New drawing! Pens & Copic markers.
“Ode to Spring”.
Pencil on marker paper. I’ve gained a new appreciation for wooden pencils - I used to only draw with my trusty mechanical pencil, but I think I prefer to draw with wooden pencils now!
I’ve also gained an appreciation for Spring. For some reason I never cared much for it as a season, maybe because it’s more prominent in Vancouver than Calgary. There’s kind of this exciting feeling of a fresh beginning.
Had to sit down in 3 (short) separate sessions to finish this. And it still looks kind of incomplete (I’m going with “stylized”)! I need to become more patient as an artist...
Study of a skull. To quote my drawing class teacher, Vjeko Sager: “The face is 80% skull. If you can draw a skull, you can draw a face”.
Love anatomy!
Studies of my hand... also more of my homework, haha.
Pencil drawing that was my “still life” homework from a drawing class... Theme was methods of manufacturing. We’ve got an injection-molded, ultrasonically welded elephant, a 3D-printed heart, and a CNC-milled icosahedron!
Wedding card for my cousin! :) Graphic done in Illustrator and laser-cut this time.
Belated card dump from 2017...
Prompt 28: Fall
Prompts 22, 25, 26, 29: Trail, Ship, Squeak, United.
Prompts 21, 23, 24: Furious, Juicy, Blind
Prompts 18-20: Filthy, Cloud, Deep.
Prompt 17: Graceful
Falling behind a bit... Prompts #12-16 for Inktober.
Missed the first 5 days of Inktober, but better late than never! Here are days (prompts) #6-11: Sword, Shy, Crooked, Screech, Gigantic, and Run.
Had the opportunity to use one of the seven Jacquard looms in Canada back in April 2017 to try weaving for the first time! Looms are amazing pieces of machinery, and incredibly time-consuming to set up - Have definitely gained a new appreciation for weaving and the textile arts from this.
We learned how to reformat images in Photoshop so that the Jacq3 software on the loom’s computer could read it (I picked a pencil drawing that I made a couple years ago), browsing through an endless selection of weave patterns. Once the pattern regions were defined, we could pick our yarn colours for the weft (the warp was set up to be black), and create 1-inch test pieces. This is such an ideal art for for pixel art, since each weave is essentially a line of pixels - we basically reduced the image resolution to 30dpi. For the specific loom we used, this translated into an image that was about 23″ wide (686 pixels - should have been 720 but some of the electronic panels were farting on us).
From there, the computer would dictate which threads “lifted” and which ones “dropped”, which determines which colour of thread shows for each row of weave. The user manually throws the shuttle through the shed (space between the lifted and dropped threads), controls the beater (which packs the new line of thread tight with the others), and activates the foot pedal (which tells the computer to move to the next row in your image). Once the foot pedal is activated, a pulley is rotated which drops a bar, and these spring-loaded pins push certain hooks out into a specific position (each hook has a hole where a single thread runs through), such that these hooks are picked up by the bar as the pulley rotates back and the bar lifts back up. Or something like that.
Thanks to Ruth and Mary Lou from the Textile Art Department for running the workshop!
Side note: These kinds of looms are hard to come by because they are used by artists or hobbyists, who typically can’t afford such an expensive (~$40,000?) piece of equipment that takes up so much floor space. I think most of these looms (within Canada) are found in art schools. Industrial looms are a different story.
Wedding card for Isabel & Jack. Again, used the laser cutter instead of an exacto knife this time...
Wedding card for Kathryn & Eric. Cheated this time and used the laser cutter instead of the exacto knife... sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.