Midish last year I thought it would be a good idea to try doing a drawing each day, with no others rules.
That didn’t last long, but I did enjoy drawing in Tux Paint on a tablet I’d found. Tux Paint’s an open-source drawing program aimed at kids for touch-screen things and PCs. Seemingly inspired by Kid Pix, there are lots of fun brushes and effects, and silly sounds. I like drawing with my fingers, and smudging things and using the toothpaste brush, and just playing round. I ended up using the toothpaste brush on a CHAI fansite I made too.
Here’s everything I done, in chronological order.
Looking at them together now, they remind me a lot of paintings I did between TAFE and Uni.
I made Hand Game for an exhibition the other week. The starting point was thoughts about my awareness of my own body, and the correlation between location and body area. Over time it changed from being about bodies to focusing on hands. All the hands in this game were chosen from a bunch of 3-D scans downloaded from that 123D website I use a fair bit. It was set up in a bathroom, one of the locations I felt most in touch with my body, and was played by holding two gobs of Play-doh, which were of course able to be sculpted. I’m not making the game available as I usually would, because of its site and controller specificness, but there is a version up for people who support my game making through Patreon ;) ;) ;)
There was also a publication given away at the show, and I included some hand drawings. In these I attempted to draw my hands as I pictured them without looking at them, mostly dictated by where I felt the most weight, if that makes sense. I’ve always meant to make drawings of how I perceive my body non-visually (for ten years, at least!) so it was about time I got round to it.
I also made this other game a week or so back that I like and other people like: Japan Game.
I made these drawings as a little project to help me take a break from working on the computer, and to make something of the job I’ve found myself in. I’m working as a cleaner in a high school, and they’re all made with things I’ve found in the bins, or on the ground. So every day I’d come home and make a drawing with what I’d found.
The yellow one’s actually done with highlighter, but it doesn’t scan so well.
I might write some more thoughts later, but I have to get to work.
I’ve been planning on doing this for a while, but some recent copyright/fair use numbskullery has led me to make myself a new Youtube account. There’s quite a bit of hoop jumping involved in setting up one if you want a sensible URL and not to join Google+.
These are videos of drawings made with a piece of artificial charcoal I’ve been holding on to for about a year. Watching them, and the way they are moved by the newly installed ceiling fans, has been a good prompt for the video project I am forming.
I’ve been drawing these quick, line-based drawings off-and-on for a few months now. If I am remembering correctly they began with a Google search for ‘dogs on rugs’, mostly as a fun drawing exercise while working on more serious things. Here’s a selection:
I’d been excited about painting again, but the painting wasn’t working. I’d forgotten how to look at people properly, and was struggling with working from a relatively unfamiliar sitter. That had been okay in the past, but now I feel like I need to know more about the head in front of me than I can get by just looking. I need to know how it feels, and how heavy it is, and how it moves, and how thick the skin is and—
So, I’ve been making these drawings of myself (they’re ordered chronologically):
This is a selection of drawings I made from a work by Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters. The photographs are terrific, and I think good enough to stand on their own apart from the text that accompanies them. Photography, in the context of a gallery rarely strikes me: a photograph’s objectness and life are what makes them interesting—a framed photo on a gallery wall is too often just another image.
