybe even a bit of paints. And there will be JELLIES.

Rogue.

Practice and Progress

Some book stuff.

I’m trying to work slow with the book. It’s a tricky line because I want to get the pages painted and done, but at the same time I don’t want to make mistakes. For this reason, I made a little practice paper to try out sewing into paper and colors. I painted the grey watercolor over both sides, added a little rubbing alcohol, and painted the random lines all over it. Unfortunetly I did learn that the watercolor paper is way too thick to sew into (in a quick fashion). I had to pre-punch the holes with an exacto knife and it took an excessive amount of time to sew. I frankly am too impatient with a needle and tread to try this again. I added the numbers (which are old old label numbers I found in a box) last.

It will probably be glued into the book or put into an envelope. It was a good practice of painting and such, so I’ll keep it for later. Besides that, there’s some images for the next pages (9 and 16). I have an idea for page 9, sort of going to play around with it, but I painted page 16 only out of impulse. I used a sprizer to add rubbing alcohol to the watercolor. Alcohol is a pretty cool thing to drop onto watercolor because it makes odd patterns that are splotchy, but not as splotchy and textured as adding salt.

Page 9 wip1

Page 16 wip1

Rogue.

(New) Blog stuff.

Made some new headers and a little icon for myself the other day. Pretty proud of it. It’s got a brain, some odd random numbers, and swirls. It’s pretty much what this blog is full of anyways. It took me a half an hour in Oekaki.

I spy a Phi in there...

Tried some new headers with more of my own art instead of just my photos. The owl one is ok for now, I think I’ll replace it later…

I also added a Handbound book category since I’m trying to seriously work on it. Each time I get through a page, I will post about it and how I made it. I’ll probably post some criticism of it after….

Rogue.

Handmade Book: Page 7

More book stuff. Here is page 7, still tentatively done. I had become increasingly interested with Fibonacci numbers and I diecided to make a page while I was still happy with math. Math and I have a messy, love-hate relationship. I like that math can be definitive, but it’s a little too harsh sometimes.

Page Technique: It’s on hotpressed watercolor paper, with a splash grey watercolor in the background. I literally just colored it just to have a color on it. I scrawled math all over it in sharpie, paint pen, and regular pen. Over all that I wrote the first 17 or so numbers in the Fibonacci series in a grey pen I found in my desk. I made the 07, 8, 1, and 3 with computer paper, black paint pen, orange highlighter, and a white gel pen. Then I wrote a really poorly written poem I had from a year or two ago.

I suppose you could read the poem on the page. It’s a pretty bad poem, full of awkward phrases. I regret even writing it on the page now, but it’s done in paint and there’s no going back. The ending is the worst. I think I was too tired to make a coherent ending. It was written for a creative writing class, and it was sort of inspired (well now I think a lot of the page is inspired) by Jean Micheal Basquiat. http://basquiat.com/ Except Basquiat could draw crazy words everywhere and it would make sense. I just made a mess except with numbers and calculus.

#13. Obviously I need to use a little more glue...

Another detail shot:

ALL THE PRETTY NUMBERS AGAIN AND AGAIN.

I didn’t specifically plan it, but the number 7 ended up on this page. Thumbs up to my subconcious for numbering the page for me.

Rogue.