Toes Over The Line

// November 27th, 2010 // 4 Comments » // Labyrinths, process, scribble to Image

Today’s labyrinth is a little off-centre, a little rough. And I’m really happy with that.

I have to remind myself that painting the labyrinth is not about getting the form completely right, it’s about the process of painting itself.

I never ask myself if I’ve walked the labyrinth correctly, never berate myself if my toes go over the line. When I walk the labyrinth I just walk it. When I paint the labyrinth, why not just paint it?

When I first started painting labyrinths I put a lot of work into getting them perfectly centred on the canvas, or paper. I wanted the lines to be as smoothly painted as possible, the paths a consistent width.

Part of the reason I like this one is that I let myself paint intuitively, there’s a lot of pink, blue, green, and yellow swirls and circles in the layers beneath the final image.

I even knocked my water all over the piece of card and had to mop it up. Arty, messy fun.

If the end result looks good, looks like a piece of ‘art’, that’s nice but it’s only part of the deal. I like that I’m starting to loosen up a bit. When I paint more loosely, each labyrinth seems to allow it’s own qualities to come through. It becomes less about me, and more about the labyrinth.

Which is quite a relief.

Scribble to Image: Heart-Door Guy

// July 27th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // process, scribble to Image

I’m an obsessive filler of notebooks. One of the great things about this is that I have a great store of quick scraps and sketches to draw on for inspiration whenever I need it.

I’m kind of a Moleskine nut too. I know they’re overpriced, but the main difference for me is that little pocket at the back–I fill mine with images from postcards, flyers, magazines, and use them as inspiration or starting points for filling the pages up.

It turns the moleskine from a mere jotting pad into a mini art reference library–add a good pen and I have an instant pocket-sized art studio.

Once I start a notebook I feel like I’ve embarked on a real project. I love the way seemingly random scribbles talk to each other across the pages, as different themes and images start to repeat and clarify.

The image on the left is a small character that appeared in a sketch I was doing back in 2005. The woman on the right is a preparing for a small circus act that was performing in Pioneer Square in Seattle.

Somehow I sketched the small cartoon clowny figure in response to her. It was just jotted in there, maybe took a minute or so. I know I spent about 10-15 minutes sketching the woman and the tent structure and speakers and wires that were going up around her.

But this small cartoon figure ended up being the more important thing to come out of this drawing. He appears again in that moleskine a number of times, the next time he appears without the hat. In later drawings the little door in his torso opens up and small symbols start to appear in there.

Eventually the heart disappears and the hinged door moves up to take its place.

*****

A while back I was participating in the Creative Every Day challenge and the theme was intuition.

I was mostly just playing with textured backgrounds. I’d got a few backgrounds done and began searching for images that might be suitable to play around with,  and came across the moleskine with the clown guy and his heart-door.

I played with that idea  a little on a torn off piece of sketch paper and this is what came out of that. The door opens to to reveal an eye which is the symbol that arose in response to the theme of ‘Intuition’.

While the clown hat is gone the beginnings are here of a new, almost clown-suit with the stripey sleeves. The unicycle, too, brings back that circus theme.

This was pretty quickly scribbled down too, (with a rainbow coloured pencil!) I think the version at the top original had eyes, but I whited them out because the expression was wrong.

Something about that white smeared over the eyes felt right and the second vesion below it incorporated that as a blindfold which fit perfectly with the eye symbol peering out from his ‘heart-door’.

*****

Here’s the image that finally appeared on the blog.

I used the rainbow pencil to sketch the figure onto the background (I love the randomness of it, the colours keep changing as you draw), and you can still see it here and there though it was mostly painted over.

It was great to see Heart-Door Guy (that’s what I call him in my head) a bit more fleshed out and finished. One of the reasons I like to use a cartoon style of drawing is that the characters I create are expressive and feel like real beings to me.

The way he kept repeating in my sketches makes me think Heart-Door Guy is alive in some way, and wanted to make his way out into the world. He’s appeared on the blog three times now (here, here, and over there!) and I’m still working on him. He continues to shift and grow, and is becoming more real all the time.

*****

I’d love to hear about your creative process. How do you store your images, ideas, melodies? Do you mine small throw-away bits and scribbles and use them to create more substantial pieces?

Do you love Moleskine notebooks, or do your eyes involuntarily roll whenever they’re mentioned? (I won’t be offended if you think they’re silly, I think it’s great that some people love Moleskines and some people hate them.)