Righty (Lefty #2)

Lefty

More Museum Antics or "Get Your Freak On with Dan DeacOn"

Is this bird attacking the other one, or mating with it? It's kind of hard to tell. I wonder if the museum workers ever snicker when setting up the exhibits?

Over the weekend I went to see Dan Deacon and his 13 piece ensemble at the Wonder Ballroom. I brought my sketchbook in an attempt to draw him during the performance and include that drawing in this post. I was unsuccessful. However before he came on, me and Stephanie tried to sketch some of the other concert goers at the show. This was difficult, but we eventually ascertained that the typical Dan Deacon attendee might have all or one of the following: thick rimmed glasses/crappy eighties sun glasses, headband, mustache/beard, handkerchief in back pocket, ironic t-shirt/sweater, american apparel hoodie. Here's a telling picture I found online:



Audience members aside the show was a lot of fun. I was curious to see his frantic, cartoonish, and mania inducing electronic music performed by a live band and I have to say it was pulled off quite well. The most notable members were probably the three drummers that it took to replicate the beats on his latest album "Bromst."

If you've been to a Dan Deacon show before you know that it is a very unique experience. Due to his ensemble he no longer performs in the center of the audience, but he still engages the audience in as much communal participation as he can. It's a great way to loosen everyone up and really produces a feeling of camaraderie. A few of his MC tactics:

1. fancy dance off in the middle of audience circle
2. snowball effect high fiving while running in a circle
3. archways
4. audience sing alongs

I was restrained at first, but by the end was moving around with the rest of them with wild abandonment. If you get a chance to check him out on this tour DO IT and remember you can get in for free if you provide him and his crew with 5 gallons of vegetable oil for his bio-diesel converted school bus.

Sorry the drawing had so little to do with this post. Peace!

Photos are a good source for inspiration ....

which is somewhat obvious, but I'm glad that I'm getting some use out of the hundreds of photos I took during my travels last year. Ornate historic buildings and museum exhibitions don't make for very engaging pictures after the fact, but can be quite useful as source photos for drawings. Such as the magnificent beast you see below. Do not be alarmed, for this creature is not alive. Nor was it when I photographed it. This ferocious creature resides at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest and proved to be a great model and helped to fuel my recent fascination with BEARS.



The museum also held many "non-bear" related wonders including a mummified baby mammoth that was recently discovered and on display. For some reason they felt part of the mammoth should be displayed in jars. Apparently the Hungarian government has a much more lenient stance when it comes to kiddie mammoth porn.



And of course what institute of science and history would be complete without a small scale replica of Noah's Ark.



(what??)

Ich ben ein weltverbesserer!

Sorry to be MIA as far as posting goes, I'm currently overcoming a brief life crisis. Posts will be more or less daily for the next week or so (I hope).



These are things on my bag. I like to think of it as an illustrative collage .

Now if only I could draw as awesomely as Egon Shiele all the time.
(I do not actually profess to be a weltverbesserer)

Disenchanted on a Sunday

I've been relatively artistically frustrated these days. When pursuing creative endeavors as a career it's natural to doubt yourself since your livelihood is dependent on your ability to stay creative, interesting, accomplished, talented, and fresh. I just feel like I've hit a wall with my art lately, at least with the type of art I've been doing. I'm still sketching and trying new things hoping that something is going to enlighten, but the result has been more therapeutic than anything else. For lack of a better word, I'm bored. Disenchanted , even. I'm confident in my actual skill, but I don't really know what to do with it and part of me can't help but think it has something to do with the plethora of free time I have at my disposal. I've considered going to grad school to try and hone my graphic design and illustration skills, but that would be pretty costly at the moment. A financial impossibility. The thing I really miss about art school, aside from the free resources, is being in a creative environment. Seeing what other people are doing, discussing techniques and subjects, critiquing and being critiqued. The wheels of creation just seemed to flow faster in those days and I'm sorry I didn't fully embrace it when I was there or take it too seriously.

Don't take all this the wrong way. I'm not giving up or seeking encouragement or advice. I'm just venting. I'm sure it's only temporary and soon I'll find the spark to light the fire in my artistic steam engine. Hopefully that will happen soon, but for now I'm going to go out and enjoy this beautiful Portland day while it lasts. You never know when you're going to see another one of these babies.

Here's an experimentation of white pencil on black paper. The person is my Grandfather's aunt Sarah, probably taken in the early 20th century. Classy gal, eh?




And here's a gem my cousin unearthed from her last trip to California. I must have been about six or seven when I did it. FYI, Jacob still looks like that in the morning.

Horrible Mustache Experiment #3?

I know some of you are familiar with my "Horrible Mustache Experiment" series, but for those who aren't I will quickly sum up. In winter of 2006 I did a portrait of a friend which pictured him with a rather unflattering mustache. From then on I decided to do a whole series of "mustache experiments" but I've been painfully slow at getting it together. Well today I decided to try and complete one. This came out of experimenting with using colored pencils on colored construction paper. Without further ado I give you my sketch test, mustache experiment #3, and the original.

If any of you know someone who would like to be a candidate for a mustache experiment portrait please contact me or send a suitably disastrous picture to ischraer@gmail.com.

Tucson, AZ

Well it's been several days since I posted anything but don't think that's because I haven't been drawing. I HAVE. I've just been lazy about posting, there's a difference.

Now as an unemployed young man I have a lot of time on my hands which allows me to think about things endlessly and to myself. One thing that I've decided is that I'm a tad bored with the doing entirely two dimensional art. I still love drawing, but I've been feeling so confined by the page and the computer these days, making sure all my work is clean and pristine that it's been kind of driving me crazy. We're lucky to live in a world with digital cameras so we can document anything we do immediately and transform and combine mediums. A show flier doesn't have to be created in photoshop or drawn by hand. The information can be painted and then arranged and lit in a multitude of ways. You could razor the information into some poor soul's scalp and then take a picture of that if you wanted to. I want to work with my hands more, I want to think outside the box. Art shouldn't necessarily be pretty and pleasant- it should disturb, inspire, invoke, excite. I guess I'm just not excited about doing the same kind of art that I've been doing. I need to branch out- which means my work will probably become sloppier, but hopefully it will also be more dynamic, more interesting, and more fun.

Here's the first stab at something different that will hopefully be the first of many.

RSVP

After much toiling and troubling I've finally finished the wedding invitation that I've eluded to in so many posts. I was initially nervous about taking on the task since a Wedding invite obviously has a lot more weight attached to it than a show flier, but the bride had a pretty clear image of what she wanted and that help tremendously. I'm actually not used to looking at it as a whole since I've been cleaning it up in photoshop on such a minute scale for the past month, but I have to say that I'm pretty happy with the outcome. It's more or less exactly as I envisioned the final product. I'd never really thought about doing anything as formal as this, but more and more people from my generation are getting married these days and unique invitation designs are definitely sought after. It's definitely something I should put some thought into.

*Sigh*... and much as it pains me to say, considering how much work went into it, I kind of like the silhouetted version better. What do you think? I guess I could always make a flashing GIF file.

Storytime

A few days ago I babysat my younger cousin and took her to "storytime" at the local library branch. Here I discovered that hanging out with kids is very strange and it makes sense why people become so weird when they become parents. What do you think would happen to you if you spent nearly every moment you had with an infant trying to communicate things to them ... and failing most of the time? Then think about how weird you have to be to be a preschool or kindergarten teacher. Anyhow, I drew some of the kids at storytime and I think it made some of the other parents uncomfortable. I wonder why?