She Sings From Somewhere You Can’t See

It’s been a while since I posted to my poor dusty blog. Alas.

But I have worked on some art here and there, and here’s one piece in progress:

This marks a broad departure from a lot of my work in the last decade because it’s traditional physical media and not digital. Acrylic on gessoed board, to be precise. It’s kinda weird getting used to physical artifacts of art again. Getting used to there being no control+z, no zooming in. I forgot that the hairs on the brush can tweak off at the last second, spoiling your perfectly curving stroke, or sometimes creating a happy accident.

BTW, this sketch does not constitute endorsement of Chertoff or his policies. It’s not “fan-art”. It was just a study because I thought his face would make fantastic reference for the Prototypically Gaunt Creepy Mad Herr Doktor. I think he needs an Igor to be completed. I found the pic at Boing Boing, and it seems to be the photo associated with his wikipedia profile and the official DHS pic as well.

Decided to paint the coral sketch from Sunday…

So, I haven’t updated in a while. I went on a trip to Canada, and my job has been keeping me pretty busy. But last night, my friend, Aysha, was sketching live and chatting, and I got so inspired seeing her process, I picked up an unfinished work and started working on it again.

I’m kinda not very happy with the anatomy though. So I wonder if I’ve been futilely re-inking something I should get some reference for. I think I’ll take some shots to see about getting the arms (length STILL too long) and hips right.

The original was here: http://art.lismitchell.net/?p=120

This week’s Character of the Week assignment is an envoy of the Khemethar, a race of aliens who descended to earth to study the ancient Egyptian culture, and from whence they derived their gods. The brief is as follows:

- Design One or More of the Khemethar envoy, based upon one of the Egyptian Gods (ie, Aten-Ra, Isis, Osiris, Set, etc)

- You do not have to depict them as the Egyptians did - think of interesting things that they might have had/worn that might have been interpreted the way they were by the egyptians either for symbolic reasons, or simply because it was the closest thing that it looked like, not having the same technology/clothing available to them.

I was going to start with Seshet, Mistress of Books, for obvious reasons. But I got diverted by the design possibilities of Heptet and her snake form, and the atef crown she wears. The atef crown will actually be a sort of glass encased electrokinetic matrix where she keeps a copy Osiris’s memories. She and Isis are escorting the Osiris biopod/saracophagus, and will “resurrect” and reactivate Osiris so that he may commence his studies. They aren’t towing him precisely–those are more like bio-leashes, which will keep Osiris alive by drawing from their bodies if his power cells give out while he is in his pod. I’m also thinking that the strips on her snake hood are actually special bio-engineered information collecting cells. When Osiris is present but not conscious, he needs somebody to collect memories for him, and that’s part of what Heptet is doing while she escorts him around.

For the Character of the Week challenge on the ConceptArt.org forums, we’re working on a personification of a city. Any city. As you know, I chose San Francisco, and here are the inks. I’ve refined the face–and since I took a picture of me to use as reference–I tried to make it Not Me. Made the hair curlier. I also redid the general shape of the djembe drums when I inked them. (Well, I knew I wanted drums, and they were roughed in, but now I’ve got the actual shape.)

Refined the sketch of San Francisco A LOT. Changed the pose entirely.

New ideas for this go-round:
Parrots: For the parrots of Telegraph Hill.
Chinese coin tied to her feet.
Portrait of Emperor Norton

For those just joining us, the Character of the Week challenge on ConceptArt.org this week is to illustrate a city as if it was a person.

So the theme for this week’s Character of the Week at ConceptArt.org is The City. You’re supposed to envision a city personified: This week we want you to take a city, anywhere in the world, your own, or another, and visualise it as a character. Present a city as a human personality, male or female it’s up to you. If possible try to avoid national costumes, and instead imagine how the city would look as a person.

Anyone who knows me knows it took me half a second to say, “Hey, I’m gonna do San Francisco!”

Ideas for this piece:

My first sketch of San Francisco, doodled yesterday. I wanted to evoke a sorta techno-pagan feel to the city, and evoke the past of the city, the activism and the culture, as well as stress the technology. I’ve got some notes on how I want to do this, since not all of it is in the sketch.

Past: Gold dust streaming from her braids. Stylised railroad tracks circling a drum. (Each of the three drums will probably have a sort of theme.)

Culture: The drums themselves (if you’ve ever spent a summer’s afternoon in Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park, you’d know why.) I’m pondering a sort of meditative posture instead of this floating one….something like a partial lotus position. You can’t see it in this sketch because the scan faded out too much but she has three masks tied to her wrist, as well as various talismans representing the city’s history.

Technology: She’s wearing googles (kinda steampunky) has some techy tattoos, and one of the drums will probably reflect this theme as well.

Clothes: Some trailing bits which turn into fog.

Over at ConceptArt, there’s a thread where you post a picture of yourself, other people do their take, while you pick somebody else to paint. So here’s my in progress portrait of fellow CAer, AG. (I’ve got more in prog shots, but maybe I’ll save ‘em for the final posting.)

Basically, I’m somewhere in the midst of roughly painting over my flats, but not into the more noodling rendering.

You can sneak a peek at the progress shots to date.

For now, this is what I’m submitting to EoW, what with the deadline being up this morning. I want to do more with the landscape and castle details eventually.