Illustration coming soon

Hey folks.

Here's some of my latest life drawing, I am too lazy to compose them nicely into one sheet so you'll have to just scroll through them (I apologise for the horrible composition on the blog post, it's me versus html and I'm loosing).

They're pretty large so click em up and zoom 'round.

I'm starting illustrating now for Sebastian's game "Hell for Leather". Check out his site here:

www.cobwebgames.com

Looking forward to filling his book with ink pictures of normal people doing horrible things.

J out.

Life Drawing Sketches

Wednesday nights squished into my company's largest closed room we now have 10 artists a programmer and a writer all huddled around a posed nude trying to remember how to draw. All thanks to me!

It went well and I'm proud because I actually got off my arse and did something for once instead of just talking about it.





Anyway here are the first classes drawings. There are two large hand drawings which I found in my notebook and I haven't posted anywhere so I included them as well.

Next post will be about some web designing I'm doing for my brother. :)

Just back from Berlin

After some weeks flying in and out of London Stansted, it's been a bit of a blur. But an inspiring blur. Barcelona was buzzing with artistic energy. Art was breathing through the graffiti and the festivals were alive with creativity.

London's modern take is a bit more stilted but no less impressive. In between the giant public spaces are an overwhelming plethora of venues to watch the latest art spring forth. Satchi held me for a few hours showing off the newest expressionism oozing from the States and the Tate Modern's entrance looks like you're in an inverted Titanic before she ran into Pingu's house.

But Berlin is the Queen. She has art in every flake of plaster, in every glued poster and every hasty stencil. The walls are covered with expression from the lude to the beautiful. Screaming kids and goggley eyed aliens, a girl pointing a wand at a star and an astronaut with a gasmask. Fish sculpted into the walls, toilets without an inch of raw paint, whole shops painted in rainbows and working 10" pink sewage pipes coming out of the ground like some sort of steel loch ness Flying Circus sketch. The people too looked like they dropped out of "Brazil" and I'm sure Mr. Gilliam spent some years either living here or building this city.

I must go back. I had about 1 billion ideas while I was there and the air of Cambridge has almost dried them up. On that note I'll say danke und tschuess!

Enjoy the pictures of my next few paintings and a slightly better version of Chiara. I'm opening up for more photo contributions. No subject this time I just want any picture you'd like to make into a painting. :)

Chiara

Chiara is finished and I'm starting on the first of the "Ape Car" series which will be called "La Macchinina Azzurrina". You're going to love these. The tiniest, coolest cars in the world. I'm going to make them my celebrities.

So what did I learn from this painting? A lot really. First off the joy of using more paint. It loosens the creative muscles, provides room for happy accidents and allows longer blending times to make more sophisticated choices. I've also discovered I'm not much good with a paint brush yet. I used only a palette knife which I had a lot more control of than I did with the brush.

Artistically I was hoping for something a little more pointilist and something resembling the kind of cheap compression that we got so used to seeing all around us in phone camera photography. That kind of greeny pixelated blur. I wanted the image to resemble a woman lost in thought and lost in digital inaccuracy. In a state of limbo between reality and perception. This is a further study on the inaccuracy of memory and of the manipulation of past perception where the recognisable is distorted into the individuals fantasy to become what they need and desire from what they have experienced. To distort the past in order to define themselves.

So look on my new work and also my little collection which has grown from one little picture to three. :)

Started another

Hey all.. Probably no one still reads this. Anyway here's my newest piece. It's just the first coat. Lots more pointilism style painting layers before it's finished. :)

What's that? Another painting?

It's back, thanks to a cunning schedule designed to fool one's self into following one's ambitions instead of lounging around fretting about them (courtesy of my dear brother), J the artist is back on form. With another masterpiece laid out before you all and three more in production all is looking well.

I will now stop referring to myself in the third person as this may be psychoanalyzed at a later date and lead to the discovery that I am, indeed, self obsessed.

It took some time to finish this one but it was time spent idling rather than working. With my new schedule, which I started two weeks ago, I am spending more time painting than I have since I left Italy. I work a two week schedule with the first week on painting in photoshop and learning other software techniques and every second week it's back to pure traditional painting with brushes and tubes of paint. During these weeks I do at least half an hour's solid work a day which normally eats into two or three hours.

Last week I learnt to use Channels in photoshop for selection/masking/greyscaling.

This week I've finished a painting, primed three canvases and started to update this blog. Now I'm going to scan this one and let you dwell on ir while I start the next ones.

The painting is called Rick.

Thanks man, I miss you. J out.