i started drawing an american bison for this bestiary of mine and started with a photo that i thought had an interesting perspective to start with. i’m trying to keep up with experiments while still working on my actual projects. so i took a gander at illustration friday’s theme and it is, weirdly enough, perspective. i’ve been wanting to try taking ball point pen drawings further as the basis for an illustration instead of using brush and ink so i thought i’d give it a go.

i realised too late in this experiment that it looks a bit barren without any real sort of background. i thought about incorporating whatever symbolic imagery that bison might have in different cultures. it seems that they’re mostly used as state symbols or in flags. so this is a flag of sorts, but the blue is supposed to suggest the sky.

if you can imagine yourself on the plain and you’re sharing opposing perspectives with this animal, your perspective might be that this is such a magnificent animal. his disposition might suggest that his perspective might be that he doesn’t like you on his land. apparently these are really dangerous animals to be around; they can outrun us and will attack if provoked. so you’re being warned as well.

not sure if i really like the result but it was worth a shot. i’ll probably give this a few more tries to decide once and for all. the original drawing is also below.

i actually thought of two things when i brainstormed the topic: transmission/movement and fibonacci sequences. it’s interesting to me that the latter occurs in things in nature, like flowers. so i thought i would just draw a flower, pop a colour in and be done with it. exhibit a:

for starters, i don’t really like how centred this is, even though it’s on the more asymetrical side. also, i have this inherent need to avoid the obvious so i started to second guess my choice of colour. i started to play with simple gradients and things and just couldn’t decide on any one colour. so i thought magenta or something wacky and then just thought about picking a colour from good old roygbiv (grade school science for the win!).

then i realised that this spectrum is in light, which propagates. taking it further, it does so sometimes a particle and sometimes as a wave. so then i thought about sound waves. this conjured up interference patterns of sound and water waves in my head, as well as a certain joy division cover.

so to go with the flowers whose petals may or may not fibonacci their way outward, the layers you see are coloured from parts of the spectrum of light. the layers are overlapped to touch on that notion of the interference patterns. to push the wave aspect, the centres of each image are arranged to appear as a sine (or cosine if it suits your fancy) wave. i like to think there is a sense of movement in all of this too, be it from left to right or vice versa or radially from any one of the centres of the roses.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaand scene. this was fun to quickly do. i like my extra-extracurriculars.

for the illustration friday theme i thought of the sweater song off weezer’s blue album, also called undone. the first thing i actually thought of was using ctrl+z or command+z but i guess i’m not inventive enough to illustrate that satisfactorily. i was also actually going to keep more to the lyrics of the weezer song and draw her bare ass and legs but this was a little more interesting to me.

so i told myself that i’ll try and do a proper illustration for IF but having just gone through my sketchbook this one seems right. there are obvious reasons and there ones that probably aren’t so clear. and that also leads me to think this one is right. one minutes life drawing poses, along with other people drawing with me, at ocad.

found this image on blogTO and decided to doodle it for something different. the trucks are in a graveyard for semis and trucks of that size. the photos were really nice. i would have thought that someone would have tried to recycle or reuse parts of these trucks, given our current climate-centric temperament these days, but even the hollowed out cab was pretty much in tact. maybe one day. ballpoint pen in moleskine, 8×10″

i seem to do a lot of portraits but i do enjoy drawing the odd animal or two, among other things. i do prefer candid images or those that are simply uncharacteristic of the subject in terms of general perception. pandas always seemed to me to be rather harmless, sedentary beings so i thought that i would try one that looked, well, angry. i knew that they like to mow down on some bamboo action usually but i didn’t know that it is actually 99% of their diets. they are still taxonomically deemed to be carnivorous though and they do crave the odd bit of meat, fish, eggs or what have you.

i’m also fond of this checkered/basketweave texture/pattern as of late. i suppose i’m reminded slightly of pixels as well. in retrospect i probably should’ve tried more of a gradual enlargement of the ‘fadeout’ to the larger patches but hey. hindsight is a friend that shows up the party invited but a bit late sometimes. an angry asian ailuropoda or my boy dj panda in moleskine, 9×10″

yes this is a double post to i.f. sorry, couldn’t resist.

i suppose the parade of penguins that were depicted in that little movie educated me some more on these bipedal, endothermic, egg-laying, flightless, and, winged vertabrates. from i’ve read, at least within one breeding season, these guys are the model household: monogomous and equal to the task of incubation. i’m guessing the raising of the chicks goes along the same lines. anatarctic emperor, king, chinstrap, adélie, and rockhopper penguins in moleskine, 9×10″

so this one was fueled by illustration friday‘s theme of hierarchy. i’m sure you can figure out how it came about. the order changes from time to time but the current order is:

1. in rainbows
2. ok computer
3. the bends
4. kid a
5. hail to the thief
6. amnesiac
7. pablo honey

somes folks involved in theatre in canada. images from the cbc’s theatre section.