Campfires

Work In Progress - shiny things

This looks kinda neat...

Cumulus Discord - How Did We Get To This?

I made these drawings as a CD booklet for my friend Alexander's forthcoming album.

It was a really fun project to work on. His album is basically about his own life, but a little dramatized and fictionalized and exaggerated. The songs start in the present and then reach back into the past, going further back each time, to try to answer the question of how he ended up where he is now. I felt like he gave me a whole lot of license to interpret the story, like I could make a mini-comic that goes with his album, but doesn't have to follow the facts exactly.

Deciding that I couldn't handle working in backwards-order like the songs go, I told a story of a young man who goes through different life phases, starting long ago, and living in a sped-up history. It's as though each year in this guy's life is 20 years apart in history. Or maybe each panel shows a different person living at a different time. Really, I just wanted to be able to draw different time periods. Because that's fun. And in a way, the time periods I chose kind of go with the spirit of each drawing.

So, the story as I saw it, with influences in parentheses:

A young peasant rejects his parents and leaves home (Hogarth); he and a friend become outlaw cowboys;

he is betrayed and thrown from a ship and gnawed by vicious sea monsters, or goes through drug withdrawal (scary-Romanticism like Goya); he washes ashore and faces life with new hope/recovers from addiction (Rationalism, World Fair architecture, Paris);

he falls in love (Romanticism, pastoral scenes with shepherds and shepherdesses, although I tried to make the lovers' posture less dominant/submissive than most of the historical examples); but the relationship starts to end/become distant (1920s phones and hairstyles and hookahs);

he has fun with friends but starts to see omens of change in his life (1950s, creepy amusement park mechanical fortuneteller); he realises the freedom to make mistakes and take risks and that things end but don't really (1970s spacewhales cosmic trippy journey);

he acts recklessly and doesn't realise the damage he's causing (1980s Ferris-Bueller style parade/marching band mayhem); he looks out his window and contemplates his life (modern-day Vancouver in winter).

campfires number one

Plastics

This is a followup to the last piece. It depicts jellyfish and plastic in the ocean. I am happy with it, except for the fact that I intended to have a more interesting shape in the end, rather than just filling up the whole page with one rectangle!

My works seem to be seen best from a short distance, and have little contrast to attract anyone from 30 feet away. I heard in a lecture once that a work of art should be interesting from all different distances. I must try to overcome this need to fill up the whole page!

loose leaf

My latest watercolour drawing. I am glad it's different from the usual stuff I do, and I think the colours are very successful. In terms of being significant or having meaning, it doesn't really. It just looks pretty in an interesting way. I feel like it should be on a t-shirt, or a curtain, or the packaging for looseleaf tea. The composition is definitely a bit too rectangular overall.

Recently I laid out all my recent drawings, and realised that they don't look good from afar. The shapes aren't interesting and there isn't enough significant blocks of dark or white - contrast from afar. I guess my drawings are meant to be seen at the distance of reading a book, for example.

fitting together

The first version of this drawing was freehand, without much forethought. Basically a doodle. I liked it, so I remade it about three more times, trying to make it better planned-out, and fitting together more. I'm pretty happy with it in the end.

I see it as an illustration for a non-specific fairytale in which adults and animals are the enemies of children, and adolescents are unsure what to do about it.