A Song of Light, Twigs, and Fluff

A few weeks ago Mr. Green and I went to the Botanic Gardens with our friends David and Rebecca. My camera immediately ran out of batteries, but Rebecca was kind enough to lend me her phone. I then proceeded to take >1 GB of photographs.

Here are a few that I like, photoshopped into sweet technicolor oblivion:

Time to make some paintings! :D

Spooky Trees

I made a painting this week. Shockingly, it's of trees! (My favorite subject...) To keep things interesting, I turned it into a spooky gif:

Happy Halloween ...

Disco Lilies

Today I learned how to make a gif:

Wheee!

Space.

The above drawing might look like the insides of a witches cauldron, but that is not the fault of its subject. I was trying to draw a Hubble image of 30 Doradus, which is a well-known star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. In other words, it's a drawing of a star nursery.

I scanned my star nursery picture and started playing with its hue in Photoshop. Dr. Green taught me how to how to stitch these differently colored images together into a movie. Watch the psychedelic witches brew boil!

Like most of my recent drawings, I drew this space image with oil-based sharpies. I just can't get over how bright they are! Today, when I was cleaning the apartment, I found a bunch of old drawings. I put them in plastic covers and hung them up in the window to get them out of the way. And behold!

Colors!!

Garden Doodle

I love wandering around a botanic garden. The next best thing is drawing a picture of a garden; doing so feels almost like a form of meditation. While drawing this picture (with oil-based sharpies, of course), I consciously tried not to control the drawing process. I said to myself: "brain, do as you please."  I kind of like how it turned out. There's so much cartoonish movement ... I feel like it's both sinister and naive at the same time.

I found the above image by searching for 'garden' on Google image. The source picture is here, and it's apparently Alan Bloom's Dell Garden in the Bressingham Gardens.

Panoramic Panel

Dr. Green and I just got back from a vacation in California and Arizona. I'm between cameras right now, but we spent some time playing with the panorama function on Dr. Green's iPhone. I made a panel of some of my favorites:

A-E: Mendocino, California
F,G: Tucson, Arizona

"Community of the Future"

Quarry Park, Bridgeport, Chicago, IL, USA, Earth.

Bridgeport's quarry park is a fascinating place. There's a pond surrounded by cliffs (where the quarry used to be) beside a hill (where the dirt from the quarry is now). Some ingenious landscape architect got the city to put in a raised metal walkway that wraps around the hill and ends in a platform by the pond. From the hill, just beyond the flickering highway, you can see downtown Chicago. If you look to the West, you'll also see smokestacks mixed in with church steeples. On July 4th, there's a 360-degree fireworks show put on by the people of Bridgeport, which goes on for several hours. We once saw a fox lurking by the water, and one year there was a pair of alarmingly white Pekin ducks living in the pond.

All this is to say: if this picture is weird, blame it on the weirdness of quarry park. Some people call Bridgeport the "community of the future" and it certainly seems like time is out of joint there. It's not a coherent place with a constant thread or stylistic theme. The sun and moon hang out in the sky together. There's beauty and charm in its ugliness. It's a paradox.

The other day I found this quick sketch of Bridgeport's quarry park (drawn with a thick blue marker) taped in an old sketchbook. I scanned it and added the colors with Photoshop. I'm still not completely pleased with it (I think if I worked on it more I might remove the strange chicken waddle arms coming out of the bubble lady's head), but my attention span is short. As is life.

The Gathering

So you now how when you move you find things that you forgot you had?

Well, we found the magic cards.

The Nothing eats Chicago

Legal aliens (LLAP)

Frannie photobomb

Infrastructure

Trees, once

The tree below is based on a photograph I took last fall.  I drew it with my digital drawing tablet. It's not really finished, but I got sick of working on it. So it's done. Maybe I'll work on it again one day.  But probably not. 

Once I decided it was "finished," I thought, "Whee! Now I can play with it!" So I made some mirror image and upside-down versions of the above image, and stitched them together to generate the below. It kind of looks like an evil praying mantis. Eek!

But why tile something only once?  And why limit yourself to the original colors?  (Maybe because the result might give you a seizure? Consider yourself warned.)

Behold my kaleidoscopic tree montage:

Sunday with Photoshop

Here is this week's drawing, made with a Wacom and Photoshop:

It came out pretty wild! I really love outlining things in black, so my drawings are fairly cartoonish. It reminded V. of the Twin Towers. I see a strange wedding cake topper. 

Once it was finished, I started applying a bunch of additional filters (other than the Joanna filter).

Here it is during a post-apocalyptic, radioactive night:

Here it is on Mars, way back when there was water there:

And here it is seen through the eyes of a poorly constructed android:

FIN

Hyde Park Picnic

One evening last August, these two ladies were sitting in Nichols park's last sunbeam. I (creepily) took a photo, but I was far away and it came out horribly. So, because the light was perfect, I decided to draw it with my oil-based sharpies. These markers are so much fun: I love the metallic gold, and the black is so very, very black. They are useful for drawing high-contrast, late afternoon light.

Shadowless

I have emerged from my den!

To celebrate, here is a drawing of some potted plants in Arizona. I drew this in December with ink and paper, and I added the colors today with Wacom and Photoshop. The sketchy signature is 100% Wacom.

Composite of a Scanner Fail

New tiny sketchbook + glorious oil-based markers = yay!

However, there is one downside to my awesome new tiny sketch book: it is so small and fat that my 'Portable Wand Scanner' does not function optimally.

This means that I could digitally copy only half of each sketch (at most). Being too lazy to try scanning them again, I decided to make a composite of all these half-drawings: