New paintings and regular art updates.
Digital map, playing with textures. I think it looks a bit woven. I won’t explain how I did it, I spent ages colouring it in. It could look like an old TV screen, but it wouldn’t be in colour! I tried to add continental shelves which is why the colours are shaded in contours. Anyway hope you like it.
So yet again I didn’t know what to draw. I tried to remember the shape of the North American continent (including Canada) and to draw it from imagination. Then I remembered when our teacher would use a roller to print out the shape of the United Kingdom onto our school books for geography class. Maybe American children had something similar to use for history or geography? So that’s what this drawing is meant to be…#bandofsketchers prompt for Thursday.
Ink bleeds through paper. Draw around those patches, lines and dots, and you get a patchwork ‘map’ that looks like roads and boulevards, streets and squares. A change of colour for city blocks. Villages line up on roads between fields. Some streets are tree lined, others are concrete. Does it show your age? Are you industrial or agrarian? Modern or ancient? Fortified? Or do you see veins, arteries and capillaries?
OK, this was a doodle for a project in one of the weeks at college. We had five words chosen for us and had to create characters and situations for them to be in.
Mine were: copper, glasses, bedroom, sarcastic and star.
I’d made a crown earlier in the year for a virtual panto I was in. It was made of card covered in holographic stars. I finished the work, but now we are doing a project on creating a map. I was looking back on previous work and found this. It’s a map I think? It’s not what I’m doing for the project but it made me think about what a map is.
I would define a map as:
Describing a place pictorially with images, or using sound to give directions.
It can be imagined or realistic. Using icons or symbols to describe objects within the map. Indications of pathways or roads, ways to navigate the area. And rules to show whether places are only accessible in a certain way. Exits and entrances. Also is the map two or three dimensional, how is that represented. Lots to think about.
I’m playing with different ideas. I held two pens together to try and get parallel lines, and I wanted to do something modern, a bit like graffiti for this. The writing says ‘walk this way to get to the treasure trove don’t get bitten on the way through the winding maze.’
There is a gaping mouth and a big staring eye. Big clawed feet and huge ears. The animals body is covered in flowers….fun..
Blurry old photo based on celtic art. I’m trying to decide what patterns and textures I can use to create a map for college. I’m thinking of using photoshop to turn something like this into a maze / map?
Next step will be to upload it and try and change the colours and sharpness. Also to work out a route and decide if there will be celtic or saxon patterns. Will there be a treasure trove of coins or ornamental armour?
I drew this years ago. A celtic style cat. I did a full colour acrylic painting afterwards but I don’t have a photo of that and I think my sister has it now.
I was trying to think of a subject for an illustrated map we have to do for college. I’ve been visiting a local lake recently and there is a hedge maze there. You cannot see the shape of it from the ground and it would be interesting in mapping it out, but I don’t own a drone camera! Then I thought the map might be based around ideas of the Staffordshire Hoard found in this area a few years ago. This was coins and gold sword ornaments and other pieces of treasure. I might base my map on these Saxon patterns. Then I did my original thesis on pre Christian celtic art, and that’s where the idea of a celtic cat came from.
Decisions…. What to draw…. Hmm
I hope I’m allowed to share this? Just watching the news and the amount of covid 19 is going up again in England. A second wave? The problem is across the nation and its passing up from younger people to older people.
So why has it happened? Was it because children went back to school, because more people were allowed to meet up? Because work places and pubs and restaurants opened up? Our government just has not got a grip on this. If we had kept the lockdown longer and tried using masks sooner maybe we wouldn’t be here.
Oh I despair of the people running things, not the NHS, they are still working so hard. But the bumbling idiot in charge of it all! I don’t mind being locked down again, but the government is against that…… Crazy…
Don’t worry I said, I know where I’m going… We walked up one moorland fell and down into the valley of the next. Walking on tussock grass was hard on the legs, each lump was seperate from the next. The ground was springy with matted sphagnum moss as well.
The sun was getting lower in the sky. The path was hard to follow, and I was getting nervous. We hadn’t seen anyone in our travels and I could not see the road that led to our destination. Matt had parked his car next to a pub on the moorland road and we were heading vaguely west towards the setting sun.
It was then that Matt had the brilliant idea of looking at the map. He’d not bothered earlier, but now it was getting late and drinking time was running out. We all peered over the map, Matt muttered something as he looked over it. What did you say? I asked. Just follow the cat he laughed. There laid out in front of us was a dotted line, following the contours of the fells. Definitely cat shaped. And as I looked I could see the pub marked just where its up raised paw was swiping at the string, the line that indicated the road!
Matt laughed. We’ll be there in ten minutes. Cheers I said. Let’s go.
I took another look at this post about map reading and suddenly saw a cat. I’ve written about finding things in wallpaper, or ink blots or all sorts of different things including the front and back of cars. Grilles on cars can look like grinning mouths, headlights like eyes. I love seeing animals and faces and objects in clouds. Sometimes it drives me mad when I see something over and over again. Once seen, never forgotten. Life is strange, the mind is stranger.
X
Mallaband-Brown