Empty Night Skies

So I've been overseas for a month and haven't posted since. I have many stories to tell and pictures to show,  but in the meantime I wanted to post about Empty Night Skies, a bat-themed art show in Philadelphia that I have a piece in.

It's opening happens tonight I believe (I'm not good with the time-zone thing) and is being organised by a particularly awesome and talented lady named Jeanne and her (also awesome) partner Mike. The show is a benefit in aid of bats, as the poor critters are dying rapidly in that part of the world and are in dire need of help - you can read more about the plight of bats and Jeanne's reasons for doing this show on her own excellent blog here. You can also see the humbling list of participating artists, which includes the rather incredible Paul Romano whom some of you may know from Mastodon's first four album covers.

I really loved the idea of doing something a little more artistic with this piece, but knowing my rather time consuming working habits and having a really strict deadline before I left for Europe, I figured it might be best to stick with graphite pencil and a straight scientific study from a real bat - a style of drawing I feel comfortable with and that can be chipped away at over a number of weeks. I also figured the chances of someone else having done something similar were slim...here's hoping. You can click these images to enlarge:

detail:

This piece and many other excellent artworks will be for sale at Empty Night Skies, with all proceeds going to Bat Con, and I believe some artists will have prints to buy both at the show and perhaps online. I wasn't able to get prints ready in time for the exhibition, but I will make prints at some point soon and will donate a percentage of each sale to Bat Con. If you're interested in a print, keep your eye on Lepus Luna, and check out Empty Night Skies on Facebook.

 

Bat drawing

Started work on a drawing for a group exhibition that my friend Jeanne is putting on in Philadelphia. The show is a benefit for bats and hence carries a bat theme...I don't want to spoil things by showing the whole drawing, so I'll show you my little studio set-up instead, and a little sneaky peek at the progress on one of the wings. More about this soon.

 

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.

Art Sabbatical

So I've been away for a little while, having just taken a month off from tattooing so I'd have an opportunity to work on my personal art for a bit, and I was hoping to return with all sorts of new achievements and some personal paintings to show off. Frustratingly, my art sabbatical didn't quite go as planned, and despite the fact that I did nothing for a whole month other than sit in my little 'office' and draw/paint/read/take notes, I actually accomplished very little; most of the drawings I did are now filling up my recycling bin. All I really have to show for that time, aside from a notebook full of ideas that are primarily still half-baked, are three pieces, two of which were in the works before I took my break. The first piece I finished was a coloured pencil  illustration of my belly dance teacher Melusina, which she intends to use for a new business card and website:

While I am actually happy with how this turned out, the process of creating it was an epic disaster from start to finish, and it ate up an entire week of my break as a result. This image was in fact my third attempt, because I started two before it that both failed for various reasons, the main one being the paper I used. I won't go into a boring rant about art paper here because it's really not very interesting, but I will say that I have now learned a few painful lessons about the importance of choosing the right paper for my art work, and this drawing was the first. The second lesson was delivered during the final stages of the next piece I completed, which was another Amanita Muscaria mushroom:

You can't actually tell from this photo, but the paper in all the dark areas around the cap of the mushroom is torn to little shreds due to the paper being too soft for intensive pencil work. It's not a complete disaster because it's only by looking at the original in direct light that it shows - but it's still a massive bummer after 20+ hours of work, and it renders the original unsuitable for exhibiting. From now on, no matter what anybody tells me, I shall refuse to draw on anything less than Arches cotton rag watercolour paper - the only paper I've ever been truly happy with, and seemingly the only one that can withstand all the layers of burnishing and erasing required for this kind of pencil work. This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish I'd gone to art school, so maybe I'd know what the hell I'm doing.

So just in case those previous disasters weren't enough, I also ruined probably the best drawing I've ever done, and one that my botanical drawing teacher was hoping I would exhibit next year:

That stain there is coffee that dripped from a spray bottle I use for doing coffee washes on my paintings, and in all likelihood, it's never coming off. Be very glad you weren't all here to see the sad, teary tantrum I threw when I discovered that this had happened. I swear there's some kind of curse attached to my artwork because this kind of thing seems to happen to just about everything I do. Over the course of many years I've had art stolen, water damaged while in a gallery,  pissed on by my cat, and thrown in the bin (thanks Mum) along with all the indignities I seem determined to subject it to. Sometimes I think it's remarkable that I even persist with making it.

So anyway, as for my third accomplishment, that didn't quite go as planned either...but I've grown to expect that now so it wasn't such a big deal. I actually feel ok with how this one came up in the end, and the only real issue I had was due to an experiment I tried with using a sepia toned black ink rather than straight black.

(I'll get a better photo of this soon.) For this sort of work I always outline and shade the whole painting with varying dilutions of indian ink, then paint over that with watercolour; I thought using sepia would give the whole image a sort of subtle warmth, but in reality it just muddied the colours and meant I had to paint over a few bits with opaque ink, which is kind-of a no-no in watercolour painting. But who gives a shit, right?

This is the first in a series of paintings I'm working on that are based on poisonous/healing/visionary plants and the folklore surrounding them. Some of you nerds out there (I'm looking at you, Jeanne) will recognise these flowers as Wolfsbane, more commonly known as Monkshood, which is one of the most poisonous plants in the world. The mythology surrounding Wolfsbane includes everything from people using it to kill wolves, to people using it to protect themselves from werewolves, and most excitingly to me, people using it to become werewolves. The idea that witches practised lycanthropy by donning wolfskins and employing toxins from magical plants may seem far-fetched, but it's certainly a more interesting and inspiring reality than the one I encounter most days, so I'm choosing to indulge in it.

Aside from this excellent book I've been reading, I think some of my love for themes of this kind comes from one of my all-time favourite movies, Altered States, in which the main character experiments with altered states using psychedelics and isolation tanks. In one particularly memorable scene, he reverts back to a primitive being and breaks into the local zoo where he kills and eats an animal with his bare hands. For the uninitiated:



Ken Russell is fucking awesome.

So aside from doing the above pieces, I also started a series of drawings for another new series based on cats, sketched out some ideas for a potential folklore-themed flash set, received this extremely beautiful Austin Spare print from Shaun for my 30th birthday, and became infatuated with the Legendary Pink Dots. Some more stuff has happened since then, but it can wait for another post.

Flapper girl.

I was gonna tie this pic in with a blog post I've been working on about how awesome the 1920's were... but I don't have the time or the energy this week so that will have to wait. Outlined this on the lovely Andrea's leg last Monday, but forgot to take photos as usual.



Mushroom drawings part 1.

So this is how I spent my day yesterday. Probably close to 15 hours of it.

I had yet another all-day cancellation, and rather than try to find an appointment to fill it at the last minute I thought I’d stay home and draw. And I’m glad I did, because as luck would have it the mailman arrived early in the morning with an unexpected package for me, and it just happened to be an awesome drawing lamp my Mum had bought me with a daylight bulb in it and a magnifyer, which made the experience of drawing in my dingy little room a much nicer experience than it usually is.  Thanks Ma.

I think this is my best botanical drawing yet and it was loads of fun. (This is not a great photo but Shaun will be able to take a nice one later). A very pale, detailed line drawing with minimal shading was done from life in Adelaide a few weeks ago, and then I did the rest of the shading yesterday from reference photos that I took:

 
I’ve taken some artistic license with some of the shading and a few other things, like removing the little tears in the stem near the bottom because I like the ambience of the texture without them. One of the things I’ve really noticed, which is partly why you have to draw from life whenever possible rather than from photos, is that a camera lens simply cannot capture the same information that your eye is capable of taking in at any given time, so the photo references always differ a little from what you’ve drawn.
I think my next Amanita drawing is going to be in colour, either watercolour or coloured pencil. I really need to either get over my fear of paint, or switch to pencils altogether I think.  Either way, I’ll have more drawings to show you soon.

Keeping me busy.

So much stuff on the go at the moment, and with most of it unfinished it’s nice to review it all every now and then so I can feel like I’m going somewhere. This year I’m going to try and document my works in progress better so I have something tangible to show for all the work I’m doing.
A few new finished pieces:

This one is a full sleeve that I recently finished on my neighbour Michael, who is also getting the lily plant pictured further down. Angels are not something I’d usually be into, but Michael is ace and I really enjoyed doing it. Better pics of this soon.

Some works in progress:

ugly little dog portrait for Nique:

Loving this lyrebird sleeve on Nick, who I bond with over Can and Grails and The Black Angels:

Buddhist sleeve on Earl who finally just got this finished after 2 years or something. Better pics soon:

Something different for me – a sewing-themed sleeve for Anneke:

Stargazer lilies for Michael: so excited to tattoo a bulb on someone!

some sketches for tattoos I’ve started but don’t have good pics of yet: a super fun harpie for my lovely client and fellow tattooist Leonie:

strange Victorian tea-drinking wolf-man for Anthony:

an epic Kuan Yin back-piece for Caroline, who got it outlined today and sat like a trooper:

And completely unrelated, a drawing of some dandelion leaves that I have been working on for weeks in my botanical illustration class:

Now I don’t feel so bad about not having a life.

Cavewoman for Tori.

On Sunday I had the pleasure of starting this cavewoman tattoo, which is now fully outlined and partially shaded. I won't bother posting the progress photos because they turned out crap, but I will post the drawing, which took me a really super long time - mostly because I was attempting to translate a strong image that Tori had in her head. The cavewoman was loosely based on a character named Ayla, a cro-magnon huntress and medicine woman, from the first in a series of books by Jean M. Auel called The Clan of the Cave Bear.  I haven't actually read any of the books, but given my interest in all things primitive I was really keen to work on this piece with her. Although the process of designing it was difficult, this was a really rewarding tattoo, aided by the fact that Tori was exceedingly happy and appreciative of my efforts. I can't wait to finish it now.

 

Cave Bear Clan Ain't Nuthing Ta Fuck With!

Shell drawing.

This is a sort of Christmas present for my boss Jane, who loves seashells and has been very, very good to me this year. It's a good thing she doesn't read this blog, becaused if she did it would ruin the surprise. Although shells and skulls and things aren't botanical items, they fall under the same 'natural history' umbrella so we can draw them as part of our course if we want. They're nifty subjects in hot weather because they don't wilt and die like plants do. It's a pretty lame excuse, but my scanner really doesn't capture the details of these pencil drawings very well at all...they do actually look better than this.

Anyway...thanks Mama Jane, you're the best.