2003/2004 - Art

Well whilst I was busy gallivanting about North Devon snapping photos for most of 03/04 I did take the time to do quite a variety of art. 

Ok so technically a couple of these images were created in 2002, most were made in 2003 and one or two were done in 2004 – I think. The dates are a little muddled what with the duplicate saves and multiple computers and external hard drives they have been added to and removed from since then.

I have tried to break it down into little subsections for ease of browsing.

***
Printmaking
 

My lone semi-successful attempt at lino printing was definitely from my time at college I know that much! I presume we had to choose a design by a famous artist. I was very big on illusionary works and dreamscapes the likes of Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher, so what better choice for me than Escher’s woodcut dragon?

2003

This image is a little deceptive in itself seeing as I printed an iguana head onto clear acetate and laid it over the top of the final print.

***

Me

So let’s get the photo out of the way with. Here’s a very poor quality picture of me in 2003 including the kooky cupboard I mentioned in my last post.

Doesn’t look that small does it? How about if I inform you that I'm sitting on the floor, the iMac is sitting on the box it came in and the lino print is only A3 sized, I mean ye gads the chair on the left is either huge or everything else is cleverly scaled…well I did say I liked illusions!

***

Sketches

 Interestingly it seems this was the time two or three familiar faces first graced my sketchpad.

Below is my first ever sketch of Cyan and the start of my love for charcoal.

 

There’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing going on with the hair, I can’t work out if I had 100% red hair first or whether I dyed it that way after creating her.

Cyan was originally made along with a handful of other characters for a different story that I never penned and Kale was amongst those.

These are the earliest sketches I can find of Kale, he still smokes in the new tale and hasn’t changed a great deal in design, although he’s meant to have slightly dreaded hair, which I haven’t yet figured out how to sketch. Still he’s always been a quirky, unpredictable, violent and almost loveable sociopath; either that or I think he’s loveable because I have Stockholm syndrome from working with him for so long!

Here’s another early one of Cyan,

And a headshot of a character called West:

Also I designed two of Cyan’s school chums and named them Nami Aoki and Jennifer Jones.

I haven’t used West of Jen again since they were very two dimensional concepts. 

Nami on the other hand was probably the first germ of our crazy girl Panda, she has a similar face shape and the same green haircut, only difference is that Panda is far far more loopy and irritating than Nami ever was!

***

Boxes, cupboards, drawers and gouache

I went through a phase where I would paint on literally anything and everything, if it was made of wood and no-one was using it then it was fair game to be scrawled upon in my eyes. I mostly painted in gouache to begin with as I was familiar with the medium.

The below paintings were done on a pencil box with a reversible lid; naturally I had to feature Cyan on one side. On the flip side is a concept from yet another novel. That book I half-wrote and then gave up on due to lack of plotting. The character shown here was purposefully never named and simply called, ‘the boy.’

Here are the two sides and ends of the pencil box:

Now this is definitely from 2002 as you can see I actually remembered to sign and date it - huzzah!

*

I should mention that I was massively into Dragon Ball Z in 2003 which obviously had an impact on my choice of style for character design. In fact my friends and I were such avid fans we constructed a miniature bowling alley with DBZ artwork on the sides.

Well when I say ‘we’ I mean they deconstructed a drawer and I painted it, the bowling alley did get up and running but the arty sides were never properly affixed. 

This is the side with male characters which I took a copy of before gifting to my boyfriend at the time. Seeing as I was keeping the side with the female characters I never took a scan and unfortunately now cannot get a copy because it is currently…you guessed it, in England.

***

Painting in Oils

Finally I began experimenting with oils, first chosen theme: fire.

Yep still a firm favourite thing to paint!

2003

This was actually a finger painting on A3 cartridge paper, guess I felt like making a mess that day.

***

The two paintings below were done on the inside of a drawer hence the deep gauges of missing wood in both designs. The spiral staircase was based on a dream I had and also features atop a hill in my large dragon painting (no still haven’t got a proper photo of that yet). 

 2003

The reverse, the wolf and fire was done on request. A friend at the time liked the staircase a lot and offered to buy it but only if I painted the reverse so he could hang it like a spinning chime. I agreed and think I sold the whole thing for a measly £20 because I knew nothing about pricing, d’oh! >.<

 

Here are the only two partial photos I currently have of the large dragon painting, you can just about make out the spiral staircase as a white smudge on the hill if you squint really hard:

***

Another one based on a dream I had, on A3 card this time, it was a good use for the discarded back of a sketchpad if I do say so.

2004

I titled it ‘Static wave,’ since in the dream the tidal wave never moved even though I was terrified it would crash down and drown the campers it remained in place, rushing perfectly upright. Similarly in the painting the wave can never move and so the campers have nothing to fear. 

***

Yet another painting from a dream I had, yes there’s a theme here; water, in its many glorious suffocating forms.

 2004

I guess then I should call them nightmares rather than dreams but none of these water dreams were that frightening. This was my bathroom in a small flat on Broadmead Avenue, Northampton, not a clue why I dreamt of a figure trapped in a bubble of water but I did, so I painted it.

However seeing as it’s a bit on the weird side I probably shouldn’t have taken it to my university interview as an example of work, it certainly got a raised eyebrow from Peter Parr!

***

Painting from Photographs

Eventually I progressed to painting from photographs as well as from my imagination.

2004

I chose one of my happy snaps from a day at Croyde beach to have a go at painting sand. This was oil on an 8 x 10in canvas, I remember I did it in one sitting so I could time myself - it took eight hours start to finish…boy I had a sore butt after sitting for so long!

*

Next I thought I’d try my hand at a different subject. This was for my grandparents from a photo of their garden which Granddad always maintained so beautifully. Any time of year you could go into that garden and it would be full of lustrous life just as the photo shows. 

2004

Somehow I don’t feel my painting did his garden justice. I probably realised then that painting flowers wasn’t my thing, unless they were dead flowers of course.

***

Model making

2004

Again I thought I’d try something new. So I crafted a bird shape from chicken wire, wrapped it in plaster-o-paris, ripped apart two feather dusters and then sat and painstaking glued each feather in place. This involved using an ironically featherless dart to poke holes in the plaster and getting slightly more superglue on my fingers than the manufacturers recommend. 

In fact I’m pretty sure I didn’t find my fingertips beneath the glue for at least a month after this monstrosity was born:

 Finishing touches included electrical tape to bind the beak and feet plus some teddy bear eyes purchased from a sweet-looking old lady in Barnstaple's local craft store. I think she assumed I was making cuddly toys, oh if only she knew how wrong she was!

*

And finally...

2004 was also the year I created my most successful painting to date, 'Water Tiger,' which I’m sure nigh on everyone has seen by now. It’s origin? Well the local take-out gave me a free calendar and one of the images therein was this tiger, inspiration does strike in the funniest of places.

2004

What you may not have known is that upon completion I took it into Photoshop to see what it would look like in different colours and saved this altered version which only a few folks have seen:

 

I like how it changes the tone of the piece and find it quite refreshing to look at; I get a better sense of appreciation from the altered version especially after working on and viewing the original so many times.

Shortly after this I moved to Bournemouth, paintings et al in tow to try my hand at university in the field of animation. 

Now we were meant to have prepared a sketchbook with pictures of what we did over the summer to show on our first day. Seeing as I got into university late via what they call the clearing process I hadn't had time to prepare any such sketches and figured I'd literally take 'what I had been up to that summer,' along with me. 

I'm still not sure if staff and fellow students were amused or bemused when I arrived wielding my tiger and a ratty-looking bird!