Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Illustration Friday topic: Stay

“Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them.” ~ Jim Carrey

To view the animated dilemma double click on the smaller image to the right. 

 

This week’s creativity was inspired by a bunch of friendly colourful chooks I came across, running wild in the North Coast great outdoors.    

 

Medium: Ink, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator & Flash

Artist’s Block? – sketchbook to the rescue

Illustration Friday topic: Remedy

Double click on the sketchbook illustration on the right to view larger.
The animated .gif records this week’s creative evolution. Double click, on the smaller image below.  

 

“To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy” ~ Hippocrates.

Well, it is, and it isn’t. The case can be made for doing something, anything, on the chance that you might stumble upon the remedy.   

Healing is not only a matter of time, but also opportunity.Take the case of Artist’s block. Getting out the sketchbook, picking up a pencil, and loosely experimenting with random thoughts, opens up a realm of possibilities. Blank pages, ready for the artist to free-associate, and connect with the pure pleasure of drawing! This raw expression can lead to unexpected tangents and accidental ideas.

Our neighbours’ creative remedy for this season’s abundant choko crop, a richly flavoured, spicy choko chutney, has made it into the sketchbook. A stand-out visually, it deserved a simple label to set off the deep orange colouring, and a sprouted choko which hadn’t made it into the pot, as a sidekick.

After quickly composing the label, I played with pen, pencil, and acrylic paint, watercolour style. I took the outlines into the computer and used Adobe Illustrator to create areas of flat, coloured shape. There may be nowhere to take the idea from here, but the directness and immediacy of this type of unfiltered rough is enough in itself.

Melissa Mackie’s delicate watercolour was my initial inspiration to make this unusual vegetable a sketch-worthy subject.

A note about sketchbooks: For those of us constantly making images, it’s inspirational to be given the opportunity of viewing the visual thinking revealed in the journals of other artists. Sketchbooks may contain the first thoughts of a project as the mind wanders randomly around the outskirts of an idea. Scribbles, experimental chaos, clippings, notations, significant thoughts, structured diagrams….reveal ambitious plans for a concept. Some artists use the blank pages for loosening up before settling down to a more disciplined approach to a more formal project.

I recently came across this impressive website, Book by its Cover, which has a notable sketchbook section. There are many links to travel through in this site, so much to explore in the world of books. To make revisiting this site easy, the link appears on my Blogroll.

Artist’s Books

 For centuries artists have been involved in printing and the production of books. But, the Artist’s Book, intended as a work of art in itself, is essentially a late 20^th century form of artwork. Realised in the form of a book or book-like object, it may be constructed as a one of a kind art piece or as a small edition.

The artist has a large amount of control over the finished work. Artist’s books have been constructed in many forms: the traditional bound book, a concertina layout, the scroll, the folded form, a box containing loose pages….In all of its various guises Artist’s Books are creative, aesthetic and tactile.

The  roll-up Artist’s Book below, is of a fictional street, Homestead Avenue, part of my ‘Mapping Ithaka’ project. I’ve  treated each section of the street a little differently. Some parts are represented in pencil, other sections in ink, and others in paint, some are colourful, others toned down in sepia. After joining the sections together the whole book rolls up to a very compact ‘baton’ size, and rolls out to be several metres long.And, a concertina version of my pencil sketches:

Midsummer Night–the animation

Illustration Friday

“… this is very midsummer madness” – William Shakespeare

To play the animated .gif, double click on the smaller image below right.

At one time in the past, new to Australia, I remember thinking bats were exotic, hanging like monster black cocoons during the day from the Fig trees in Darwin. But my response to this week’s Illustration Friday topic is inspired by a recent summer in the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales, when thousands of bats discovered an abundant food source in a nearby mangrove swamp and took up residence for the season.

Summer in this part of Australia is unbelievably hot and humid, but evening walks were out of the question with the risk of being hit by a swooping bat. The sky was black and alive. And the noise! Sleep was elusive. Bats are considered endangered, and enjoy protected status within Australia.

Animation enthusiasts may be interested in Brett Bean’s Art Blog, a great blog site with useful information, tutorials and links.

Launch – an animation

Illustration Friday topic ‘Launch’

The idea behind the image above (one frame of an animation) is to illustrate a group of birds launching themselves en masse from a leafy tree. To play the animated .gif, double click on the image to the right.
Medium: Watercolor, Ink, Pencil, Photoshop, Adobe Flash
For animation enthusiasts: an illustration Friday artist, Leah Palmer Preiss, who does beautiful book illustrations on collaged maps and text, is just beginning some studies in Flash animation, and is giving us the opportunity to follow her progress and experiments via  her curiousillumination blog.

Windswept – a radically edited animation

Illustration Friday topic ‘Swept’

This week I assembled an animation to try out as many features of Flash as I could within the one file, which would still make sense as windswept chaos when played. A wind-blown beach umbrella, deck chair, sun hat, thong, grass and flower……were pulled together using motion tweens, shape tweens, fades and rotations. And I experimented with importing various types of files: .gif, .png, .psd, and .ai. But finally, at 550px X 400px, 144 frames, 12 frames per second, the exported animated .gif amounted to 11 mb, a bit large to upload. But it was fun. I did learn a lot. And I like the result. My journal pages show the scheme. (Double click to enlarge)

I have radically edited the Flash file to post a few frames. The image below looks uninteresting as a static frame, but double click on the image and I hope the animated .gif will give you the basic idea.

Medium: Watercolor, Ink, Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Flash

Shadow Jumping

This weeks Illustration Friday   topic ‘Shadow’ (see previous post)prompted more practice with animation.  Double click on the image and I hope the animated .gif will play for you. It may go a little slow at first until it’s fully loaded.