Ink Dots Black Spots

Once again I have neglected my blog, and as with my last post I have dusted off my keyboard to tell you about a group art show I have a piece in. This time it’s a Melbourne based show conceived by lovely local artist Simple Sime, involving 50 artists from 15 different tattoo studios around Australia and New Zealand. All artists were instructed to create a piece of art in plain black ink on white, which would then be screen-printed by Dangerfork for the exhibition.  A limited edition of 20 signed and numbered prints per piece will be for sale, and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the Cancer Council of Victoria. An impressive list of the artists involved  and other relevant details can be found on the website here.

I really enjoyed the challenge of creating a piece without the smooth gradients I usually employ to give depth and tone. I’ve always wanted to try plain ink work for the purpose of screen-printing, but have shied away from it for that very reason – I still think I’m better at drawing and painting in my usual style, but I think having tried this method I’ll experiment with it some more. I will happily admit to being strongly influenced by gorgeous poster artist David D’Andrea with this piece, one of my favourite illustrators whose prints I have hanging both at home and above my bench at the tattoo studio. As he works almost exclusively with black ink I thought of his posters often for much needed guidance. 

(click to enlarge)

The concept was something I’d been planning for a while, and that I felt could be re-imagined fairly well for a detailed, line-heavy drawing. Passionflowers are by far my favourite flower and a treasured herb in my personal pharmacopeia. I fell in love with them after their gentle sedative effects saved me from crippling anxiety as a teenager, and have used them ever since (though these days it’s mostly for insomnia). They are truly beautiful and amazing flowers, rather like strange organic space ships…and as if that weren’t enough, they also give us sweet, delicious passionfruit! For some reason I can’t discern, I’m infatuated with portraying fruits that have been torn open by birds, exposing their flesh and seeds. So…without wanting to delve too deep into what that’s all about, that’s how my disorganised ideas about those things managed to become a halfway organised drawing.

Some close-ups of the detail in the flowers and nest:

 

Hopefully some of you will like the print  (or someone else’s) enough to buy one and help out a worthy cause. The exhibition opens on Thursday August 16th at The Vic Bar in Abbotsford, and all prints are reasonably priced at $60. Would be great to see some of you there.

Amanita print.

Not sure if I posted about this painting on here when I first did it, but it's my first finished watercolour painting of an Amanita muscaria mushroom, and Shaun and I have just made prints of it. You can read more about it and order them from our paypal store over at Lepus Luna. 

Live to work, work to live.

Ok, so I'm pretty much a complete workaholic: I derive most of my pleasure in life from work-related activities, be they actual paid work or extra-curricular activities like botanical drawing. Even when I'm not working, my idea of a relaxing evening is writing about said work in this blog...sad but true. Still, even I have my limits and I think last week I nearly reached them.; in a single week I spent about 60 hours in the tattoo shop, 18 hours at my plant dissection workshop, and another 10 or so hours at home drawing for my appointments. Still, if I hadn't done all that work, what the hell would I post about on here? Besides, I'm working this hard to save funds for a very exciting trip to the UK that I'll write in detail about on here soon. In the meantime, here are a few pics of what I've been working on lately.

Poppies around Kate's zebra:

 Some lotus flowers for Katherine:

Anthony's pirate ship...what's kraken?

Vampire lady for Maddi...will look a bit nicer healed. The text says 'cursed beauty':

 A tribute to the lovely Anneke, on her also lovely husband Ryan:

A six-armed dingo goddess back-piece for my fellow belly dancer Briohny: final design is a little different but didn't get a photo.

And...an homage to the mothership for the epic photo-collage album cover that Shaun and I are working on for our good friend Ishan. More on that soon.

I have a bunch of other new photos on different cameras around the place, but have been lazily using my phone camera for most stuff lately. More pics coming up when I get around to it.

The secret teachings of plants.

As if in obedient response to my recent expression of interest in illustrations of plant dissections, my botanical illustration teacher Mali held a plant dissection workshop over the course of three days last week. As it turns out, she teaches them over summer every year; but I'm not going to let that ruin my enjoyment of the coincidence.  I was particularly happy that it would be Mali teaching this course, because I'm extremely fond of her and find her love of scientific drawing contagious. This is an example of an exquisite Boronia painting with dissections by Mali:

Needless to say, I was very excited to be learning these skills and was determined to get as much out of the course as I could. I managed to scrounge up enough pennies for an old stereo microscope that I found on ebay, and swindled a free dissection kit from my kindly vet-student sister Kate. Although was looking forward to it immensely, I actually enjoyed dissecting and observing plants even more than I had anticipated; and despite the fact that I barely managed to dissect and illustrate the inner workings of a single flower over the whole workshop, when the three days were up I was left wishing it wasn't over. Three days of staring at such microscopic detail ended up feeling like three hours, and I felt as though I would need another month to actually complete what I was trying to draw...which amounted to little more than a few pencil sketches and some notes:

Just to deliberately confuse and challenge myself, being the contradiction-loving Gemini that I am, I chose to read a book called The Secret Teachings of Plants on my way to and from the workshop. The book, a gift from my very dear friend Jerome, discusses the limitations of science to accurately describe nature, and specifically plants. Not that the book dismisses science altogether, as it necessarily covers a lot of scientific ground, but it does call into question the sense of certainty that people derive from the process of scientific reductionism. I haven't finished the book yet, but what I read of it served as a nice reminder during those three days that I was merely observing patterns that frequently occur in nature, rather than discovering cold hard facts that were indisputable.

So anwyay, onto what I did during the workshop: first up was pulling apart a lily and bud to see what a fairly simple flower looks like when pulled intro it's various sections. I was rather pleased to be working with lilies, as the ones we used were very similar to the gorgeously scented Stargazer lilies that I had in my wedding bouquet, and that I am familiar with from years of drawing them. As I'm sure many of you have noticed, these flowers have one of the most visible reproductive systems of any plant you're likely to see:

Once we'd pulled them apart and identified the various parts - petals, sepals, stamens, anthers, stigmas, styles...then we got to cut them up and look at them under a microscope. It was pretty awesome. I can't show you any images from under the microscope because mine is a rather old one (there are new digital ones with a usb cable you can connect to the computer), but maybe that's better anyway - all the more reason to draw what I'm seeing accurately so there's no need for photographic documentation. We learned a fair bit about basic botany on the first day, and about how images are sized, scaled and arranged on a page both for scientific and artistic purposes.

On the second day we got to dissect flowers from the daisy family, and happily Mali had brought Echinacea flowers which happen to be another one of my favourites. Echinacea was my introduction into the world of herbalism, a subject close to my heart, and I've always loved the flowers as a symbol of that initiation. Like lots of things I love, I originally thought they were weird and not particularly beautiful at all, which I think is what makes me all the more fond of them now.

 

 

 The reason Mali had chosen daisies for us to dissect is because they're thoroughly complicated, as I soon found out. The really interesting thing I discovered about the Echinacea was that the actual flowers - ie the section of the plant containing the male and female parts used for reproduction - were in fact covering the entire surface of the spiky receptacle in the centre.  This was not one flower, but many flowers combined, and the long orange spines that protrude from each flower are just the bracts. This meant that dissecting one of these tiny flowers in order to find out how it reproduces involved picking one of them up with tweezers and cutting it in half under the microscope. In the cross-section below, each of the orange spines represents one flower, and the halved seeds can be clearly seen at the base of each one:

 

flowers and bracts:

 

  

Each flower was only about 9mm tall and 1mm wide. Below you can see my sketch of a seed on the far left, then a flower in the middle, and a bract on the right, all magnified by 10. I couldn't believe how long it took to draw those simple little things, and it occurred to me that perhaps I was taking more care and spending more time observing rather than drawing because I knew I didn't have the benefit of photographs that I could refer to later.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to take my echinacea specimens home after the class due to current restrictions on plant matter leaving the gardens, but I have them sitting in the fridge at the botanical garden observatory where my classes are held, and I intend to squeeze some more drawing time out if them before they perish. Hopefully one day I'll have time to complete a full scale painting of an echinacea in colour, and with all the dissections and individual parts illustrated also. One day.

La Louve art prints.

Limited edition of 23, up now on the Lepus Luna website if anyone’s interested. AUD$160 shipping included.

Lepus Luna

So if you've noticed that I haven't been posting here as much of late, that would be because I've been busily working on an exciting new project with my husband Shaun, which we've named Lepus Luna. Motivated in part by the desire to spend more of our time working together from home, as well as by the numerous requests we've received for prints of our respective paintings and photographs, Lepus Luna will be a mutable space that can accommodate whatever we're working on at any given time, either individually or together. This is our brand new logo!

The most significant move we've made towards getting this thing off the ground is the purchase of a large-format digital printer that is capable of reproducing artworks and photographs at museum quality standards - commonly known as giclée printing. Not only will this make it possible for us to make our personal art available to people, it will eventually give us the opportunity to help other artists we know and admire to make prints of their work as well. With the photo-editing skills and printing knowledge that Shaun's been gaining at his photography course, he's able to achieve printed results that are as close to the original artwork as possible, which has always been a challenge for me in the past.

As we are both still working full time, progress with this thing is going to be slow, but we plan to have our first print available before Christmas this year - a very limited edition of my painting from earlier this year called La Louve, signed and numbered with some hand-painted gold detailing. Check out our new blog and follow by RSS, or like our facebook page if you're keen to get updates on prints and other things we're doing.  Cheers!

Chapel Tattoo flash set

All of us at Chapel Tattoo were recently asked to paint a sheet of flash for a shop set, which I thought was an excellent idea. I’m really glad we were made to do it because I’ve always meant to try painting flash, but  never did for some unknown reason. I’m not sure my style of painting is very suitable for it, and I definitely added some embellishments here and there that you wouldn’t bother trying to put in a tattoo, but I think the designs could easily be modified or adapted to be tattoo-able, which I guess is the idea anyway. Whether they end up being used or not, I had fun painting this sheet and might even try doing some more one day.

I’d been playing with some small sketches of magic and witchcraft inspired images for some time, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to flesh them out.

The full page: (click for bigger res images)

Mandragora, or mandrake. I am super fascinated by the folklore and mythology surrounding this plant, so will probably paint more of them in time.

The spider lady was an excuse to paint a lady face with some creepy extra eyes and legs; I like images of animals crossed with humans, or humans wearing animal pelts, because to me it suggests the transformation of a witch or shaman into their animal form.

Hissing kitty. Included because it’s a popular image for tattooing, and because cats are common familiar animals. And because, well, it’s a cat.

Ritual objects. Once again, skulls are such a timeless tattoo image that you can’t really go wrong with them; I included the other objects to resemble a ritual alter setting.

Hand of Glory.  This is an intensely strange and grim piece of folklore that you can read about here.

Voodoo doll or poppet. This was inspired by a protective doll that a friend made for Shaun, and that has always fascinated me. I feel like the creation of dolls for magical purposes is a really powerful and intuitive way of working that I’d like to try some day.

 

This sheet was mostly painted with Indian and Sepia inks on Arches watercolour paper, with a few touches of white gouache which was originally there to cover some boo-boos, but that I included more of because I like the blue-ish colour it created. The background was painted with good old black coffee dregs from my stovetop coffee maker. I’m not sure what’s happening with the prints of this set, but when I do know I’ll be sure to post the details up. I saw all the finished sheets the other day and it’s really nice seeing all the contrasting styles and personalities in our shop reflected in the designs.

Painting and cats.

Trying hard to get these cat paintings done, but Monty seems determined to get in the way.

 

So far I have outlined three of these and haven’t ruined any of them, which is a good start…although I did have a near miss last weekend when I stood up after painting for a while and discovered that the end of my plait had been resting in a pot of black ink.  I’ll just add that to my long list of stuff not to do, along with keeping spray bottles of coffee lying around.

While I’m on the subject of painting though, I’m going to indulge in a post about materials that most of you will find boring. But it’s really cold and wet outside, and I have so much trouble finding the right stuff to paint with that I feel compelled to share it when I find something great; and I have actually found a few things lately that make my life as a painter a lot easier.

Firstly, any of you who work with paper will know that masking tape which claims to be ‘low tack’ is very rarely useful. Either it peels half your paper off with it after you’ve spent hours on a painting, or it’s so low-tack that paint seeps under areas that you were trying to mask. So I recently splurged on a roll of $20 masking tape, recommended to me by the nice lady at the art suppliers, and I am super glad that I did. The blue stuff you can see in the photo above is a brand called hyStik, and as you can see from their website, these guys are serious about masking tape. I bought the long-lasting one, which means I can stick my painting down with it and leave it there for 14 days before the tape starts getting harder to peel off. So far every time I’ve used it I’ve been able to get it off easily, with no paper tears or sticky residue, and all the edges I’ve masked with it have been perfectly clean. This in particular is of vital importance to me because of the paintings I do where certain parts of the image extend beyond the masked edge, like the wolfsbane piece I did recently:

Another thing I’m pleased with having found recently are brushes with ergonomic handles. One of the things I found incredibly frustrating over my one-month painting holiday was that after a certain period of painting or drawing, my hand was so sore, and particularly my thumb and middle finger where the brush/pencil rests, that I was constantly forced to stop and let it recover. Even layers of band-aids on both my fingers and the brushes are not enough to prevent this from happening, because I like doing work with loads of tiny details and have to use the smallest brushes, which also generally have the thinnest handles.

SO, I went hunting on the internet for brushes with fat handles, having seen some before in a similar post to this on the rather excellent Wandering Genie, and after hours of searching I found some. This picture is of larger brushes, but the handle on the 000 brush I bought is the same size.

Within Australia, these Roymac Purity bruishes are the only ones I can find (which is fine because Roymac make good brushes), but on Dick Blick in America I managed to find several brands that make a range of wide-handled brushes, mostly for detailing. I ordered a bunch of different ones that haven’t arrived yet, but they look excellent. The ones I’m most excited about are these:

The brand is Robert Simmons Expression Series, and these spotter brushes are smaller than any brushes I’ve found in Australia. They’re also a hell of a lot cheaper, like most things in the States, but the cost of having them shipped here cancels that out somewhat. So far the work I’ve done with the Roymacs has been far more comfortable so I’m looking forward to getting these.

Also making my life way easier these days is Saral Graphite Transfer Paper, which I only recently discovered:

Until now I have been using a glass-top table from Ikea with a desk-lamp underneath it to trace images onto my painting paper, and when I’m using toned paper or really thick card it doesn’t work well at all. For anyone who hasn’t used it, this stuff is re-usable and comes in a roll, so you can cut a piece that fits your paper and just trace right over the top of it. I’ve been using computer print-outs of the line drawing and tracing it though with a ball-point pen. The greatest benefit of doing things this way is that you’re not actually placing a pencil on the paper, and therefore avoiding the tiny grooves and scratches they cause on the surface, which annoyingly show up after putting colour down or rubbing something out.

I also just bought some stuff called Mask-It, similar to what Americans know as Friskit, which is a masking film for use with airbrushes and the like. Apparently it won’t damage paper and is useful for watercolour painting too. I haven’t tried it yet, but have some bits on these new cat paintings that I plan to mask out, so intend to try it in the next few weeks. 

If this doesn’t work though, I learned a good way to apply large areas of masking fluid from my botanical drawing teacher, which is to apply it with one of those rubber-tipped paint shaper thingies you can buy:

Anyone who has ever accidentally dipped an expensive brush into masking fluid will understand why it’s important to use one made of rubber, not hair.

So now that’s all off my chest,  I guess I’d better go do some painting. I have some technique/materials tips for graphite drawing that I might share down the track some times as well, if anyone finds this stuff useful. I’m always happy to share whatever knowledge I have with people who would like to know how I achieve certain effects in my work, and appreciate it when others do the same. The importance of good materials and knowledge of how to use them cannot be emphasized enough when it comes to painting and drawing, at least in my experience.

Botanical Illustration

I took my first ever class in botanical illustration today, at Melbourne's beautiful botanical gardens. I've been somewhat preoccupied with both natural history art and with plants for a while now, and this seems like the logical way to explore these interests. So far we've only done some sketches of gum nuts, but already I get the impression this is going to be a life-time passion, and something that feels natural and intuitive for me as an artist. There's something about the meditative process of observing nature so closely, and the discipline of replicating it as faithfully as possible, that I find really appealing - perhaps because the focus is on the inherent beauty and perfection of the subject, rather than on the artist.

For me, obsessing over how impossibly beautiful something is, whether it's a flower, a melody, a sentiment or another human being, is precisely what inspires me to make art in the first place. The art may not always resemble what I'm obsessing over, but profoundly emotive responses to things are always what inform my visions and stimulate my desire to put them on paper. It's only when my whole being is consumed with that kind of euphoria that I can make art that really feels alive and meaningful. I think this is why music provides me with the most inspiration of all - because as a visual artist it communicates to me in a way that feels entirely mystical and beyond my comprehension.

  

There's nothing nicer than recognising in another person the same creative impulses that I feel, but expressed in a completely different way, and I think that's why I have a tendency to become enamoured with artists who work in formats other than my own. People I find hugely inspiring like David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Justin Broadrick and Emil Amos are all operating from a sincere and deeply felt desire to express themselves, and they do so tirelessly and without compromise. Often it's their approach and dedication to their art that touches me more than the art itself, but the one commonality between them all is their ability to make me feel as though the world is essentially a beautiful place. Looking at some of the botanical art pictured, it's an easy thing to believe.

I scanned these images from a Taschen book called Garden Of Eden which was my birthday present from Shaun this year. Thanks babe.

Ballard Wisdom

"Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant."