Creative Spaces - Closet Creativity

Artist-writer-oaf Sean Craven of Renaissance Oaf and I have talked about how fascinating it is to peek inside another creative person's studio space. To quote Sean, "I'm always fascinated by the workspaces of creative types. The factories of the culture industry, the monastic hives of the culturally isolated, closets and couches as well as studios or arts centers."

Sean has started things off with Ascending the Lavender Staircase his Workstation and Decor by Default. So let's whisk into the wall of my living room.

My baseball-playing, special education teaching, gorgeous wife Michelle and I live in an ancient 3 story apartment just west of downtown where Littles Italy, Portugual and Brazil meet. It's a two-bedroom, and because our nephew stays over once a week, a few years ago we gave him the second bedroom as his own. Michelle's office moved to the living room. I offered to take one of our two huge living room closets. I didn't want the little guy messing with my painty chemicals.

So let's pull one book out on the shelf and whisk into the wall of my living room. My studio is a closet, painted to look like part of the wall. I don't have a lot of photos of the outside of the studio. Here's one from a couple of year's back. It's behind my holiday smile. Weird colours in that photo. The walls are actually more neutral blue-green.

This is just inside. You can see I have pieces of the Of Two Minds and Meming of Life banners tacked to the door. I also sometimes pour stand oil, a thick-as-honey heated linseed oil on top of my finished paintings, like the diatom fairy painting in the foreground. Gives it a mottled, glossy surface.

The view above my card table/drawing surface. Some pieces from the Migrations banner, and a large drawing about my asthma and lungs in general I did years ago.
Almost every surface of the studio is crammed with my images. I find it helps me to recall brushtrokes or colours I may presently be having trouble with. One of my only non-mybigego images is an article entitled "Evolution, and nothing more" by Jerry Coyne, published in Canada's National Post on Friday 2nd of December, 2005. It was a one page rebuttal to the previous day's insipid "intelligent design" article. It was the first time I had ever read Jerry Coyne, and it electrified me. I was drawing and talking about it like crazy. So now it's plaque-mounted and been in my studio space ever since.
Paintings, collapsible easel, buncha portfolios. Naked humans with mitochondria and trilobites.
They say the trick to taking pictures of oil paints is to use 2 bright bulbs at 45 degree angles or less and very distant from the painting. I paint in a closet. Meh.
My original painting-drawing for the current blog banner actually just moves awkwardly around the studio (below on my paint-box). The drawing is lined up on a piece of bristol that I carelessly got squidges of paint on. I really need to get that framed properly. Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle is under glass in a hinged 12x12 scrapbooking frame.

The wooden flying trilobite necklace Tanja Sova made and gave me is hanging below. Our home has books in almost every room. Like Bond, I like to have some inspiration and reference close at hand. The bright blue book below the awesome Art S. Buck mannequins and Precambrian toys is my mother's original nursing anatomy book. Books on concept art, atheism, science and art techniques all sit hand in hand on there. And Twisted Toyfare Theatre tends to creep in sometimes.
Paint! I use such thin layers when I paint, many of those tubes are from when I originally worked on my undergrad 12 years ago. I think I have only replaced the lamp black, titanium white and naples yellow. More storage portfolios, one with another diatom fairy from the period when all my people had green skin.
If studio spaces are like a room into the mind of the artist, mine is fit to burst. Or collapse inward and make a crushing singularity.
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This trip into Creative Spaces wouldn't be half as fun if it wasn't continued by others. Some Creative Spaces I'd love to see: Almost Diamonds, eTrilobite, The Day After, Heather Ward Wildlife Art, Claudia Massie and State of the Art. If you participate, feel free to use Sean's excellent logo above! We plan on collecting all the links in a post on Art Evolved.
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Other Creative Spaces so far:
*Renaissance Oaf, Parts one, two, three.
*Bond's Blog

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

Bring Bing Back!

We gotta bring Bing home.

Bing left home and has sent amazing photos back from across the Pacific. Some with little robots. I know that piqued your interest. Little robots! The photography is all that and a bag of squid-ink chips. (Except for that one where he has a giant Buddha stuck to his head. That's just weird.)

The Son of a Blue Guy is in Japan, and needs to get back to Minnesota. His new friends in Japan want to keep him there. In fact, they have threatened to hold him for ransom unless his North American friends and family do two things:

1. Answer questions about Japan/Nippon culture and cuisine.
2. Donate money to help his mother pay the plane fare for his trip.

It's tempting for a young man to stay in Japan, because so far he has found the food to be awesome and the shopping (even in vending machines) to be, let's say, "unique." In fact, the Japanese students think that if he stays long enough he could use his ninja powers to be Emperor someday. I don't think that this would be a good thing for world peace, as Bing has not worked out his "Megalomania" issues and bad things could happen. So I've heard. The robots are in the photo for a reason after all.

The question The Flying Trilobite has been assigned to help Bing is:
The name “Japan” is an exonym. Exonyms are place-names not used in the native language nor by the native people. The endonyms for Japan are “Nippon” (formal) or “Nihon” (informal.) The origin of the word “Japan” is traced back to Portuguese sailors who adapted it from the language of:

a. Vietnam
b. Korea
c. Malaysia
d. Hawai'i

Click! Donate some cha-ching to bring Bing back! (A part of me wants him to bring giant conquering Gundams with nunchuk skills.)

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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: Cloak & Dagger sketches

Lately I've been filling my sketchbook with some of my favourite characters from various pop culture franchises in a very fanboy-ish manner. So for the month of August, expect each Art Monday to feature something fun and different from usual Flying Trilobite fare.

Cloak & Dagger are two of my favourite Marvel Comics characters, created by Bill Mantlo and Ed Hannigan. The duo are teen runaways who were forced to take a fictional, experimental synthetic heroin, which unleashed their powers. They have fought alongside superhero staples such as Spider-Man, the Punisher and Dr. Strange in their efforts to stop the drug trade, lead normal lives and rescue the innocent. I drew these two in my trusty Moleskine Folio book.

Cloak's real name is Tyrone Johnson. He's a nice guy, a stutterer and he suffers from low self-esteem. When he is Cloak, he can travel through darkness, sweep the guilty into his cloak and the demons within will feed on their guilt. Or their "light". Or their minds. It's a bit vague, which helps with both science-y and magical plots. Unlike his alter-ego Tyrone, Cloak is haughty, brooding and does not stutter. Both as Cloak and Tyrone, he worries he's not good enough for Dagger, on whom he depends to feed him with light to keep the demons inside his cloak.

Tandy Bowen is a rich kid who ran away, and met Tyrone at the bus station. She was an excellent dancer, at one point became blind (with some well-researched stories about what that's like by writer Terry Austin). She can throw light 'daggers' at criminals and infuse them with a sort of pure goodness, painful to their evil bodies. The blindness got better.

Costume-wise, these two represent for me comic characters at their most iconic. Cloak's deep blue and black costume with only his human face -invariably with glowing eyes, and sometimes deep lines- is mysterious and spirit-like. I wanted to show here that his cloak is not always a solid article of clothing, but more unreal, like a piece of fabric you could be lost in.

Dagger on the other hand has one of the only excuses for a superhero to be wearing tights. She's a dancer, and in battle usually gracefully leaps toward the villain hurtling light-daggers at the foe. The deep cutout dagger shape on the skin-tight costume gives her an almost scandalous look, which really doesn't come out in her personality. And I love that weird circle around her right eye.

These days, usually both male and female comic characters have unrealistic bodies, but Cloak's swirling costume, and Dagger's skinny physique are different from that.

Hmm. I will see what I can do about oil painting these two and using Gimp to assemble the final piece.
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Next week: more Marvel!
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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 ***
Cloak & Dagger are copyright and trademark to Marvel Comics.
This is a fan homage, not a licensed illustration.

Subway trilobite with Brushes app

Still practicing with the Brushes app on my iPod Touch. Did this while on the streetcar and subway yesterday. I kind of like the sketchy pencil lines. Trying to keep my practice pieces simple. Limited colour palette, subject I'm familiar with and a dark background. I think that's always best when exploring a new medium.

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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: Fanboy Month Begins at the Ent

Lately I've been filling my sketchbook with some of my favourite characters from various pop culture franchises in a very fanboy-ish manner. So for the month of August, expect each Art Monday to feature something fun and different from usual Flying Trilobite fare. There are still a number of paintings not under the fanboy umbrella that I aim to crank out this month. Y'see I'm practicing not-sleeping for when I return to school in September.

Today, let's begin at the Ent.

Pencil in my super-awesome giant Moleskine Folio. I created this piece for Henry Gee and the magazine Mallorn. (I'm hoping it sees publication! Naked desire! There!) Henry was looking for something different than the work of Peter Jackson's films, or D&D derived imagery. I knew almost right away I wanted to do an Ent walking surrealistically on tiny roots and eyes blinking out of knots.

I think it's going to eat the wizard-dude though.
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Next week: let's bust out some Marvel Comics, shall we?
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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 ***

Transitions

Computer Transitions
Immediately after logging out of Blogger on last week's Art Monday, our Compaq Presario R3000 with the busted screen froze and restarted with an error we may not be able to fix. Thanks to a couple of helpful bloggers, (Thanks ScottE and Lousy Canuck!) I may be able to rescue the family photos we were still in the process of backing up. My artwork is relatively safe on an external hard drive and USB key and my iPod Touch. Back-up your files, kids!

At the moment, I'm working from a loaner pc my wife's mom lent us: Thanks bunches, S! I was hoping to budget a new inexpensive pc for my return to my undergrad this September. Innumerable people have suggested I invest in a Mac, but I'm not sure that's in the budgetary cards right now. At any rate, even an inexpensive Acer or equivalent will seem like a dream after what I've been using since starting The Flying Trilobite.

Our laptop had a number of problems. We bought it lovingly used from a friend and it was great. After one cold night walk outside to a friend's place, the top right of the screen lost half of its pixels. You could kind of bend it and they'd snap back on for a few seconds. A few months ago, our old Photoshop CS stopped working, due to the software licence number not being registered - I was sure the copy we purchased with the laptop was legit, but at any rate, the operator's recommendation was to sink $700 into Photoshop CS4. I'd love to. For the moment though, I downloaded GIMP free software, and I have been eyeing Artrage for the new computer when we get it. My Wacom Intuos 3 came with some nifty software I'll load onto it as well.

And that's something important that needs to be said to all the aspiring artists who might read this, or colleagues who fall on hard times. Your tools only carry you so far. If you think the art I produce has any degree of technical ability at all, keep in mind I've been using a 5+ year old laptop with a busted screen that takes 15 minutes to log onto DSL connected internet. I'll say it again: your tools only carry you so far. The rest is practice practice practice. Do what you are good at. Expand your skill set by experimenting a bit at a time, pace yourself at integrating new lessons.

School Transitions
I'm a student again. This is a weird feeling, but in a few weeks I'll be headed back to York University to complete an undergrad I left incomplete about 12 years ago. My wife and I met shortly after I left school, so she doesn't know what I'm like as a single-minded obsessed art student. Oh dear.

It seems like a fool's hope that I will go beyond the undergrad, what with working, food near a table, roof in the vicinity of heads etc., but I admit I've begun to think about it. What I'd really love to do is illustrate full-time. I think my personal life is gonna be busy this year.

Blog+Art Transitions
I think this blog is slowly expanding into some new areas beyond the art. I'm commenting more on the nature of being an atheist today, and being a tad more personal.

Art-wise, expect to see some new themes as well. It'll always be Art in Awe of Science, I'm simply adding more things to the mix. I aim to do some pop-nerd culture drawings for the August Art Mondays. 'Cuz why not?

I have loads of artwork I'd like to wrap up in this month before school starts, and I've bought my supplies (except that pesky new computer). Always willing to let a contract interrupt though! I promised myself I'd stop announcing artwork I haven't completed but here's a list of things on my slate to be checked off when I can. (There, that's nice and vague.)

-New Diatom Fairy piece. Sketch here and at right. Diatom Fairies are basically my wife Michelle who doesn't like looking at herself in paintings. Which is weird because she's gorgeous.
-My submission to the Coyne/Benson/Myers/Haubrich/etc accommodationist-Vs-atheist in science debate. Almost done. Involves science-chess pieces.
-Three new t-shirt ideas. Camouflage flying trilobite insignia, albino squirrel doing tai-chi, and a butterfly-winged trilobite. These'll probably have to wait until I'm settled into a new computer.
-A mysterious planned image for The Beagle Project. Got the wood panel ready, and prelim drawings done.
-A number of Lord of the Rings drawings, Marvel comic characters and a new image of my Trilobot Transformer to complete for the next few art Mondays.

You know when you have that feeling? Like, where will I be in one year's time? Everything feels in flux right now, and in a good way. Even with the toasted-'puter.

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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 ***