Revisited this Nick Cave & Warren Ellis piece for an upcoming promotional postcard.
The Bordello: Enzo Vega
“Part time male escort, full time badass motherfucker.”
*~*~*
An illustration for an evolving collaborative project. Inspired by too much Tarantino, use of the words disco, daddio and debauchery as well as the sounds of Misirlou.
Here’s a little madlib for you, “The Illustrator’s Lament”:
No matter how many ( cool objects, people, or scenarios ) I draw, I will still be a ( self adjective ) ( self noun ) who will never ( fanciful action ).
For instance:
No matter how many tough lady space marines I draw, I will still be a cautious nerd who will never fire an interstellar harpoon.
I think Kali is hitting on something vital here, albeit jokingly. At a recent panel on The Art Department/Illustration Academy (and I forget exactly who was addressing this issue, perhaps Sterling Hundley), it was proposed that one of the largest problems facing young illustrators today is that our worldviews and experiences are essentially filtered out and spoon-fed to us through various media outlets. We don’t dance, we watch people dance on youtube. We don’t fight, we play fighting games.
Compared to say, Frederic Remington roughing it on the frontier, or Harvey Dunn being sent as an artist-correspondant on the Western Front, my life has been pretty sheltered and tame—does this mean my art is sheltered and tame?
I mean, I don’t think everyone needs to go to war, or go exploring into some untamed wilderness (although both of those things would be quite the character builders), but I do think it’s important to get outside of the studio and just do things for yourself. At one of the subsequent panels after the TAD one, James Gurney talked about “feeling” your reference, instead of just relying on photographs; he said he would often put on costumes and act out the situation he was about to draw/paint, just to get a better sense of what essential emotion needed to be emphasized. He lives by a mantra of Howard Pyle’s: “Throw your heart into a picture and jump in after it.”
We need hearts that are our own; ones that we’ve built up, broken, and shared willingly on our own terms.
All this to say: Kali Ciesemier has some badass work and I love her space marine.
Follow-up on the previous post. Finally wrapped this one up, and I’m on to the next one.
young Miles Morales
he’s Spider-Man, yanno
Before war photographers, there were actual war artists armed with pencils, pens, ink and paper. And we can’t stop staring at their incredible drawings.
These images, drawn from the May edition of National Geographic magazine, on newsstands April 24, and W.W. Norton’s “Civil War Sketch Book,” on sale May 14, represent some of the finest made by a corps of young Civil War artists known as “Specials” — so called because their work was rushed to newspapers and magazines special delivery — who recorded the bulk of the firsthand images of our nation’s bloodiest conflict.
WOW. That’s something.
(via auricomus)
