Art digging (lotsa big pics)

[mimi_sardinia]

So, due to a post of hanae0711's, I went hunting for my school photos looking for a childhood picture of me. While doing so, I ran across some old examples of my personal style of drawing.


So this is one of the few extant examples of this form from the time when I did it with a calligraphy pen.



It's nowhere near as closely detailed as the stuff I do today, but that's less than surprising because of practice and the types of pens I use today being finer than that calligraphy pen was. You may also note that there is no specific central image hidden within the pattern.


The following are the first instance of my habit of putting a picture in the middle - or filling a picture with the patterning. The main point however was that I wasn't trying to hide the figures though, I was more going for a contrast between the two types - one had the clothing patterned, the other had the figure surrounded.

I believe I did all of these - and probably some I didn't find in my photo hunt - at the same time. It was either 2001 or 2002 (because it was after I got my computer) and the movie Ravenous - starring Guy Pierce - was on Foxtel (this was before Mum and I decided to get rid of cable TV because we couldn't afford it and weren't really watching it a great deal anyway).
I'm pretty sure I'd run an all-night sitting on the computer and then decided to watch the movie at something like 6AM and took to a notepad and drew some of my pet characters of the time, then did the patterning to give the dresses a bit more character. Then I reversed the polarity for the two aliens.

Anyway:



This actually isn't a character, I think it's just a random no-name figure.




This is Trixi Maple. She was a random doodle in my notepad during my Tafe sewing course. She was also one of the lead characters in my period of "Return to basics" stick figure drawing. That much is evident in her head being a plain circle.

I was also going through a long no-face period. I don't really think it meant anything deep that I didn't draw faces other than the reason I alway gave it - I was sick of drawing a great figure only for the whole picture to be ruined by a bad face.

Mimi Sardinia can ultimately track her history back to Trixi, since Trixi was one of a group that developed, and her closest friend was Nina, whose sister was Tarlia, who eventually would be the goddess the original Mimi Fish was a sort-of avatar of (it's a tricky issue).



This is Utopia. I have no idea why I named her that. Her defining features are the earrings, the armband and blonde hair.



Utopia again, with her hair down.

On both the second Utopia picture and the Trixi one, I am really fond of how I got the pattern marking out some of the less evident curves - main in the bust region.


And now for something completely different.

I was discussing a type of drawing with someone on IM not long ago, but I don't recall who, and the subject of pictures made up totally of dots was brought up. I have done that before - once. It's a painstaking process and the one try I made (for an art class in highschool) was never completed.
I still have the picture however, and also found it while photo-hunting.






Anyway, enough showing off.

Comments

[mariagoner.livejournal.com]

I really dig your style! I could never have as much patience as you do to pain-stakingly draw all of that out!

And isn't it so funny when we go back to old things that we did and compare and ocntrast it to our current style? ;)

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Those singular figures are pretty simple to do, the really long ones are the ones like the title page of my new art diary - it's A4 (standard printer size is A4) so it takes a while. It'd go quicker if I did something like attend church, but I never wake up early enough for that.

It definitely is. Amongst the stuff I ran across was one of my random collage pictures - just a page with random drawings from all sorts of things scattered across it - but it was reminder of some of my old styles of drawing.