Construction for Firstdraft show

The very long and emotionally draining process of building the corner wall! All made possible through my partner Chris Ross' help, expertise and studio!  The photographs were taken during just a few stages of prep including gauging what height the shelves should be, painting the walls and putting the skirting on at Firstdraft Gallery.

Evolution of an image

Long time no post, but I have a lot of news and images so this week will be chock full of entries! I wanted to break pace a little bit with my sketches so here are some process shots of the charcoal portrait I had in the show at Monstrosity Gallery! (It also made its way into a magazine! but I will write more about that later)

Hopefully you can still pick out details and follow the evolution of this image despite the bad quality of the photos. Dodgy as they may be they still show crucial moments in the rendering of the face as well as some of the drastic changes I made between stages.

I had been working on this image for a while and had some interesting marks happening, but it wasn't moving anywhere and at the end of the day it was just a slushy indistinct collection of facial features. So I clarified where I wanted the head and the shoulders to be with some strong lines. After solidifying my guideline I was able to push the image because I was confident on the placement of the face.

Most of the fun happens in the beginning when I am just throwing water and smearing charcoal around trying to find patterns I like from the resulting mess. I draw a face and then water it, let it dissolve for a while and then re draw and then let it partially melt again. Then I slowly piece the image together from these leftovers like a fortune teller with tea leaves.

Towards the end I make smaller and smaller adjustments, slowly becoming more afraid of my image and a little too precious with it. Some images die this way. I get too hesitant to change certain areas and I get into a stalemate, where I can't move the picture forward without somehow damaging my favourite part.

Thankfully this one went quietly, though before when I had been pushing it to be a young female with four eyes it had rightly argued. You can still see traces of this in the earliest image's luscious lips and the thinness in the face.

This work is titled The Swimmer and as I said before was on display at Monstrosity Gallery's Portrait exhibition. During the show there was an artist talk and small get together over some munchies. A video was made of some of the artists (me included). Hopefully this video will eventually see the light of day and you'll be able to hear me describe some of the thoughts that go into my drawings.

Printed portraits

I've been doing a few etchings recently to make use of the printing studios at my University before they close down for the holidays. As you can see it's mostly experimental stuff, not the usual tightly and neatly drawn etchings I'm used to doing. These portraits are sort of overflow inspiration from some of my charcoal work which I hope will be finished sometime early next year if I get a studio space. Otherwise will update you with a few close ups and process works as I go along.

Process pictures

More process images!

I am trying to simultaneously experiment and build a new body of work with my charcoal portraits.  This is the most recent and I have to say my easy favourite.  He's gotten straight onto my website and I also entered him into Blanket Magazine's Portrait challenge.  (They are amazing go take a look) I heard of the challenge before making him and I wanted to do more charcoal works so I decided to do some double duty.  Hopefully he'll get accepted.  

He is also working for me in my attempt in gaining a student grant, and will probably be pushed into the Mosman or the Waverly Art Prize in the near-distant future. 

A very busy picture.   

Quite a few people ask me: how do you get it to look like water is dripping down it?

Answer: I drip water on it.

I hope that didn't spoil the image for anyone, some people like to not know how something is made, ruins the magic.

I feel the same about most technological and scientific events, inventions or general know-how.  If you ask me how the internet works I can safely tell you: by magic.  And that is all I have to know.  Frankly I feel like knowing too much background info sometimes kills of the mystique of life.  Apart from quantum physics, evolution and the big bang. That shit is awesome.

But I love knowing how people make images, hence the process pictures.  And I get all miffed when artists try to hide how they made something so someone can't copy them.  I swear I just want to know how they make it!  I'm not going to copy! (maybe a little bit...stingy artists...)  

But Folks get ready to try this at home,

if you draw on canvas you can use the special charcoal eraser,

but you can also you water!  

I use water and a sponge.

If I need to clean up a lot of charcoal I use a scouring sponge.

That's just cleaning up though, 

you can also use water as a mark making device.

Throwing water, swirling it around, etc.

The water picks up the charcoal, 

and dry pigment + water = "paint"

so there are marks of the water's path, kind of like weak gritty ink. 

I've used water in some my other charcoal drawings,

so try take a look and spot them.

Alright,

hope that was useful to some of you, 

or will encourage someone to be more adventurous with their charcoal or drawing.

Cheers,

jess b

Process

Final

First of all, I am sorry for such a long post, but I think it is so much easier to see a progression in an art work when you can just scroll up and down. Rather than having to add all these different images together in your head.  Second of all I am sorry for some of the quality, focusing (or lack of), and the position of the image.  I took them with my camera phone.  

Nevertheless I wanted to share.  I get a bit annoyed when I see beautiful polished work on blogs, its nice.  But I also want to see the crap and hard work and how it looked before it turned out great.  I think its important to see stages of a work, and also learn how different people solve different visual issues.   

This is a personal piece that I started and finished recently.  I was really inspired by Melanie's work, you can't see the crazy things she thinks up and creates so much on her blog, which is a shame.  But in real life she is crazy about hair.  Human hair.  She makes giant skipping ropes out of it and braids balloons together with it.  She has a scary work place at COFA filled with hair sculptures and hair objects which happen to be horrible and beautiful at the same time. 

Very strange.

From her I got a strong image of a guy with this giant beard simply extending down off his face and consuming his neck and chest, as you can see that never manifested itself.  I tried: and it looked shit.  Also a while after I started I went to the MCA drawing show and saw Laith McGregor.  My internal image wasn't exactly the same as his bearded men, but they were very similar so I was a bit disheartened to follow through with my hairy man.

In the end however he turned out being devoid of hair, which I found quite amusing. 

This was done in charcoal on canvas.  And if the last one looks a bit funny it's because I didn't grayscale it and I was trying to be quite delicate with the levels tool, it is amazingly hard to get the tonal values right.

Hope you enjoy, I will be putting up more phone camera process images later.

Process Work for A Float of Crocodiles

Earlier this year I was part of a group exhibition called 'A Murder of Crows'.  It was a show based on collective animal nouns and, as promised, this is the process work for my image.  

The first image isn't much, but usually it never is.  

I researched into various animal nouns and the one that struck me the most was 'a float of crocodiles'.  I had a wonderful image of crocodiles that had camouflaged themselves as pool toys.  So I did a small sketch and moved on from there to get images of crocodiles and children that would fit into my rough composition.

After finding a few resource images I made a rough composition and continued to refine it until I was happy.  Since it was a very complex image I did the first few sketches by hand but then surrendered to photoshop.  I am very particular about composition so this was probably the longest-or at least the hardest-part of the process.

    
   
Usually I know what 'style' or 'look' I am going for, and the composition follows this knowledge.  But this time I didn't know if I wanted to go for a fairly realistic image or follow a style more derivative of children's illustrations.  I did want a particularly happy perky image to off-set the horrible fact that children were obliviously swimming with crocodiles.

 So I looked up various advertisements and played around with watercolours till I was happy.  

(the kid below on the right looks like the cover boy of Mad Magazine!)

I decided on the kid on the bottom right hand corner, watercolours with a pencil outline.  I had originally wanted to screen print the image, but as the composition got more complicated and the costs started to count off in my head I decided to go with a more familiar medium.  But with the strong pencil outline and the big washes of colour I felt like this style was close to my earlier idea.   

I tested a few images with this style and felt the water was looking crap.  So in the end to get the right 'flatness' similiar to screen printing I used acrylics; and when that didn't work I used the computer.  I showed the above image to the rest of the 'murderous crow' crowd and got some lovely feedback.  Everyone felt it would work better if the crocodiles were less visible on first glance.  (To get more of a 'Where's Wally' sort of effect)  And I agreed with them completely.  So after making my crocodiles much more green I did the final image.     

and Ta Dah! the final image!

Don't you want to buy yourself a Crocodile float?