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drawings

drawings, graphic design, paintings
Mouthpieces
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Pencil, ink, acrylic
January-February 2010

Lately I’ve been doodling a lot, trying to regain a sense of design. It’s funny, because although I’m a full-time graphic designer (and production artist and customer service rep and project manager and copywriter and…), I feel I’ve lost a sense of visual design, of creating and arranging elements within a space. Or maybe I’m just now seeing the differences between the two, because I don’t have any creative blockage when it comes to arranging information (text and images), but in composing an image that’s not an accident, or taken from life, I’m at a loss.
drawings
Colorspace 2
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Colored pencil and acrylic on wood
May 2009
part of the Staring at Screens series
drawings, www
Colorspace
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Colored pencil on wood
May 2009
part of the Staring at Screens series

in researching this project the word “colorspace” popped into my head. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this term before in my cluster of thoughts. since I work for a digital printing company full time as a graphic designer, “colorspace” enters my vocabulary all the time in discussing CMYK, RGB and Pantone colors. Each has totally different quirks and foibles in what we see on screen vs what the design software reads (e.g. Adobe) vs what the print driver reads vs what the printer itself reads vs what we see produced. This is about how that image we see on screen, the digital eye of the machine (interpreter [screen]/producer[printer], and what we see physically, is altered in that process, particularly through digital photography: translation of images seen by the human eye into pixels, 1s and 0s, and that mutation of form and message through television, movies, and internet presences such as personal websites, image/video sharing and social networking sites. It begins and ends with The Eye. Consciousness of the Self and how it is reproduced in these media, as well as ubiquitous Unseen Eyes, digital and human, viewing, interpreting, reproducing the Self, infinitely, obscurely. In drawing and painting images produced by machines, I am attempting to reclaim natural vision. Let us take our understanding of “The Work Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” a step further, or in another direction (whatever your preference), and look at our present circumstances in “The Self in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
drawings, graphic design, type
Amor Prohibido
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Finally got around to doing this, it’s an idea I’ve had since last summer. Inspired by Charanga 76’s Spanish cover of “My Forbidden Lover” by Chic. The lettering style I came up with in high school when I wrote out all the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” one time in study hall.

Sharpie on wood
May 2009
drawings, ideas, style, type
milagros
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The word “milagros” has been stuck in my head the last few days since I saw Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo last week. For some reason, the first time I saw “Miracles” – the neighborhood community center in the movie, I read it as “Milagros” – which sounded much cooler to me. My next project is to find the right t-shirts to paint it on in a couple of different styles. Oh, and the t-shirts will be shredded, of course.

Ink on paper

August 10, 2008
drawings
Diskovery
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Saturday I felt like watching the Chapi Chapo intro on YouTube. Then I starting watching Nickelodeon bumpers from the early 80’s in Related Videos. I think the video for the Midnight Juggernauts’ “Into the Galaxy” should’ve looked like the Nick graphics instead of the bland thing I watched the other day on myspace. Anyways. Then I found a bunch of Jem music videos. Wow! I don’t think I watched it that much when I was a kid, I think it was on TV at the same time as some other show I liked better. But I was impressed by the fashion and drawing style (the music, less so). I studied studying the face formula by pausing on closeups. I know I need to practice my technique some more, but I don’t want to polish it too much. I always thought it was lame that the kids in school who were considered “good” artists always drew like comic books, nothing original.

her hair looks like Tammi the hooker from that episode of King of the Hill
drawings, life, portrait
Before their time
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Before their time
Pencil on paper
May 28, 2008

In art class, my junior year of high school, we were asked to fill up a 100 page sketchbook over the course of the semester. This was the year when I starting thinking seriously (as seriously as a 16-year-old can) about art as a career. I remember sitting at my antique writing desk, staring at the objects on it – a stapler, a pencil, the hinges of the desk flap – as if they would they would start talking and tell me what to enter in my sketchbook for the day. As I gazed intently at them, they began to flatten out. I composed a drawing of these objects completely of shades only – no lines. I was astonished at the photographic rendering when I finished the drawing. I realized that what separates objects visually is not lines, but values. What makes dimension is not the shapes themselves but the proportions, the relationships from one change in value to another, that make up those shapes. Lines have their purpose as a shortcut but they aren’t what really define things. Now that I’m older, I understand how that “Eureka!” moment of seeing – of seeing physical objects and relating them to the mind, which is internal, and processing them back out again to the world as a drawing, something that is experienced externally by others – informs my outlook on life and people.

I made this portrait of my uncle in the 1980’s the other day to see if I could still draw, really draw. It took about 30 minutes. I’m a little out of practice but what was bizarre was that my proportions were dead on. I didn’t really have to measure anything. Nonetheless, when I double-checked my foundations of the drawing, I found everything was 99% accurate. I think this comes from doing so much graphic design over the past few years that I can now find the middle of the page or line up elements without having to measure them. Of course, I always verify my work by using the align/distribute tools in Adobe, but it’s kind of shocking when I realize I’m only one-hundredeth of an inch off.

You grow up but you don’t.
collage, drawings
Fallible Fashion
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January 20, 2008

Ink and paper collage