Illustration Friday

size: 11 3/4 x 8 5/16″
medium: cut and torn paper on wood
click here to Super-size her!

A superhero uniform has only a minimum of necessary features. Gloves and boots are always a good idea for those whose skin is not made of stone or steel. Capes are optional; not everyone can carry them off. Certain nocturnal avengers may favor utility belts and pouches, while those with metahuman powers would find them superfluous.

The only absolute necessity, the one thing a hero or heroine cannot do without, is an insignia. Their logo. Preferably prominently displayed. After all, what’s a hero without marketing?

It’s fascinating to watch the evolution of the superhero costume over the decades. The dudes’ costumes have become less colorful and more practical with body armor, a plethora of pockets and pouches, and most happily, less spandex. The girls’ uniforms… well, they didn’t exactly toss on a pair of overalls to tussle back in the 30’s. These days, it’s gotta be a challenge for the artists to pinpoint which scrap of cloth they can erase without the whole thing disintegrating into separate atoms.

Below you can see a couple pose studies. Read the rest of this entry »

size: 7 7/8 x 7 7/8″ (20 x 20cm)
medium: dimensional cut paper

Compared to the mayfly-like lifespans of us puny humans, the stars are infinite. So too is their power to captivate our minds and imaginations. We dream of visiting them and, when we can’t do that, we sit back with a bottle of wine and try to pick out familiar shapes and stories among those uncountable pinpricks of light.

Like the forever chaste Virgo. Except that oops, she’s not that innocent. Turns out that for about a billion years (just a loose estimate), from the ancient Babylonians through the Greeks and Romans, the big V was a fertility goddess. Now, I’m a little rusty on this sort of thing but I’ve never heard of a virginal fertility goddess before. It kind of flies in the face of the job description. It wasn’t until medieval times that she reclaimed her maidenhood (is that even possible?) and became associated with the Virgin Mary.

Much like A Great Ol’ Bear I experimented some with dimensionality here, suspending Virgo in front of the sparkly background paper. The patterns and positive/negative cuts make some interesting shadows in the right light. While I was making this piece, I held it up in front of my desk lamp to examine some of the cuts, and was surprised by how beautiful it was illuminated from behind. Sometime in the future, I’ll have to play around with illumination (kind of like Tim Budden is doing with his work right now). Sometime when I have more resources available to me than one cheap desklamp.

size: 5 7/8 x 5 7/8″
medium: dimensional cut paper

The power of myths and fables lies in their ability to magnify human traits, feats and frailties. The gods and men and monsters who inhabit these stories are larger than life, and so too are their flaws. Zeus may have been a god among gods on Mt. Olympus, but the guy had the libido of 200 teenage boys and the moral code of a brain damaged weasel. Match that up with his supernatural fertility and he seems to have been solely responsible for 90% of the demigods and heros tromping around Athens and Sparta.

Poor Callisto, tomboy nymph that she was happened to catch his wandering eye one day. Things just went downhill from there. Nine months later she gave birth to Arcas. Which ticked off Zeus’ wife Hera who, as far as I can tell, was the goddess of misaimed jealous rages. She turns Callisto into a bear. A decade or so passes, and Arcas, now a precocious hunter like his mom, draws back a bow and takes aim at… do I have to say it?

Zeus had the decency to feel guilty and he stops the matricide. He grabs momma bear by the tail, swings her around a coupla times, and plants her up among the stars. Because, I suppose, that’s better than being human again. Arcas is turned into Ursa minor. This is how gods fix their mistakes, I suppose. So what’s the moral of this story? Always have deity-strength pepper spray on hand, maybe?

Aside from just loving mythology, this piece was an attempt at some new techniques with cut paper. For one thing, this is all about pattern and positive-negative space, instead of color and texture. For another, this is the first piece I’ve done where the front layer is suspended above the back. In the right lighting, there are some pretty cool shadows at play… although not in these photos. Every once in a while, it’s nice to stretch my brain and do something different. And I’ve gotta admit, some of those wacky celestial patterns were a ton of fun to draw.