Tuesday, July 31, 2007

The Fox

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Dinosaur Shopping


This one's for Pablo. Eventually I'll have a color version of it. I'm trying to do it JJ style in Photoshop. And, as with everything I do, I want to make it into a little book. The dinosaur kind of reminds me of this crocodile Gaena, that's a pretty popular cartoon character in Russia, a friend of Cheburashka who's a craze in Japan now. He wears a hat and glasses and plays the accordion. I didn't base my Dino on him, but found some resemblance in retrospect, especially in how polite and awkward he is.
I'm getting a little terrified of how much cute stuff I've drawn lately. But I do like this dinosaur. There seems to be a little sad note about him, unlike the milk adventure drawings I am doing for my uncle, which are a stretch of how far I can take the ridiculously adorable absurdity of the poem. This sketch, though, seems a little more mine and when I work on more cartoony animations, I suspect they will take off from this style.

New Cartoony Sketches


This is the character of milk that runs away on an adventure. It's for my uncle Zhenya's children's poem. The girl below is also for an illustration for that book.


And just some stuff I drew with the influence of my job and their markers. Also had this little fox character that I wanted to post, but forgot to put it on my flash drive. It's so terrible without my own internet...

Tarusa


A digital painting of a little town Tarusa on the bank of the Oka river in Russia, very close to where I'd spend my summers as a kid. The church in the background had been destroyed during the Soviet rule and has been under reconstruction for as long as I remember.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

After It's Over


Doodled this in the middle of the night after three glasses of wine...

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Weird Room


(Work in progress... since high school)

Richmond Series



Another book I want to make in the next year is a look around Richmond and Northern Virginia without any character development, portraiture or introspect. Simply record of the city. Ispired by the collection of woodcuts of Frans Masereel.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Portraits of My Russian Friends

These are the portraits of my friends I drew right after I got back from my trip to Moscow. It isn't a complete series. They need some more work on shading, and there are a few friends that are still left out.


 
 


One thing that has happened as a result of this series is that I want to combine it with the old love-lorn drawings I did for the book "Anima," which was intensely personal and revolved around my internal states and visions, so to speak. The Russian series started my experimentation with attempting to show my take on the person's inner world, or at least their energy in their relationship to me. I am now continuing my work on "Anima," expanding it to include these portraits, many more people and more dream visions.

Anima


The series entitled “Anima” in its completion is meant to be a book, but at this point it is a collection of scans, sketches and thumbnails. I started working on it my freshman year of college, and I believe it to mark a certain turning point in my art, specifically my realization of the themes and the metalogic of dreams that have always preoccupied me and informed the process by which I construct an image. “Anima” from an obsession has come to be a sanctuary in a certain sense, where I am free to explore as deep as I want having come to realize that the laws that govern this explorative creation are consistent, intuitive, and mine.
The cover page for the series started out as a high school senior project for which I spent a class sketching in the band room and later produced some finished pieces using the sketches as reference. While some of the pieces actually incorporated the things I observed visually, this image came from a different sort of observation. It was at first a mere allegory for music, but later on became apparent as an image that is as connected to me as dream that lets you know everything you deny while awake. I believe it to be appropriate for the cover page of “Anima” because it is an introduction into the process of image formulation the series have come to be structured on. It may be mistaken for self-consious symbolism but mataphor is the air of this world I reveal not its translation. It has very little to do with what I have learned of Tarot, or Jung, or Lacan or the subconsious, for it has everything to do with what I do NOT know.
This is my folklore.

From a collection of invasively intense mystery obsessions such as these:



the content of Anima is going to evolve to explore a wider range of emotion and connection. And, as it will include the Russian series, and the following doodles once they are complete, it will have to be a blend of the loose and comforting in appearance pencil work that delivers a good illusion of physical space with the meticulous line work above with which space becomes only a container for the invisible.




Oh and the bruja is back. I think at this point her character is the most solid representation of the wisest part of me. And in that sense, Anima is her.

Firehorse


This is a sketchbook piece I did last Spring. Must be the kind of thing I would always draw if I were always happy.

Monday, July 9, 2007

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Tyler and Alex





Caricatures




Working at King's Dominion as a Caricature Artist


It's an interesting summer job. For the first few weeks of working there I felt as though I was stuck in the date I had at the park a long long time ago. Funnel cake stands and Rocky music and the heat in the snippets of those slightly uncomfortable instances when you suddenly know you have been in this place before and you would be much happier about it if the passage of time and your life travels made just a bit more sense in conjunction.
But gradually everything became routine, of course. Watching people adamantly having fun because they paid their good money for it is probably the most redeeming part of having all my time taken up by the long commute and the sketching and the standing. I meet people I normally probably wouldn't, even though I am not one to avoid conversations with strangers by default. It is simply that people seem to be in a very special state at a theme park where excitement and moneysqweezing is pumped into them at every corner, while they can enjoy the comfort zone of their friends and family and act like a park employee is at best a fun dispenser who of all things is definitely not human enough to expect any politeness. I suppose I am saying that it is fun watching people be rude to me, but that is just the worst case scenario. Some are very nice and rich.
Anyway, before I start musing about the experience of being a sales person which I am not morally o.k. with but seem to have a knack for, I am going to post some sketches I did after I started working as a "caricature artist." If anybody ever suspected me of being capable of drawing only realistic sad-looking naked people, here, see some variety.
Next thing to study for me is drawing clothes. Drawing from John Galliano and his madness.