Happy New Year

The year of the rabbit starts in February.

prehistoric

I hope it's clear what this is meant to be - a fossilized mobile phone from the eighties.  I guess I need work on drawing fossils some more.

Life drawing

I've started going to life drawing classes at the Sash Gallery in South Yarra.  This week was my second go.  Last week none of my pictures were very good, but this week I thought they were a little bit better.  I thought the model was very good at making nice poses.   Unfortunately the paper got a little crinkled before I took a photo of them.

burning

This is a picture I did about four years ago for my boyfriend.  It's a picture of the Angel and Devil game where to make it more interesting I made it so he burned the squares.  

afterwards

This is really late, but I've finished it (sort of) so I'm putting it here.  The story is that the gorillas had an argument.  Afterwards the harsh words they exchanged are hanging in the air and they realise they didn't need to be so mean.   Click on the image to see it less blurry.

Also, thanks to everyone who has written comments on my earlier pictures.  I always really appreciate them but never know what to write in response.

spent

racing

It's racing season here in Melbourne, with the Melbourne cup next week, so it was obvious what I should draw for this illustration.

spooky

Last pictures from Berlin

I just moved from Berlin to Melbourne.   The first picture is a still-life of things I'll miss - nice berries and ridiculously cheap beer.  The charcoal sketch is of a clay doll I made one day and threw out when I moved.  Hopefully I'll have more pictures to put here soon from my new life in Melbourne.

statue at Georg-Kolbe Museum

I haven't been putting my pictures here, so I decided to put this one, in an attempt to start again.
It's just a study I did of a statue in a museum.  I wanted to draw a picture of a girl side-on in a picture story I've been making, but I found it really hard to do out of my head.  So I went to the museum to look at all the sculptures side-on. 

Then I played around and added colours for no reason.  Hopefully I'll have another picture tomorrow for 'dessert'.

star gazing

I was a bit distracted this week.  Everyone's done such pretty pictures of people looking at stars.

I was thinking of star gazers as amateur astronomers.  So I decided to do a nerdy picture about their modern counterpart - people who use their idle computers to search databases for stars and things.  Last week I read about how the  Einstein@Home project published a paper announcing their first discovery of a radio pulsar.

caged

This is a picture of the Bremen town musicians locked up in jail.  They beat up some men and stole their house.  In the story it says these men were thieves, but it didn't say how they knew that.  So I think they made it up to make themselves feel better.  

artificial (flowers)

It's a bit late for Illustration Friday but I figured I might as well put it up.  We had to paint these artificial flowers in a painting class I did today.  I'm really not confident that I got any better at painting.

double

I was a bit preoccupied with other things this week, so I didn't spend much time on this, and I'm not sure I should put it here since it's so silly.  I folded some paper in half and cut out a picture of Golyadkin from The Double by Dostoyevsky.  He's walking along a river and thinks he is being watched.  I haven't finished the story yet.  Actually this is as far as I got (about page 50).  

I didn't wait long enough before I folded it though, so the paint wasn't dry and it stuck together and is not very good.  Then I got glue all over my fingers while I was sticking waves on it.

 

breakfast

I wasn't very creative with my interpretation.  I just drew what was in front of me at breakfast.  I'm trying to use up all my least-favourite coloured pencils.

giant

The neat thing about this topic is that anything can be giant.

satellite

The Illustration Friday word this week is satellite. It made me think of this year's winning Eurovision song, sung by Lena Meyer-Landrut. So I tried to draw her as a satellite.

paisley

I liked this topic. If I had more time, I would have made more things paisley.

Nerdy collage

The second assignment for the Pikaland Artist Bootcamp asked us to do three versions of the same picture - one that's just black and white, one collage of previous works (it seems maybe I interpreted this too literally) and one that is in the medium of our choice.

This is my collage. It took hours. I think I made it too complicated. It's meant to be my boyfriend and I talking about maths, and then I made a collage of cut-up and painted over maths notes, as well as some old pictures. It's perhaps a little bit childish.

I was also trying to be inspired by Persian miniature painting, using bright colours and patterns.

ripple

This week's topic is "ripple" and Illustration Friday is dedicated to the animals in the ocean affected by the oil spill disaster. I thought maybe this picture that I had just done the other day is appropriate. I added in some water to make it more rippled. I don't think there are any penguins in the Gulf of Mexico, but they're affected by other oil spills...

Penguin

Last week I watched a show about Matisse and learnt that his cut-out pictures were the inspiration for Miffy the rabbit. I tried to draw something simple like that.

Pikaland Assignment 1

I just started the Pikaland Artist Bootcamp. (It's been a really busy week for me because I started this and I did a four-day night class in how to use Illustrator.)

This is the work I did for the first assignment. I did it with Illustrator and sometimes I felt like I really had to fight with Illustrator to make it do what I wanted. It seems there's still a lot to learn.

Fox + Dog

This week I did a class about how to use Adobe Illustrator and I drew this picture. It was just a quick silly thing, but I don't have very high standards for what I put here yet, so here it is.

slither

I'm a bit of a beginner at water colour painting, so this was fun. I used some water colour pencils and pen as well because I didn't know how to make things stand out with just water colour paint.

early

equipment

"People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too."
Christopher Morley

fearless

The quote in the Illustration Friday email this week was:

The fearless are merely fearless. People who act in spite of their fear are truly brave.

I suppose I don't really think of fearlessness in a positive way, because I associate it with not caring about anything. If you don't care about anything then you don't fear what might happen to it.

I decided to draw a robot doing something that I suppose is exciting because it's scary. Nothing against robots, but I associate them with not having feelings.

I'm not entirely happy with it, but I'm not sure what is wrong.

cocoon

I should probably do some more work on this before I call it finished. But I'm tired, so this will do. I'm hoping to improve gradually by doing a painting each week. This is acrylic paint on a wooden board.

Squiggle creature

I drew this in my German class the other day to pass some time, and then I liked it so I decided to colour it in.