Oh, my, only four days into the year and already I’ve found (via Random Index) a devilish enabler of procrastination — Outrepart, a site featuring 100 “astounding images from everywhere”, updated hourly, with links.

A minute there led to a couple of hours looking at, amongst other things –
A regal penis
An ithyphallic Jesus (c.1525)
Crappy taxidermy
Japanese surgical illustrations
The strange and luscious art of Madeline von Foerster
The strange and luscious art of John Brophy
Moose
Undream the Echoes, a blog of macabre and unsettling things
Rob Evans, whose eerie paintings often show strangeness occurring in liminal places between the home and the outdoors, or the domestic and the wild.
A haunting abstract sculpture or installation by Harm van den Dorpel (all troubling and seductive latency)
Captain Jeff and the Squeeze Box, from Curious Pages (recommended inappropriate books for kids)
And MY ALLIGATOR MAN-GOD-THING.

And again from Random Index, the surreal drawings of Walter Schnackenberg.

Well, I guess it’s better than looking at porn or playing Bejeweled.

When I looked at this c.1916 picture of Elasmotherium, my first thought was, “Fuck, it’s a really-truly unicorn!” (More recent pictures look more like woolly rhinos.)

The artist, Heinrich Harder, made a lot of pictures of prehistoric animals. Arsinoitherium had a particularly badass head, but as a mostly aquatic swamp dweller it can’t be a candidate, rather to my regret.

Elasmotherium may have survived into historic times. 10th century traveller and writer Ibn Fadlan describes an animal that matches Elasmotherium’s description, and gives this colourful account of its behaviour: “Whenever it sees a rider, it approaches and if the rider has a fast horse, the horse tries to escape by running fast, and if the beast overtakes them, it picks the rider out of the saddle with its horn, and tosses him in the air, and meets him with the point of the horn, and continues doing so until the rider dies. But it will not harm or hurt the horse in any way or manner.”

Glyptodon and Doedicurus match up with Kirby’s suggestion of an armadillo. Glyptodon looks rather round and slippery for riding on, but Doedicurus had a dip behind a hump in the shell where a saddle might go — and the hump was possibly a fat store like a camel’s. It also had a wickedly spiked tail. I can imagine it surviving a bumpy fall, which would be a bonus.

Waiving the issue of domesticability (I think that already got waived with the centipede), it comes down to a bit of a dance between ambience and narrative ideas. While I want to avoid a big-lipped alligator moment, I’d also really like to have a beast that can do more than break its legs/neck when it falls.

No, I don’t know why I’m getting so obsessed with this. Wait, yes I do. I’m not sure how to write the scene after the one I’ve nearly finished, and research is the noblest form of procrastination. Gulp.

Collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie. Like botanical illustrations from dreamland.

Extreme embroidery by Angelo Filomeno. More here.

Right, back to researching yurt construction, alpine steppe flora, and various ways of hurting yourself when you fall off a cliff. I’ll probably use about 0.01% of the info I find, but it’s sort of nice to have it all available so that I can choose details to include without wondering whether they’re realistic or not.

Some things I don’t worry about, like large-scale geography. My fantasy world, such as it is, is made of overlapping mythic territories, and geography and climate are subordinate to that, but I like each individual environment to work on its own terms. And I have to decide what tradeoffs to make between ambience and practicality — e.g. in this case a horse is being ridden where a yak or Bactrian camel might be more practical, but maybe I just want horse-ambience — though if I want the mountains to be alpine desert, like the Kunlun Mountains, which was my original idea, it might have to be a yak, since I think you’d have to carry a ton of feed on pack animals to get a horse through — or let your horse go hungry. Buy feed from herders? Maybe, but why are herders living in a poxy alpine desert when there’s probably a nice grassy steppe a couple of thousand feet down? All these things can be worked out, but they take a bit of thinking. And in a short story there isn’t room to go into detail. Maybe there are mining towns; there’d be feed for the pit ponies, but I want a somewhat otherworldly ambience, and mining towns don’t really go with that.  Or maybe they do? A donkey is technically an option, but the story starts at the winter solstice and has one other sort-of-though-not-really Christian element, and a main character riding on a donkey could underline the wrong idea. (Llamas and alpacas are right out; wrong ethnic feel and not strong enough to carry an adult rider very far, it looks like — even though llamas eat lichen, which would be perfect for the alpine desert.)

Get caught up in trivia, who me?

Edit: Having just looked at Alex’s blog, I feel inspired by the donestre. Carnivores can go quite a long time between meals. What sort of carnivore? Maybe an enormous giant centipede, which I guess comes to mind because I have a friend who has done battle with two pretty big ones in real life. But that really would change the ambience… and it needs to startle at a noise enough to throw its rider, and I somehow doubt a centipede would; but since the creature is in the realm of utter fantasy, it could. But is a domesticated giant centipede way cool, or way silly…? My inner child thinks it’s cool, of course… and it could actually be very useful in the first part of the story… I don’t know if I can resist. It might just have to be. Unless it really screws up the ambience.

British art student Sara Watson, 22, from Central Lancashire University, has painted a Skoda Fabia so that when viewed from a certain angle it appears to vanish into the parking lot where it sits. “I was experimenting with the whole concept of illusion but needed something a bit more physical to make a real impact,” Watson said. The work took three weeks and is quite amazing. I’ve tried to find more of her work online, but no luck so far.

I’ve joined an art studio near work, so I can now go to classes and use the studio whenever I want. There are lots of classes on offer, and it’s also a nice sociable place.

My aim in taking classes is to improve my technique and stretch my mind so that I can find more interesting ways to draw or paint the subjects that give me pleasure. Which means lots of figures with animal heads, men in fancy clothes, masked Venetians, and the occasional bit of porn.

This is a new minotaur, half copied from the last one, which was copied from a couple of photos. The head teacher discourages students from working from photographs, saying that it hinders you in developing our own style because you concentrate too much on just copying the picture. And I can see her point. I’m going to try to use more drawings from life as references from now on. If I want to walk a mile or so up the canal, there’s a water buffalo tethered on a vacant block, so perhaps I should go there and try to do a life study. They’re rather handsome bovines with clean-cut faces that ought to be easy to draw. Speaking of water buffaloes, bareback water buffalo racing!

Copypasting my own critique from DA:

Cobbled 2 or 3 references together here, not counting the bull. Anatomy could be better, hands and hips particularly, and the shadow inside the arms is probably too dark — or else the head needs more texture/detail to draw the eye to it.

And the style of drawing isn’t exactly exciting — I have a ton of trouble getting accuracy and liveliness into one picture (hey, I have enough trouble with accuracy!)

Still, I’m pretty happy with it.

I made a long soapboxy post…then took it off, because there was at least one big hole in my thinking. Of the “There’s a hole in my thinking, dear Liza, dear Liza” variety, that could not easily be fixed. So, although I’m convinced there is something I want to say, I’m not sure exactly what it is yet.

In between thinking like Henry’s bucket, I’ve been drawing a minotaur. I took this picture as a memento before starting the hands, because hands are Mr Cockup’s favourite rendezvous point.

I’m glad I took the picture, because it shows me clearly what I evidently couldn’t see by looking at the original, namely that there needs to be a dark shade on the head — or possibly around it, but up there somewhere — I’ll try out both in Photoshop and see which works — to balance out those two heavy dark areas, or the viewer’s eye will keep getting drawn to the elbows rather than the head. A couple of places could do with sharper definition lines, and that eye needs to be something other than white. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t stand out very distinctly — the white looks too undead.

This is my first time using a blending stump. I over-used it on the torso, but basically I like it, especially on a drawing like this where I want the subject to look solid and still.

Anyway, tomorrow…hands.

Used a photo ref off a gay eye candy site for this one. Shadows enhanced in PS. Getting totally into these bandit masks.

I’m so glad I stumbled across the works of painter Heather Nevay. Born in Glasgow in 1965, she studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her paintings are rich and detailed and replete with symbolism, often featuring children (with faces like early Northern Renaissance portraits), surprised, as writer and film maker James Burge puts it, “in the middle of some incomprehensible ritual, staring out at us with hostility and contempt.”

The Sleeping Boy and The Mourning of Mister Lambe from Nevay’s exhibition this month at The Portal Gallery.

Nevay says: “I’m interested in the games in which children take part which fall into traditional roles and activities. I look at the duplicity of the play which is often the cause of misinterpretation of adult onlookers. I am not storytelling but I want to offer a glimpse of a scene which will continue after our gaze has moved on. I don’t want to paint horrific scenes, but sometimes I have to create an atmosphere of uncomfortable feelings.”

Heather Nevay’s home page — lots of pictures, and the bio includes the article quoted above.

Some of you may remember the picture with the blindfold (completely utterly unsafe for work, unless you work in a whorehouse).

The blindfold is back. I needed a model, really — looked at a few photos but couldn’t find a figure in this position.

Anatomy and %$@#! hands aside, I kinda like what I did here. Might explore this direction some more. (I know: first no eyes, now no nose or mouth. I was inspired by Duncan Regehr’s drawings of Zorro, who he also played on TV. Little did I know, when in the first budding of my sexuality I went batshit for Dirk Blackpool (for younger viewers, yes, men really did wear their hair like that in 1983), that the actor playing him was an accomplished artist. I suddenly have a jones to watch W&W again… )