Illustration Friday: "Secret"

Secret Present

Finally managed to do an illustration this week even though it was from a drawing a did a few years ago. I always wanted to paint it up so this was a great opportunity.  Hope you all like it.

The John Ruskin Prize Competition

Undergrowth

Snails

I did a couple of frottage images for the John Ruskin Prize. The first image "Snails" was inspired by the many snails who climb trees. I thought this was quite an unusual aspect of nature and wanted my artwork to be quite different for this project. Fossilised shells, leaves and wallpaper were used to created the rubbings. The second image "Undergrowth" was created in much the same way and then in Photoshop a watercolour painting was applied over the top. The characters in each image appeared naturally and I just added a bit more detail to bring them out. The judges will probably be looking at hundreds of beautiful traditional style paintings and then there will be my strange creations - well it does say "A new look at nature".  For more information on the competition visit the link below.
http://campaignfordrawing.org/powerdrawing/ruskin.aspx

The Sketchbook Project 2012/2013

Wings

The second page in my sketchbook project is very different from my first image, but I wanted to explore the method of frottage further, as I really enjoy this technique. Rather than just use the image for backgrounds and texture, I wanted to produce an automatic response to my charcoal rubbing. Using a charcoal stick and also charcoal pencil, I started to pull out some of the details by making the dark areas even darker. This worked really well and small images started to appear. The most obvious one is a butterfly shape, but there is also a little man in the centre of the wings. I also found a dragon, bird and some sort of female red indian. The hard part of this was knowing when to stop. Please click on the image to see a larger view.

If you're interested in this surrealist technique follow the link below to watch Max Ernst.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Jm5jHMETfM

Illustration Friday: "Vision"

Vision

Even though this week has been hectic with preparations for the end of year degree show, I managed to do a quick brainstorm to come up with my entry image. Ideas explored:  third eye, eye of Horus, short-sight, long-sight, skylines, and the transmission of information to the brain. I decided to take this further and thought of the image of lines, shapes and transmitting images through a lens. This, somehow, led me to satellite dishes and so I decided to produce a surreal image using the method of frottage for the background. The whole piece was done in charcoal. If you are interested in the frottage technique of the surrealists, look up Max Ernst.  If you just type frottage in your search engine you might get a few unexpected results.