That's amazing. I think it was completely worth the time you put into it.

Awww, thank you!

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my art blog :: my gallery :: my candidate

This is quite a flavorful deployment of textures, colors, and ideas...I am enjoying looking at it, and all the strange, pleasant combinations it engenders. The spike hair is a good effect with the shadows. The design, starting in the bottom right hand corner and moving up diagonally, and shooting with the stars over the spikes and back around again produces a fine circularity and pulls all the disparate elements in to good effect. There's a bit of Klimtiness in there, but I think you incorporate well into the punked-out style (those big blue and gold squares are very cool and boldly placed)...overall this is fun to look at and has a wild retro-futurist poster feel. I'm looking forward to the detail shots...

Why thank you! I actually ended up feeling a bit out of my element on this one... I think I went fairly far afield, and where I ended up was so experimental that there wasn't a whole terrible lot of my own sense of self and of personal style to hold on to. That's odd, I suppose, considering that many people look at this and tell me that my work is "very you" and "so unique."

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my art blog :: my gallery :: my candidate

Interesting...I just noticed the word 'tetragrammaton' in there. I think it was yesterday, or maybe early today, but this word suddenly popped into my head, and I was holding on to it, fixated, not even knowing what it meant (just googled it). Looking at this piece again, I like how you have put all this crazy detail in it, but it feels controlled, or at least tamed. You've got it in thrall to what appears to be a 'golden' spiral shape, which is the ultimate shape to make an art work in. Often a work like this could get out of control, and get that crazy junk pile work that a highly detailed and varied piece gets, but you avoid it. Maybe it is the unorthodox colors you use that charges it up in this way. Whatever it is, I like it (ooh, that wheel in the bottom left is quite a good device too). A couple questions: those patterns, how did you come to envision each of them, do they possess a special significane for your? And what do you think of the Strathmore, and how does it hold up for you? Is it the 500 series plate surface? I am using that stuff for an ink piece right now, and it responds well. Good sizing, stands up to a fair amount of reworking...

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I hate everything about you
Why do I love you
You hate everything about me
Why do you love me

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my art blog :: my gallery :: my candidate

Yes - the words along the top are YHVH AGLA HASHEM ELOHIM TETRAGRAMMATON SAMAEL LILLITH. All names for the traditional Judeo-Christian God, except for the last two, of course, which are names of the Adversary.
Yes, now that I look at it, the whole piece is undulating in a sort of spiral. That was entirely subconscious, though; I'm usually at best only vaguely aware of the underlying layout shapes that I employ, though I may consciously stress certain layout relationships at certain points in the process. It's mostly about trusting the process, and though that can be a very difficult thing to do, I find it very rewarding. I started inking when many areas of this piece weren't even sketched in; the sketch I inked over was not itself terribly detailed. That is usually the case with my works; it has its ups and its downs as a process, but its major upside is that the inking itself becomes a highly creative process. If it was more or less tracing, I frankly couldn't be arsed about it. That's just how my mind works.

That wheel with radiating feathers has become one of my personal motifs; it appears twice in [link] , and has continued to appear in sketches and such since. It's not quite as old as the spikewheel motif (in [link] and [link] , but originating several years ago), but it's becoming as persistent.
My color process is more or less intuitive, unplanned; when I put down the first colors, I only have a very vague idea of what the piece's color palette will look like when it's finished. I'm very fond of my Copic markers - they give me excellent, rich hues, blend quite well, and on the whole make color selection a lot of fun. The patterns were more or less dredged out of my brain; a few of them are standard patterns, a few are traditional Japanese, one is shamelessly stolen from one of my favorite artists. Some are made using a collection of something like 50 old plastic templates that I inherited from my grandfather, who was a draftsman for Lockheed.

I'm honestly not sure which series of paper this is, I started on it so long ago....

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my art blog :: my gallery :: my candidate

LOVE IT