Lilacmoon

Surprised? New doodle from yours truly!
◉_◉ㆀ

I was inspired by Alex Noriega, after seeing a Drawn! post about him recently. I really like his layered look, with yarny clouds drawn in pen and vibrantly colored backgrounds. When I saw his blog post about how he paints, I really got the urge to try to learn his techniques because I like his style a lot.

I felt uneasy working on this sketchbook page while constantly having his images in my head. Like I was imitating him. But all in all, I think it was a good lesson and an experiment because I learned a few things that might help me build my own style. They are all very trivial sort of things that you might find very uninspiring. But I think I needed to find them out for myself.
For one thing, stippling sucks. Too much work. But its effect was just what I needed because I needed to balance the thick ink lines I drew around the cut-out flowers. So I won’t say I will never ever do stippling again. Second, I learned not to be afraid to wet the non-waterproof ink lines. Why not? I rather liked the bleed-out look of the stitch lines around the flowers (These may be hard to see in the above picture). Another thing is that I can shade with colored pencils. Duh, I know. But I’ve never done it before, especially on a colored paper.

Well, I’m happy to report that I am definitely learning to be more spontaneous. I did no planning on this exercise; I just started with three shapes of flowers. Since I’m doing these pages as experiments, I do a lot of analyzing and thinking about the approach I took after I complete them. Thus the long explanations, like the one above. Hope you don’t mind.

Next time, I’ll show you what I’ve done with the flowers that were cut out from this sketchbook page. That’s right. Waste nothing!

I found a really cool collage artist!
Her name is Kate Endle, and I happened to see her work while I was in Seattle last weekend. Check out her portfolio site. I love the colors and textures found in the papers she used, and the fact that she continues her collage on the edges of the canvases, very much the same way I used to do my acrylic paintings. Looking at collage artists like her is very inspiring for me.. I should really do something with papers I collect. ∋＿∈

Laforet Harajuku, a trendy shopping mall in Tokyo, is having an event called Laforeco, where you can join Team Minus 6% and get a canvas bag for free and have it personalized with various stamps designed by participating stores in the mall. I’ve learned, with the help of a Japanese dictionary, that Team Minus 6% is a national movement you can join to help prevent global warming. Nice cause, it sounds like. Too bad I’m here. -_-;;

Heh.. the real (selfish) reason I’m blogging about this event is because of the stamp designs. Lately, I’ve gotten interested in rubber stamping, so when I saw the stores’ stamp designs, I was very excited. Aren’t they neat?? I bet many of them are store logos.. My favorites are Olive des Olive, Algonquins (love the skulls!), Transit Lounge, X-girl, ysh (on the 2nd page), and Osmosis (on the 3rd page).

Hopefully, I’ll start designing my own rubber stamps very soon.