It’s my great pleasure to pimp Dunja Branovacki, an artist from Serbia, who contacted me a while ago with images illustrating and inspired by The Etched City. I think she has a great talent, particularly for creating grotesque yet beautiful creatures and scenes. She often uses a subdued palette that unifies her oddities into a dreamlike cohort — there’s truly a sense of the otherworldly about them. Here is a picture she’s given me permission to post. It’s Gwynn, coolly facing trouble that appears to have snowballed, as he would say:

Her DA gallery is here. The TEC illustrations she’s put up there include Soul Portrait, an image of the man/crocodile god born from the river, and Monster Parade, a tour-de-force of Things. Amongst her other Things, don’t miss the strange and lovely sand/mud lurk. One of my favourite images is Garden; I feel a bit sad that this place doesn’t actually exist.  And there’s plenty else to see, in different styles, including a gorgeous man in a tutu.

Thanks, Dunja, for sharing your art. All the best to you — may the Geist of inspiration visit often!

I’ve been drawing quite a bit lately, mainly with pen and watercolour. These are a few pictures I’ve made, with ruminations (insert noise of spitting cud…).

This started off as a simple drawing of a woman’s profile in reddish ink. I dropped a blob of paint on the far right of the page, so I extended the picture rather randomly to cover the blob. I added black ink to deepen the shadows, and soon had quite a mess on my hands. I turned it blue in Photoshop, which was an improvement, but you can still see that the shading is messy and that the whole thing is not well planned. The valuable lesson here was that if you’re making a monochrome composition with a lot of objects, you really need to think about where lights and darks will go. And I drew those fighter planes very badly, too. On the other hand, I’m quite pleased with the dodo. The Kewpie doll made a special point of being in there. I used a reference from Rose O’Neill’s original drawings. I like the quote of hers on that page: “I am in love with magic and monsters, and the drama of form emerging from the formless.” Her titanic “Sweet Monsters”, also on that page, I find wonderful and intriguing — powerful, I won’t say surrealistic, but magical work.

An experiment in painting with minimal preliminary drawing. I discovered that you can lay down a wash with Ecoline dyes and then work back into it with watercolours, or just a wet brush, which will partially lift the wash from the paper, which is what I did here. The little story to go with it is that this is Plonky, of the plonked-down colours, watching over eggs — someone’s eggs, Plonky doesn’t know whose — in the Sepia Cave, where the scanner picking up buckles in the paper causes mysterious patches of light to appear on the walls.

Ludo. Friend. Diluted India ink on tea-stained paper, graffiti in Photoshop. It looks like Ludo, so I’m happy. No Jareth, I’m afraid. Couldn’t see past his crotch to get a good look at the face.

Rough sketch of a violinist in Venice, from here.  I made him a bit thinner than the figure in the original. When I get better at painting I might use this guy as a reference for a goblin fiddler or something.

A case of fail better next time. Copied from George Frederic Watts’ painting, with hindquarters added when I realised I’d left too much room. I love the image of the minotaur gazing out to sea (I prefer it without the crushed bird in his fist), so decided to do a pen copy, which turned into pen and watercolour, which turned into a mess. Still, it’s a picture with a background, all painted, nothing Photoshopped. I’m going to try copying Watt’s image again, maybe just in sepia ink.

This is how the D picture finished up. I did chicken out with the background, and just sketched it in with the Wacom, partly because the paper wasn’t stretched, so it would have buckled badly if I’d laid a wash down for the sky, and partly out of sheer cowardice. The result isn’t very good, but I think it’s better than I’d have managed with a paint brush:

I learned a few useful things in the process of painting this, including the helpfulness of white opaque ink for painting hair– you can paint with the ink, then lay watercolour on top of it — like gouache, only it gives a softer effect, or softer than I can manage with gouache, anyway.  I flipped the background to make it fit the shape of the figure a little better. I’m pleased with the hair and the armour, the latter more in idea than execution — I can imagine knights in ceramic armour painted like tea sets (”plate” mail!), made by the famous houses of porcelain: Meissen mecha, Spode cyborgs, Willow-pattern warriors, chevaliers de famille rose et famille vert… defenders of the Empire Deluxe, R.C., if you are reading this.

Other useful discoveries:  You can paint in Ecoline over ebony pencil without it smudging. Gold Sakura poster colour mixed with Ecoline makes lovely pearlescent paint. And bleach! I read that Rackham used it, so I’m been experimenting. Sure enough, you can lay down a wash and then lift colour off in sections with bleach, although bleach when dry may leave a deposit behind (chlorine crystals?) that’s difficult to paint over. However, thinned bleach seems to do the trick and doesn’t leave as much deposit.

I think my rough drawings, like It Was Rabbit, Forage in the Garden, and No Country for Old Women, have more individuality and life than the things I manage to do when I’m trying to draw well. So it’s definitely time to stop copying Amano. But even when I’m not copying someone else’s style, when I concentrate on technique, I think I tend to produce pictures that are less “mine”; they could almost be anybody’s. However, I know it takes time and patience to get technique and inspiration working together — and the more technique you have, I think, usually, the better you can eventually do when you start to let obvious technique go for the sake of individuality and expression.

Anyway,  I think it’s time to go back to drawing for the sake of practice for a while, without trying to produce finished pictures, and to do a few more pages of the doujin, which is looking rather cobwebby and neglected.

I completely finished screwing up the D I had just begun to screw up a few days ago. I had this one in reserve:

This is watercolour and ink with the background and a bit of the figure sketched in digitally. I’ll get the figure finished tomorrow, but might chicken out and do the background in Photoshop.

I figured out while doing this that if you want a thin line in a particular colour, and you don’t want to mix up a whole lot of it, you can just use a brush to load the steel nib with watercolour or ink. Bleedin’ obvious, really. Using the Ecoline inks, you can control exactly where the colour goes and then blend it with water afterwards — this is a good way to lay down small shadows. So I’ve learned a couple of things.

I think I’m doing ok with the colour scheme, but I could have made the costume more aesthetically coherent. I kept the ornaments simple, to reduce the chance of error, but now that I’ve figured out about using watercolours with the pen, I’m sorry that I didn’t make the hat and hair doodads more delicate and elaborate in keeping with the armour. Still, it’s an improvement on the Gwynn picture. I also thought D would look good with a lampshade on his head a little veil on his hat. Now I’m not so sure, but it can’t be removed. I guess stranger things have gone down the catwalk to resounding applause.

Yesterday, one of my adult students told me that her mother used to write gay Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets) doujinshi. To which I could only reply, Awesome!

I also crossed a rubicon of Thai literacy yesterday. At a snack food shop I was able to read the name of the thing I wanted (khanom jeep), ask for it without pointing, and get the thing I’d asked for.

In other news, I have fucking awful PMS this month. Nothing physical of note, just baaaad wolf blues, in honour of which I drew this monster:

The monster has his own problems. He — being normatively male, thus PMS-less — is blue for other reasons. Mainly, he’s blue because people don’t taste good anymore. Everyone’s damp and stringy and musty inside, he says, like old macrame left out in the rain.

Serendipitously following Lee’s idea of a manual of inexecrable delights, this, from an exposition of erotic art at the Bibliotheque Nationale last year (pic via Chesty in Furs):

It looks as if it might be by Eugene Le Poitevin, who drew the penis birds.

The upper picture reminds me of childhood visits to great aunts, which inevitably entailed a tour of the garden and a lot of talk about bulbs.

Stu put me on to this while we were discussing the mysterious nightlife of the bulldozer and the piledriver at the building site across the road. In 2003, Canadian choreographer Anne Troake made a short film, Pretty Big Dig, featuring three mining excavators moving in harmony to music. [Video].

Bulldozers and excavators are, like steam trains, machines in which it’s easy to imagine there being life; they have heads and long necks; they move like strange animals. They certainly dance better than I do.

This is a drawing based on Lee’s sketch inspired by Laurie’s erotic story The Archive.
Lee’s triffic art
Laurie’s triffic fiction
Thanks for letting me borrow this image and idea!

I used liquid watercolour with a steel-nib pen on heavy drawing paper. No photoshopping apart from colour correction. (I take the picture in broad clear daylight, it comes out green, ours not to reason why…) There are a number of anatomical, lighting and use-of-pen problems, and I don’t think I’ve got as much character in the faces as there is in the original, but, being easy on myself, I’m still not entirely displeased with this. I decided not to shade the girl’s leg — thought it looked good with a bit of plain white there. My first plan was to draw half a hookah on one side and half a vase on the other, as negative shapes, to bracket the image, and put shading in between, but there wasn’t room for the vase, so I just shaded the half-hookah in the normal way. I can’t make up my mind whether it’s odd and distracting or quite ok.  Maybe I should partially indicate the other half of it? Might do a test run on the ‘puter. (Edit: nope, tried that, didn’t work. Anything off to the right draw the eye away there.)

With more space around, which I prefer:

 Gwynn, in paint:

Obviously I was going to let myself loose on him sooner or later. There’s quite a bit that isn’t so good here — the clothes are obviously designed by committee (what was I thinking of with the collar and cuffs? I don’t know!), the sections outlined in pen stand out from the rest, the hand and the gun are bad, and it was obviously a bit much to expect myself to manage sleeve creases and patterned fabric. Oh, and the original was in glaring blue and turquoise — calmed down in post-prod, with misty hills added digitally. Still, although I think I tried to bite off more than I could chew, it does look like him and I’m basically pleased with it. I’m especially happy with the hair ribbons, which show how confident he is in his masculinity. Next time he wants an action pose. With better hands.

Wip - D:

So, I shaded the face, was quite happy with it, then proceeded to lose concentration and blithely screw up the rest:

Notes to self: Acrylic emulsion picks up lead pencil and runs with it. You can’t paint in watercolour over acrylic, because acrylic, O dummy, is like plastic. Test the darkness of whatever is on the brush before you commit it to the paper. Drawing details in pen on a painting looks like…drawing in pen on a painting, and magical thinking will not make it otherwise. Don’t just slap cold titanium white on a warm-toned picture; mix it with yellow or get a warmer white if such can be found here. And touching up with opaque whites is not desirable if you wanted a “paper left white” look; it’s never the same. And do get the design right first, don’t just cover hats with random non-matching doodads (although I kind of like the rooty things).

I will probably finish this if only as an exercise in drawing and painting roses. Might be able to rescue it if I can darken the tones, something like this:

Wip - Medicine Seller from Mononoke:

I bought some liquid watercolour to do the outlines with. It comes in a bottle that looks like ink, therefore, despite the label that clearly says “watercolour” my mind goes “ink bottle! waterproof!” Which is why there’s that grey splodge next to the brooch on his hat, which is what happened the first time I put brush to paper. It has now become an exercise in throwing colour around like a monkey throwing shit, with black smudges all over.  It suddenly occurs to me how much the box on his back looks like a washing machine. Maybe it could get out the dirt and fade the colours…
Some sort of partial rescue might be effected by thickening the black lines around the various bits of detail. Maybe.

A couple more profile pics in the works. After that, it will definitely be time to try different angles and poses. And for such time as I actually learn to paint, this morning I saw a dragon’s face in the bathroom tiles, which made me think of a series of pictures based on Puff the Magic Dragon:

The waves reach the sandcastle (D:!) :

Sometimes Jackie looks up from his desk and sees a dragon-shaped hole in the world:

Still on the liquid diet (no, not that kind of liquid diet). Feeling hungry and lightheaded. Seeing things. Such as goblin knights on our bathroom wall. Can you see them too?

This one…

is actually a kind of centaur goblin, playing Goblin Polo Hockey (a very serious sport):

And this one…

is a goblin Jedi ™ out cruisin’ in his goblin landspeeder ™, which has some kind of reptile head mounted sideways on the front (possibly it functions as the horn):

Edit: Christ, now I can see a half-goat, half-wolf beast in the upper one, but only the thumbnail.

Because what every vampire hunter needs is…curlicues. I drew this one in the hotel room and the airport and coloured it at home. The brown colour reminds me of my grandmother’s arrangements of dried flowers, so…dedicated to her.