African Jacana & Hippos

I couldn’t resist one more. (Tomorrow, hamsters. Really!)

I decided to try to do something similar to the other two woodblock-homages, this time with animals instead of a landscape (or maybe with hippos, the trick is that animals ARE the landscape.) This is an African Jacana, which I really did see standing on top of the hippos at Chobe. (Hippos don’t care if things walk on them, apparently.)

So the trick to doing these is actually similar to the Art Deco travel posters I was doing earlier–instead of drawing the oulines, I block the whole shape out in flat colors, and use about ten thousand layers, putting thin black outlines around the big blocks of color and then drawing very thin weird lines on other multiply layers to shape the whole thing, and using gradients madly to make the flat colors work.

It is a seriously weirdass way to work. I am having to think much farther ahead than I usually do. Once everything is blocked out, fixing little dings requires sorting through dozens of layers to find out where something is.

But I really like how it all comes out. The thin lines are basically the same kind of black lines I draw on everything, only more useful.

Mad gratitude to Kevin–he took about a hundred photos of hippo piles which were invaluable for making it work. (Hippos have really messed up heads, incidentally. Their eye lumps do things no other mammal does.)

Prints available!

• July 20, 2015
• 3 Comments
• Art

Thamalkane Lodge

While the rest of the crew was south of us and experiencing some brief technical difficulties, Kevin and I were hanging out at Thamalkane River Lodge admiring this view. (This is in Maun, Botswana.)

There were a lot of birds. Most of them were egrets.

The artist Yoshida Hiroshi and his son Yoshida Toshi traveled the world and did lots of shin-hanga prints of the various sites, which is why there are gorgeous Japanese wood-block prints of things like Uluru and Mt. Kilamanjaro. That would not be a bad way to spend one’s life, if you ask me. This is something of a homage (and something of a “Man, I should go find all my old vacation photos and use them for reference for stuff in this style, because I will actually LOOK at this painting in a few years and maybe remember it, instead of having it moulder on a memory card somewhere.”)

I am really only able to do this because I am procrastinating about drawing hamsters, though.

• July 18, 2015
• 4 Comments
• Art