Subconscious Drawing

I've spent this last week doing a lot of subconscious drawing.  At Uni we had a nice relaxing "drawing week" which acted as a bit of a break between our five and six week projects.  We had our choice of three drawing workshops to participate in, the choices were: Life Drawing, Subconscious Drawing/Sound Interpretation, and something else, I don't recall the third one.  So of course I chose to stick with the Subconscious Drawing/Sound Interpretation all week.  It was a great and inspirational week.

As I have written earlier I am very influenced by music, and this week I let myself take even more of a back-seat to the music than usual.  A few of my favourite pieces from this week are the product of splashing water and watercolour paint to the rhythm of  music (and various noises) being played by my instructor.  Then, after letting the paint dry, going back and emphasizing the shapes and forms that I felt should be more pronounced, which I am doing using ink and coloured pencil.  Here is one example:

     

Detail view

The music I was listening to while doing the detail work:

David Bowie-Ziggy Stardust

Pink Floyd-More

David Bowie-Space Oddity

Gábor Szabó-Bacchanal

Pink Floyd-Obscurd by Clouds

Because I really enjoyed this process I have started a couple more of these pieces at home.  I did these after putting a rule in place, the rule was I could not use paint, I could only use things that I could find around our flat.  The result is these two pieces which were created using coffee, tea, water, wine, soy sauce and bleach.

Detail view

Detail view

Detail view

I'll continue working on these once they are completely dry.  Up to this point they are brought to you by John Coltrane.

 One more work-in-progress I started today using chalk and soy sauce:

The album that influenced this creation is:

My First Project

My first project is complete!
I had to compress the files quite a bit in order to post the videos, so the quality is pretty bad.  But here it is:

This next video is one that I thought turned out pretty cool.  I was experimenting with the colour (as you can see I'm adapting to British English), speed and layering while trying to give the previous film the look and feel I had in mind.

Music has always been a very important part of my creative process, so I've decided to keep track of what I'm listening to while working on each piece.  Hopefully I actually stick with this plan because I think it would be a great thing to be able to look back on.

While working on the two previous films I was listening to some early blues and a lot of folk songs, obviously Woody Guthrie but also quite a bit of Dylan. These are the albums that provided the majority of the inspiration:

Here is a somewhat psychedelic short film I created while figuring out how all this editing stuff works.  This one particularly lost a lot of quality in the process of converting it into a file this blog accepted.

While working on this film I was constantly listening to Captain Beefheart and CAN, I couldn't get enough of these three albums:

Inspired

I am awakened by ideas on a nightly basis lately, good ideas too.  1:30am, 2:30, 3:15 they seem to come at all hours of the early morning.  I find myself unable to get back to sleep as I am mentally trying to figure out if these ideas could be tangibly executed, wondering if there is some way I can actually mould these ideas into some amazing work of art.  The inspiration has become incredible, if not ridiculous, everything I look at inspires me.  I am looking at everything in a different way now, I thought I had always looked at life in an artistic light but that was nothing compared to this.  I have been introduced to a whole new world!

So it seems I am now constantly inspired, I can't escape it...which is a great and very welcome effect of attending art college.  I guess that's to be expected after two months of spending six hours a day looking at, creating and manipulating art in various forms, and additionally spending another two to three hours a day reading about art history, theory and philosophy.

I have spent these first six weeks working with digital media.  I have never done any computer generated art in the past so this has been a great learning experience.  I have spent the majority of the time creating short films which I have enjoyed immensely.  My first project, which I am quite happy with at this point, is due at the end of this week so this is the last week working on the digital side of art.  Next week I will be switching to a different medium.  I feel that I have learned a lot about digital art in this short amount of time and I can see myself  working with it quite a bit in the future.

Here are a few self portraits I made using still shots from the films I've been creating: