Art Monday: Seed Fossil Flax Flower

A detail view of one of the underlying drawings from my project, Sowing Seeds & Fossils.


The text written on drafting film in the image below says,

a. Nutrient- rich shell yields dark oil when pressed.
b. Flowers have ammolite-sheen on stalks, esp. at base.
c. Pleasing to my eye. I hope transfer works onto pumice.
d. Observed to crawl blindly up the sides of buildings to eavestroughs.

You can see the project and all it's layers here.


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: peek at my Jane Goodall portrait

This drawing is actually larger than my scanner. (Click to enlarge) It's part of the series I am tentatively calling Lights. You can see a photo of J. Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins at this post.

I am trying to tie-in a source of light on each scientist's head, and some sort of double helix shape in the backgrounds. For my second drawing project at York University.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Quick glance: Venter & Dawkins

A quick glance at two of the (hopefully) six portraits I'm doing for my drawing class at York U.

Left, J. Craig Venter, right, Richard Dawkins. Click-y to enlarge-y.
I'm thinking about calling the series, "Lights". I'm planning next to do Jane Goodall, Rosalind Franklin, Eugenie Scott and mmmmaaaybe, Carl Sagan.

Quality is somewhat sacrificed for time, but I suppose they're passable.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: Sowing seeds and fossils

This is a multi-media drawing project about York University's landscape. Once, southern Ontario was underwater. Many marine fossils can be found here, such as ammonites. More recently, the land was used for farming. Here, I am showing flax, a favourite of mine due to its use in oil painting.

This is Sowing seeds and fossils.
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It is constructed out of beechwood panels,
a piece of shale, various pumice mediums,
with acrylic matte medium transfers of the drawings,
chalk pastel, graphite and charcoal,
mylar and india ink,
.3mm mechanical pencil with HB lead on vellum-finish bristol,
with notes from scientific documents,
and notes from my sketchbook.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Fanboy Monday: superhero anatomy

When I originally posted this, I was squirrelly about infringing on copyrights, and so I called it a "Made-Up Hominid". I've tried to learn a lot about copyrights, both here in Canada and in the U.S. and a fan homage is another thing entirely. I own some moral rights to the art, but I may not profit from it since the character belongs to one of the comic companies. So. Time to "out" this drawing as the fanboy piece of art that it is. Should be easy enough. After the guess, I'll list the diagram notations that are absent in this picture (you can see the indicating lines) in the comments.

This art was done like, a gazillion years ago. Next week will feature some more new content.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: remembering my first time

I'll never forget the first time I felt my artwork had reached 'professional' quality.



Every piece of artwork on this blog was created after this one drawing. It is the second page of a narrative assignment done in my first year of Fine Arts at university. The series is called The Three Fates and the Acorns, and it consisted of 10 drawings in total. This was page 2, but the first part I had completed and I felt I had created something special.

I had been using .3mm leads since high school, and still had many unformed opinions about mythology, religion and folklore. I was using acorns as a motif that year, both to symbolize nascent wisdom and to represent birth. In the series, each of the three fates (Norse, Roman or Greek, I didn't specify) was dying due to acorns. The one above is drowning because a tiny cluster of acorns is tied to her toe. Fate defeated by wisdom.

Mainly I was really happy with the tightness and quality of my cross-hatching, and the minimal style of disconnected pieces of sinewy bodies.

On critique day, I was initially disheartened as our professor made his way around to see the work before group crit started. He said he didn't get it, it didn't flow, and it was up to me if I wanted to show it to the group. I insisted I should.

In group crit, I went through each piece. Some "ooo"'s, some comments about the line work. A couple of people agreed the deaths depicted in the series were misogynistic. I was taken aback by the accusation. Misogynistic! It had never entered my mind. (Some would say that's the problem, I suppose.)

The professor replied before I could. He had done a complete about-face on the series due to my presentation. He loved it! He began to vigorously defend it as decidedly not misogynistic and said that was overly dismissive, or some such. He marveled to the group that he had not "gotten it" when I showed it to him before crit.

After class, one of my female classmates stopped me to tell me that it was the most beautiful series of the year. A couple of others with her agreed. I left class with a huge rush at the overall responses. To this day though, I worry myself with possible misinterpretations of my art, particularly because so much is secular and science-based.

Sometimes I wonder. How much of the positive response was from my brief explanation, and how much from the images? Does it make the images less potent if they must be explained?

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Drawing Day!

It's Drawing Day! The goal is to remember how much fun it is to create and view drawings, and to upload a million online in one day!

Today I have two new pieces I'm working on, a recent sketch and one drawing from about a dozen years ago. Click to enlarge. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about each one: it's Drawing Day. Enjoy!
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My self-portrait I began this week. Still not done. Do I look intense or angry? A recent drawing for a piece I'm painting on a wood panel. It's a diatom fairy. A sketch for the Introducing Sara Chasm, as seen in the inaugural ART Evolved gallery on ceratopsians. Hmm. Lately I seem to have developed Derek Zoolander's problem of turning left. Not so in this old piece: one of the three fates, from a project on narrative I did while in university.
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Great stuff out there, take the next few days to look around on deviantArt, Redbubble, and more through the Drawing Day site. With so many artists uploading, I'm sure even the strangest subjects are out there.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***
Created for Drawing Day - www.drawingday.org

In the works: self-portrait for Drawing Day

Tomorrow is the second annual Drawing Day, as I discovered a recently. The goal is to see over 1 million drawings be uploaded onto the intertubes to remind people of the fun/magic/horror/whymightymonkeywhy of making marks.

I plan on putting up some pieces that have been sitting around the ol' sketchbooks.

Yesterday I made it a mission to do a self-portrait, and I am almost complete. A perfectly vain and pompous project for my birthday. It is only intended to be in pencil, but looking at it, I think I could make use of my tablet and colourize this one down the road. I downloaded Gimp a while back, the free imaging program, and maybe this would be a worthy experiment.

That black stuff behind the head? Not sure what that is? One friend suggested it's my ego.

Hm. It's missing my freckles. Drawing should be completed tomorrow for Drawing Day!
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***
Created for Drawing Day - www.drawingday.org

Art Monday: Trilobite Nest

A detail from a drawing I spent some time on while at Lake Simcoe a few years ago. The whole piece is called Trilobite Eggs For Cooking. In it, a young woman is being harried by a couple of flying trilobites after harvesting eggs. I just kind of liked the nest, drawn without reference despite me being surrounded by nature.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Art Monday: Migrations banner concepts

This is Part 1, Concepts.
Go to Part 2, Final Workflow.
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Collaboration can lead to wonderful places. I've done a few blog banners for other bloggers before, (Retrospectacle, Of Two Minds, The Meming of Life) and I think it can be incredibly beautiful for a serious blogger to hire an artist to do some custom work. Look at Carel Brest Van Kempen's exemplary A Blog Around the Clock banner, or Jessica Palmer's own Bioephemera banner. This is serious art conveying information on the diverse moods and interests of the blogger. Perhaps a review of blog banners is in order some day.

Dan Rhoads is a molecular biologist and avid naturalist who moved from America to the island of Cyprus. His blog Migrations ranges in topics such as bird-watching, conservation, science in society and whatever else catches his keen eye. After a rocky patch of non-connecting emails ("What do you mean I am having trouble sending instantaneous messages halfway around the world?! Preposterous!" I spluttered), and with some help from Mike Haubrich, Dan and I got started.

Initial ideas that were tossed into the salad bowl of my brain:
-Fibonacci sequence. Archaeopteryx. Cyprus. Human migration out of Africa. Bird Migration, v-formations. Darwin's finches.
-Dan's personal migration to Cyprus.
-Looked up cellular migration, realized it's poorly understood.
-Read about Dictyostelium discodeum, an amoeba useful in studying cellular migration, has a slug-form it adopts when moving. I like saying "dicty-disco" out loud.

Starting with these ideas, here are some of the images developed in the rough conceptual stage.

Archaeopteryx on a slab in the shape of Cyprus with a shadow of a modern bird, pencil:A spiral emanating from archaeopteryx's eye, birds following the path, human footprints, dictystelium amoebae tracing a path. Cool tones, digital painting:Same spiral, archaeopteryx. Warm tones in oil paint:Wedge-shaped concept, flight of birds in center, Cyprus on right, amoebae moving from left. Pencil:
Wedge concept simplified. Dan suggested amoebae in positions of Mediterranean islands, but I kept a wedge shape. Oil paint:

There were a few other pencils in similar vein. I worried the concepts were missing a human connection for the blog-reader.

On my walk to work one day, I stopped in the park and scribbled out an idea. Take it right back to the human traveller. I touched up the pencils with india ink, scanned it and did a slapdash colouring job with digital painting in Photoshop. Included the image at the last minute in an email to Dan:

Bingo.

I'll conclude this "Making of the Migrations banner" in part 2 later this week! In the meantime, make sure to view the final in its proper home.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Protomammal Fallacy

A lively discussion is taking place in the comments at Art Evolved in the new Permian Synapsid Gallery. Are terms like proto-mammal or stem-mammal appropriate? I tend to think they confuse more than help. I understand evolution by natural selection is a sequence, but by defining an extinct creature by its descendants, I think we run the risk of promoting the facile and erroneous amoeba-->fish-->lizard-->mouse-->monkey-->ape-->human progression diagram. That is why for the Synapsid Gallery, I wanted to show a dicynodont with human arms erupting from its own shoulders (and a gorgonopsid with human legs threatening it in the background). To echo Dawkins, Permian synapsids were not half-evolved, not "on their way" to becoming us. They were successful animals living in their own niche.

Successfully made my point? Well, perhaps as an illustration to this blog post.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Art Monday: Synapsid peek

There's been a delay in the second ART Evolved gallery, our gallery of Permian Synapsids. So I thought I would show a teaser of the face of my dicynodont drawing. ART Evolved is a delicious visual treat cooked up by Craig Dylke and Peter Bond, with input from the rest of our paleo-artsy-bloggy crew. We launched a couple of months back in an attempt to showcase some of the best paleo-art being produced by bloggers. In addition to posts about technique and subject matter, every two months we aim to create a themed gallery that anyone can submit to, making for a lively a vibrant gallery. The first gallery featured ceratopsian dinosaurs, y'know, like triceratops.

I've added a self-updating blogroll of the whole regular ART Evolved gang in my sidebar (look down, way down below the flying trilobite button), so I can easily keep up with the diverse gang of artists involved.

The synapsid gallery should be up soon, thanks to the hard work of our tireless moderators. I've heard the expression before that organizing atheist freethinkers is like herding cats; I think organizing paleo-artists is probably closer to teaching velociraptors to drink tea properly.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossil III

The new blog banner is now installed above.
Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossil IIIOil on shale, pencil on bristol and a surprising amount of digital done in Photoshop with my new tablet. Copyright to moi, 2009.

For Art Monday, I'll try to show some of the details, and maybe just how much digital there is overlaying the oil on shale. I added quite a bit of colour to this little beastie.

Insect wings instead of mammal! Do I need a new tattoo?

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Art Monday: Eremotherium & Glyptodon

Burning the candle at both ends. Happy and artistically busy. Please enjoy precious fossil eremotherium skull and fossil glyptodon skull while I scamper back into my cave-studio and continue cackling gleefully while I toil. These skulls are...precious...to me.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Art Monday: shale banner progress

The new Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossil blog banner is almost complete. Here you can see the oil on shale, with oil & pencil crinoids off to the right hand side.The last few steps will be to peel the bristol off the back of the shale, and scan the bristol and shale in separately. This shale is too big for the scanner, so I may have to tilt it to wedge it in, or Photoshop-together two parts.

In the little peek of it last week, Eric Heupal of Eclectic Echoes and The Other 95% suggested we don't often see enough bite marks on trilobites. Hmm. Battle-scars, eh? So far I have not put any on this little critter. This week I have taken a new leap forward in technique and invested in an Intuos 3 tablet. I know there's a couple of touch-ups I may try with it, and scars are on the list. I hope to have this baby completed in the next couple of days.

As a little aside, here's my first efforts (besides some loopy happy face exercises to get me use to the feel) with my new tablet. Remember this encrinurus drawing?
So here I've tried to mimic my pencil strokes and added two new nodules to the head, and a new elongated nodule on the left side of the cephalon. I may need to adjust the sensitivity of the pen to mimic my lighter pencil strokes. In the upper middle, I tried some light washes, and below that, some bolder painted strokes. Can't wait to play some more.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Art Monday: shale painting underway

A raw and unedited scan of what will be my new blog banner. Note the shiny wet oils glaring off the shale.

A mythical flying trilobite fossil heading for some crunchy crinoids.

Enough lollygagging! Back to work!

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Art Monday: Encrinurus

Here is the drawing along with the Tra-la-la-lobe-ite painting presented yesterday.

I just hope Walcott discovers what's in those presents. A big thanks to Marek Eby of eTrilobite for joining me in that epoch-old holiday of trilobites at Krismas/Solstice/Newtonmas/Haeckelmas. It just isn't the same without a glass of cinnamon-topped egg nog, a trilobite racing around underfoot and some lovely art.

If you'd like more trilobite art year 'round, why not pick up The Flying Trilobite 2009 Calendar?



Ahh, the holidays...Merry Krismas, everyone!
-Glendon

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store. 2009 Calendar now available!

Art Monday: hadrosaur sketching at the museum

Some museum sketching pics from November, taken at the Royal Ontario Museum.

My nephew and I sketching a Corythosaurus skull he found interesting. He's part of the Explorer's Club there, and received a nice treasure for all the visits this year.
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Comparing my Gryposaurus incurvimanus drawing to the original. I like the interesting reflections of the new Crystal architecture on the glass in this shot.
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The Gryposaurus skull drawing is also featured as one of the dozen months of 2009 in my 1st-ever calendar, on sale for about 23 bucks. And there's still time to get it for the New Year.- -
All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Artwork Mondays: Grandmother's favourite

This drawing was always my grandmother's favourite piece of my artwork. I drew this back in the early days of university after I had largely stopped drawing vampires and faeries, and as my interest in science had started coming back to the fore. I called it "Beetleman", though I'm not really sure why.

My grandmother loved this one, and I gave her a reproduction of it. I miss my grandparents, and I'll always appreciate how they encouraged me in my artwork. My grandmother would challenge me about what I was trying to do, and pester me with questions, until she'd laugh at my answer once it was clear. My grandfather would not have much commentary about the subjects, instead asking about the media used, and supplying us with astonishing amounts of paper when my sisters and I were small.

Good times.

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Artwork Mondays: Art is Hard

Art is hard.

Last year I posted this:


The idea was a steampunkish device to aid the painter. I called it the Hyperferrule. Hooked up to the visual centre of the brain, it would enable me --uhhh, I mean the artist, heh-- to rapidly paint the image in their mind's eye. Swap out those mechanical finger-tip brushes, and the little arms could draw something using graphite and an eraser. Maybe a tortillon smudger would be in there too, to get some nice shadows going.

Lately, I keep thinking about this image. I'd love to do a self-portrait about it. Me, standing next to a canvas, one hand furiously painting, the other drawing. There'd need to be some stark shadows and studio light, an out-of-focus model nearby, perhaps human, perhaps fossil.

I keep thinking about it. And at the moment, that's all I can do.

This isn't intended to be a whiny, whinging complaint. I'm really striving for a lofty lament about the torturous and demanding muse so many artistic types suffer from. It's hard to tell the difference. If I was whining, I'd stamp my foot.

Creative blocks have never hit me. The more I sketch, or think about sketching, the more ideas start flowing. On my way home today, I stopped on the Queen West sidewalk near Claremont, pulled out my Moleskine and had to sketch a full-blown image of a landscape while blocking foot traffic. I struggle a bit with landscapes, and this one excited me. Stay tuned for the surprise.

Art is hard. There's a steady flow of ideas and I strive to get some of them down at least a bit in pencil. Aim for something interesting and maybe if I'm on my game, someone finds it astounding.

I wish I had Degas' money. Idle rich, nothing to do all day but paint vampiric-looking ballerinas and go to the track. Like many of the artists (and probably everyone) I don't have enough time. I have a full-time job, work with some great people and freelance on the side. The freelance is going well, I've got four projects currently on the go. They're a blast to do, people who really get me, I think.

But this Artwork Monday is all about the things unfinished, the ideas I haven't forgotten but I've left alone to wander and prowl about in my studio.

Remember this Dimetrodon-Sphinx?


I've played with it a bit digitally, to practice my digital work. I plan on getting a computer tablet later this year and I'd love to play with a couple of backgrounds. A mountain terrain, a street at night.

Over the summer I played with a piece I really enjoy, and in my head is filled with a soft riot of colour, Trilobitlepidoptology: It needs some shadows, and colour.

Last year, I embarrassed myself a little bit trying to do a portrait of Richard Dawkins. I even emailed his website folks.
Then, I tried a different technique, and killed the drawing. It only exists as a digital file now. I can resurrect it, print it on canvas paper and paint over it. I meant it to be a diptych with Carl Sagan. I'd really love to get back to it, Richard Dawkins' writing has inspired so much of my work. A humble tribute, sidetracked for now.

There's more. A dress based on a fossil, sketches for a kids' book of aliens evolving, a trilobite graveyard...

*sigh*

Next week on Artwork Mondays: Art is Easy

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.