Funny Animation Scraps

Showing posts with label Visual Journal. Show all posts

Home. Some thoughts on technique.

I drew this in the summer, and it actually took two days. I must say I'm in love with gradual building of form with hard pencils. It lets you have a steady control of texture and to look very closely at your subject. And unlike working with a pen that quite quickly constricts your use of gesture, every time you step up to a softer/darker pencil you have another chance to work gesturally. It would seem two days on a small sketch like this would suck the life out of it, but to me this looks quite alive.

Maybe it's simply that I had such a soft spot for pen and line work all throughout college that I finally exhausted my use of it of course, but I think there really is something to line drawing process that is stifling. And it's the overbearing contour. No matter how much you try to build sculpturally, you get this containment effect. I still use contour of course. After all I think like a draftsman, not really as a painter: contour line is here to stay. But I am much more welcoming of it, when it's in 2H or 4H graphite. It lets the things you draw breathe.

My beautiful sister

Daily Grind

It is, indeed, a pun on the coffee mug.

Dominican Republic

Gunston Hall

Chinatown, Washington DC

This weekend for some reason I got to see the Chinatown in DC, Manhattan and Brooklyn... This is the view from a Starbucks where I was waiting for the bus to Big Apple, overhearing people at business lunch confessing to each other their fear of computers and an idle Bible-repeater mumble on with feign care in his disdain that all the people passing by need to discover just one name.

San Lazaro District, Arequipa, Peru

The only observed drawing I produced on this trip. But it was a pleasant couple of hours of unrushed meditative doodling on a day when life gives you what you want for a few hours, squeezed between uncertainty and frenzy of surviving without direction on some arbitrary spot on the globe that has solidified into your habits and fears in an imprint that's hard to wash off. Sometimes life gives you a restful morning, an embrace of sunshine, a destination for the flailing strain of survival. This rare calm is in this piece. A privilege to simply breathe and draw, without that dire need to express anything in particular, to capture, to define, to expel, to conquer. I happened to be on a street of a South American desert town in the summer of 2009. How long will this town stand? How long will the street stay unaltered? How long will I? I may have gone out of an unreasoned turmoil that a beating heart can cause in a meticulous mind, but what I have to show for it all is just this sketch of a few moments of tenderness I shared with the harsh Arequipan sun. An achievement somewhere in between dedication and an accident.

AMOSHIMASHA Blog Launched

My best friend, otherwise known as Amosh, will be documenting his journey from China to Israel on a unicycle. Reality poetry will be accompanied with illustrations by yours truly. Follow our blog atamoshimasha.blogspot.com

Drawing the Passions

Watching Hot Dads at Virginia Beach

This is as close as I could get to Bill Clinton.

Former US president Bill Clinton came to a Democratic rally at the VCU Commons court last Sunday to give a speech in support of Obama. Virginia being a swing state these days, there is a lot more campaigning going on than before the last election, and I have to admit there is a selling point to in-person campaigning. Being used to everything in the world of politics happening pretty much on televesion I have seen and been a part of the overwhelming feeling of distance and irrelevance to politics among the young and the not-so-wealthy. Politics on TV is show-entertainment, popularity contest made epic, and with world order implications that we know of mostly from Comedy Central.

Now when somebody like former president himself comes to your university, stands right where you normally try to quickly munch some lunch on a windy day between classes, how can one not feel like all of a sudden your life is politically important and your vote is needed and all that. You see a political figure as a man of normal proportions and with physical limbs that he uses to shake hands and to point when he says something particularly crowd-pleasing.
The "humble" factor, the grass roots aesthetics will get you if the rhetoric doesn't. A party rally is a rock concert without music, and the crowd leaves with a sense of involvement. Is that sense an illusion, or the real thing which ends up moving social change one way or the other...?

Well... I may be cautious about the PR in politics, but what choice do I have? These things I know matter:

Universal healthcare (and oh, come on, have no fear of socialism, there is plenty of capitalist purists in this country who are in power to never let that happen)
Environmentally safe energy sources (besides what that would do for foreign affairs, it would mean employment and oh, yeah maybe safer second-hand cars in the third world where people live in such polution that young green-mided yuppies that are active because they buy from companies here that are good at selling Green Design look but not at cutting down even simple things like paper waste... can't even bloody imagine! And let's not deplete the soil, either... that's like a full circle to the Grapes of Wrath.
Negotiations. America is hated all around the world. And that is not because we're better than everybody and they are just all jealous. What are we, a country of prom queens? Oh wait, I forgot... hockey moms... ok.

Well... I guess it's clear whom I'm voting for.