When I'm bored or feeling down at my day job working for corporate America, I imagine adorable animals with snarky attitudes. Here are a few of my babies. Originally paper and pencil drawings, I scan them and turn them into vector art with Adobe Illustrator.
I like to randomly send them to friends and family members to cheer them up (or, in the case of the octopus, to make fun of them). The owl and the crab have inspired animated shorts that I am currently working on.
This painting is a rebellion. I was knee deep in pencil-only animation drawings when I had a surge of rebellion that I could not contain. I badly needed vibrant color, rhythm, patterns, a malleable medium, a large workspace, imprecision and, paramount above all else, an utter lack of control. I needed to be able to push color around a canvas. A few days before my pencil-only film was due, I ditched the pencil, purchased a canvas and dove off the deep end into a pool of COLOR.
In the spirit of Halloween, I figure dinos should have the opportunity to dress up too!
I previously posted other dinosaurs that are a part of my coloring revolution!(http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=318291.msg3667593#msg3667593). These dinos are further proof that coloring can be considered a fine art. This collection of dinos came from the pages of the Dover Dinosaur Coloring Book (http://store.doverpublications.com/0486240223.html). Prior to my tampering with the images, these were perfectly realistic looking drab dinos. All clothing, hair, tattoos, platform shoes, extraneous accessories and anything else that would be out of place in a prehistoric era were added by yours truly with Prismacolor colored pencils and an occasional marker. Enjoy!
This blue hoodie was a little boring, so I embroiBIRD it. (sorry. lame.)
Each vintage tattoo inspired sparrow measures between 3-5 inches. The design of the birds is based on a stencil I saw quite some time ago and I don't remember where...
It turns out that this seemingly unassuming hoodie was a poor choice of an embroidery subject because: 1. The combination of the knitted fabric and thick screen-printed dots made any kind of marking on the fabric impossible. I had to freehand it entirely. 2. Trying to force a needle through those thick screen-printed dots resulted in some seriously sore fingers. In life and in craft, no pain, no gain, and since I'm pretty hardcore I conquered the dots and through that pain, gained a pair of sweet birdies.
From a mental standpoint, these were less about composition than they were about moving paint around on the canvas. I knew which colors to use and roughly where to use them (burnt orange and golds towards the top, blues towards the bottom) but that's it. I mixed acrylic with water and played with opacity and blending. I squeezed out splotches of paint directly onto the canvas and used pieces of cardboard to spread. I got into the zone that doesn't involve thinking about what you're doing, just doing. I think it looks like the skyline of a city that is on fire.
Thing 1 and Thing 2: Globs of acrylic paint spread around a canvas using various sizes of cardboard. A quick, relatively painless way to create unique fun paintings in a flash! These two babies (8"x10") were created during a viewing of Monster's Inc.
I'm starting a coloring book art revolution. I maintain that coloring books can equal art as long as your contribution to the original image is significant.
The following are selections from a Dover Thrift dinosaur coloring book. With a few markers, perhaps a little too much free time and a bit of brilliance, I created these babies.
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