scrapbooking exercise

The inspiration came from here (it is in russian but the pictures are pretty self-explanatory). In this post illustrator and designer  Natalie Ratkovski talks about exercising your skills and imagination by taking a random image - ink stains, shadows, fragments of photographs and completing them in some new, unexpected way which has nothing in common with the original image. It seemed like an interesting way of doing things, very different from how I approach things.  Usually the idea comes first and then the image reflects it. In this exercise the image is primary, the idea and final image is based on it. Here is what I got:

In the last image I did not take a picture of "before", it has 2 photo fragments - large black part in the quilt and part of the pillow above the boy's head.
This is pretty interesting exercise and I learned something about myself. I have a problem with relinquishing control :) I look at these drawings and see - I did everything to hide every last shred of those original images. Next I have to try ink stains.

what is this?

I think it is interesting to see the progression from the inspiration/idea to the final artwork. Every artist has their own way to get inspired and it is fascinating to see how others do it, and maybe try doing it yourself. Ok, here is one of my progressions. I like to look at thumbnails on flickr - very often you can't see all the details and very often see something different from actual artwork. In this case I looked at the thumbnail of this beautiful photograph and it seemed to me that it was a deer with pink ruffles around its neck.  here is my quick idea sketch:

I added legs and armchair later, at first it was just deer on the wall with ruffle collar.
because I had armchair someone had to sit in it now. So here they are - lion, fox, and deer.

I am not sure why lion and fox, they kind of just showed up :) 

Illustration Friday ... Surrender

Hands up!

Stamps

Inspired by Geninne's stamp carving tutorial  I made some stamps.

here is how they look on paper (boy stamp is on the backside of the owl stamp)

I used cat, deer, and circle stamps to decorate wrapping paper for the christmas gifts, and owl and boy are for the sketchbook project.   here is my page  This seemed like fun when I first got the sketchbook but I got to it only a week before the deadline :( (Note to self - stop procrastinating) There was no way I could draw on each page without some sort of a shortcut, so I made couple of stamps - owl and boy and used them as templates to create various characters. My subject for the sketchbook was "under the surface" and i thought "on the surface - owl and and child, but under the surface ... anything i can imagine" - slightly lame, i know but I had one week only. Here is a sample of final sketchbook pages 

if I do it again I definitely have to give myself more than one week. 

illustration friday (Chicken)

Alektorophobia, originally uploaded by agpolaris.

chickens could be scary

more of the same

Owls and owl

What else do owls do? perhaps, they like to catch moth in the early evenings and at night - dance some cancan.

Bravo!