Thursdays with Lisa

Don't know if it's just me... but everytime I decided against taking my camera (My baby, Camcam) a moment of inspired brilliance tends to spontaneously strike, leading me to wish from the bottom of my camera-less bag that I had not been lazy that morning and just toted my camera along. This morning, I was running slightly late for my morning sewing class, and caught a basically empty skytrain downtown. I happened to be standing near the windows. As the breathtaking landscape of the BC mountains & glaciers emerged from in between the buildings with a soft scatter of white among the foliage, I was reminded once again of how much I love BC. And how much it blows not being able to capture the most perfect moment.

Anyways; last evening after being inspired by the Pastiche assignment in Illustrations & Design class, which is where you literally rip off another designer's style in order to better yourself and learn and be inspired, I raided my mother's virtually unlimited stock of art supplies and to my delight, she had pretty much everything I was hoping to find. Chalk and oil pastels, watercolour pencil crayons by Faber Castell, some willow charcoal, and even a tub of gold powder which who knows, could come in very handy.

My illustrator of choice is Henri Matchavariani and his work in the 80's. Very loose round shapes with minimal lines but still conveying what he's trying to say. Mixed media with bold use of colour and black/white line drawings. I don't think it was the sort of illustrator my instructor Lisa had in mind... but I did some exploratory Matchavariani-esque drawings anyways. Other illustrators of note include Bil Donovan & Ariel Mazo. I do like the style but have yet to do research to determine if I love the style.
Great illustrations class this afternoon; sat beside somebody different and we shared stories (horrors of being the victim of public masterbation), laughs & sentiments (Her leaving Bolivia without saying good bye to her nephew).   I must add despite the chatter it was a productive class... Managed to perfect a figure & added a good croquis to my collection, flipped through a few illustration books for the pastiche assignment, and got a good start on my practice render of satin fabric with some brand spankin' new Copic markers I picked up recently. Researching the Copic Sketch vs. Copic Ciao markers, I've come to the conclusion that the Sketch, which are larger & oblong in shape and with a WAY better colour selection at $7.70 a piece are probably a better deal than the $4.95 Ciao which are smaller, round, and only have about 60 colours available as opposed to ~200, with the sketch.

In progress

Ended up spending over an hour after class helping dear Lisa out with some fellow students of fashion with moving her 300 piles of paper and bags to her storage closets. I don't think I have the capabilities of portraying her in words, she's quirky and genuinely weird, sarcastically jokey but dead pan serious, defensive and accusatory ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Yet she's quite the mentor in the art of illustrating and design and brilliant at it herself. You can tell by the obviously huge leap in improvement of my artwork since I've started this program. Now that you have a mental picture of her, I have found a real picture (or two) here from when she was at the pop-up Comme des Garcons shop in NYC. She's really quite the character... Gotta love Lisa in a strange, strange way.

Pattern rendering assignment, just to share.

Gouache