Society 6'n

Several years ago, at the end of a dissatisfyingly unproductive day, I sat down at my computer and honked out a quick sketch of an owl. By quick i mean maybe an hour or two, because the sucker was made of crazy patterns and odd details. I named him, oddly, Owlie:

h00t

 A little while later, I decided Owlie needed a home and a background, so I drew the background and housed him in the illustrator playground known as Society 6. He kinda languished there for a while, but...

This past week I received an email from Society 6 informing me of their selection of Owlie for inclusion in their public store! Essentially Owlie will be a good deal easier to find for the casual online browser in the Society 6 shop. Presently, I'm offering Owlie as a framed art print, stretched canvas, iPhone case/skin, iPod skin, and greeting card; props to Society 6 for making the variety of iterations quite easy to apply one's designs to!

Owlie as an iPhone case.
He's growing up... I'm so proud!

Seeing as how my shop would likely get increased traffic over time, I decided to take some time to produce a few more designs for my S6 account. I started a collage a few days ago for myself, based on a portion of the large collage I described near the end of last week's post. There was a chunk of window visible with the sun peeking just around the post and for whatever reason it made me think of a face. I set to elaborating on this spark and created a very strange image that is a little whimsical and dreamy as well as mildly menacing and nightmarish. I call it Don:

"Don" 2012

I think Don comes from whatever shreds of cabin fever I may be experiencing, though I do declare I've been plenty busy working on things new and old so if I have any cabin fever it is only felt on a subconscious level. He's an odd one, but I don't think he means any harm.

The first thing I think of when I look at Don is one of my favorite paintings by Rene Magritte, "The Human Condition". Magritte's exploration with illusionism, paintings as windows, paintings about paintings, and paintings about windows about painting as a window are very pertinent to my own current interests in pixel imagery, given the ubiquity of "windows", whether of the Microsoft type or the Apple iPad type, in our daily lives.

This past Wednesday I had a check up about my broken foot. My doctor brought the xrays in an iPad. Myself being not especially familiar with iPads, I had a brief but strong impression of being in the future. It was a little weird, weirder than the bolts and metal plates in my foot, even.

 The next image I constructed for Society 6 was a colorful update of my Ex Voto para Nuestra Senora de San Juan de los Lagos. I was all about putting her at the center of some dazzling, very pink, explosion of color. I spruced up the clouds behind the Virgin by bending the lighter areas closer to the yellow of the lit clouds, which had the wonderful effect of making the shadows in the clouds read like purple. Yay color theory!!!

DAMOS INFINITA GRACIAS

My first drafts are never my best (whose are?!?), and I am a firm believer in making something, sleeping on it, and reacting to it at first sight the next day, repeating the process until I cannot think of anything more to do with an image. That is how I define the illusive term "finished" throughout my art practice: the point where my brain finally submits in the arm wrestling match of creativity, outdone by the refined image or object. It works!


You can check out my Society 6 shop here, here, or here. It's totally up to you, no one will judge you :)