Escher Cheekbones and Heinous Seepage

I’ve kind of finished the infernal dragon. That’s that out the way.

(Click on any of today’s image for a larger version on Flickr. And you could even leave a comment there if you like. But if push comes to shove, I prefer comments here on blogger.)





In the last stages of this mixed media monstrosity, I used a lot of white lines with a thin brush and this stuff called liquid paper. I wrote a little note that said ‘white lines connected to my mind’. I could feel this an exciting little development that I will carry forward to the pictures wot I care about that have both grappling and nature in them.

I don’t normally do this, but here’s the photoshop mock-up that I used as the basis for the dragon painting, and liberties have been taken with perspective and picture fragments. It’s not much of thing in itself, but it kind of signals a little bit where I want to go with my next paintings, a more playful and hands-on approach to pictorial space.







I had been neglecting my other duties to do that. My last week’s wrestler mushes were sitting there begging to be more understood and stuff. Begging to be taken to the extremes of draftswomanship!





Biro frenzy! Unfortunately it seems that biro tends to seep through even the most opaque applications of acrylic paint. Bum bums! Does anyone know of some kind of biro-esque wonderpen that would refrain from such heinous seepage?





Now in the more recent two bottom drawings above, I used some of the information from the biro frenzy ones but tried to filter a bit of likeness back in. Particularly in Randy’s face I began to think about Escher, about getting some optical mischief in there with the wonky cheekbone adventures. I’ve seen some technically spectacular caricatures that are immaculately constructed, and look like Spitting Image puppets, but part of me thinks… why do it like that, when drawing on a 2D plane gives you so much more freedom, freedom to indulge in a play between illusionism and pure linear kicks. I think the bottom two would almost be more suited to being cleaned up like proper cartoon characters and have the shading and the scribbling beaten out of them. Also I would add that I was trying to make Randy a little bit more smug and bastardy, like he is, and that Kurt has got a bit crude and ugly here. He has features that lend themselves to just getting massive. So I still have work to do.

My latest grey blog is entitled birds do not require punk spirit to experience the urgency of life
, you could read it if you want to boogie some more with my thoughts.

I Make Your Ankle Hurt

Randy is more advanced than Kurt, in the sense of being further along the line of my understanding his face.

Kurt looks slightly feminised and slightly baby-like in my pictures. He’s all tender round the edges for the time being.






More dragon.






Primitive Kurt Angle studies. He has some whopping big expressive blue eyes, I do not have a handle on them yet.





There’s a tender little oil painting based on wrestling.

Not feeling too texty tonight. Have a look at my texty blog if you want text. I done plenty.

Bye bye,

Love from Chloe.

Sexy Biros and Floury Baking Potato Dragons

I’ve started painting a dragon in a tree for a kind of sort of illustration commission.

It’s barely started really. I want to get it good and luminous and spooky by the end.





I’m using a lot of different media to get fast rich-surfaced results. It’s all a little bit mysterious and I’m figuring it out as I go along.

Different brands of hot pressed watercolour paper are like potatoes. They vary from waxy to floury. The waxy papers are better for pure watercolour painting, because it’s easier to lift colour from them and they don’t take pencil very well because they don’t have much of a grain. Floury papers are good for mixed media because they do take pencil marks and almost anything you can throw at them really. I think that Fabriano hot pressed paper is quite waxy. The one I’m using now is floury and I can’t remember the brand… Saunders Waterford! That’s it.

I’ve realised that with boring old non-cartoon long winded painting type art it’s less easy to squirt entertainingly bloggable eye entertainment out of it on a regular basis.

But it happens I’ve also drawn Randy and John again for sheer man-face-contrast boisterous biro fun. If only I had no other obligations I could spend all my days in such joyous manboy scribblings. I want to take it to weird far out places.

In a sense it’s perverse for me to draw wrestlers when they are peculiar twilight scorned quasi-celebrities, and perhaps if I painted real celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan I would be more accessible or something.
But I love doing wrestler faces. I love the man shapes. I love the pantomime expressions. I love the mime and the bodily expressiveness. I love doing these two in particular at the moment and I don’t want to lose my thread.

Doing a pair of faces lets them bounce off each other. It makes you more sensitised to their striking differences. I tend to do Randy’s eyes particularly tiny and beady and shifty in these whereas John’s eyeballs quite frankly have trouble staying in his head. Randy is extremely sinuous, supple and graceful whereas John is a graceless but endearing ogre nonchalantly whittled by the god of plasticene, whose name is Mr. Wobblyhands.

I love alternating between pencil and bic biro. I observe differently with each. I see differently. I love the fun and irreverence of a biro. Biros are sexy. It costs twenty seven pence or something and it’s practically my all time favourite drawing implement.

My REAL hardcore work is big epic oil paintings that are either nearly finished or yet to be conceived. I’d be doing that if I could really choose. But I gotta stick with this children book cover business for now and try to make it brill.

I feel I’m getting in a groove with these things so I hope to get some more regular white blog action happening.

no leaf dragons as yet

Soon I’ll be posting you leaf dragons and figuring out how to be craftily profound and emulate Rembrandt again.

But in the meantime I am possibly further off the trajectory of my rocker than in the last post.





I sat and giggled at that drawing last night while tired and sitting on the sofa. Possibly at my incompetence, possibly at my competence, possibly at their faces.

The Randy on the far right was not boyish enough. Hence the one in the middle. He's hard to draw face on, no interesting contours are visible. John Cena melted.

Then there was this little compulsive monstrosity:



If you don't know what the originals look like, they look a little bit like this. Except in my mind they look more like my drawings.

Now I am going to add a little bit to this post. I wanted to be brief, but not so brief as to baffle with insufficiency of information. So am I adding a little something.

Most of the pictures I do of wrestlers aim to be beautiful and delicate. These ones aren’t, they aren’t quaint or ladylike, but whatever they are, I feel like I’m going through some really particular learning process. To sit down and monkey with the contours of somebody’s face is quite a curiously empowering experience. It has made me remember what’s possible when I sit down to draw, things that I could not have held or envisioned in my head. Things to do with manual dexterity and visual… IQ, I guess. Challenging my visual smartness.

Even though these are extremely frivolous and that’s mainly the point, I feel like attacking my next pompous and ambitious projects with a similar level of robustness and confidence. It’s something simple about the infinite potential of just sitting down and drawing, thinking with lines.

And I may need to alert some wrestling fans to these little bastards.

Because my mum just said ‘hmmmmmm’

And I hope to do a grey blog today.


Then I scribbled some fairies and crap for illustrations for a letter I'm writing.







And I've been writing lots of revolutionary thoughts in my grey blog.

Oh I also have a myspace now. You can be my friend if you like.

And here's something slow and slightly spooky and slightly more like what I'm going to be doing next: