dotwork – lesley's headspace

Scylla and Charybdis diorama

I made this in one day, so that should reassure me of the speed of my work and remind me that I don’t have to panic and that I can do anything. It’s about the size of an A6 sheet, working smaller because it’s just a draft. I’m thinking of incorporating dioramas into my bookmaking process, along with fortune telling and the grotesque as a medium to convey monsters like Scylla and Medusa. I have yet to flesh this out properly but it feels like all the pieces are slowly, slowly coming together, even if I can’t tell how that will happen.

300815 Sketchdump

So today I started work on the huge amount of illustrations I’m going to use for FYP, and here’s a character I created along with his more scientific-looking skeleton. I haven’t added a background to the first illustration yet, but I plan to (so as to experiment with Takato Yamamoto’s style – I really admire his work and I’m giving it a go trying something of my own as a homage to him).

I haven’t decided how detailed each drawing should be, but there will be a difference between anatomical drawings and illustrative drawings (I have some freakshow posters to make). I’ll find a way to bring everything together. My work is quite obviously contemporary so it’s not going to be an ancient grimoire as much as a compendium with an 1800s-meets-contemporary aesthetic.

Skull drawings

Deformed skulls to go with the previous set of illustrations I did earlier. I had to google bone spurs and finger joints and wonder to myself about how the underlying bone structure might look.

WIP illustrations

In chronological order, my drawing experiments for people with fingers growing out of their faces (to be explained in person, or in a future blog post). I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about the drawing style I’m going to use for my project and I’ve decided to go back to dotwork (thanks Beverley!).

Even if dotwork is slower, I reasoned to myself that my dotwork is astronomically better than my hatching and that I’d rather preserve the quality of my illustrations (that was the whole objective, right?). More medical weirdness coming soon – I think I have a much better idea of where I’m going now.

Justin Hopkins/ RareBit

This was what I was trying to do with my blue and red dotwork that I tried a while back and gave up on. I might try again. These images are by Justin Hopkins, from here.

Creepy ocean babes

I’ve been inspired by survival horror and weird anatomy lately as well as The Resurrectionist and Japanese erotica. I’ve been trying to synthesize all those influences to get into a drawing mood that can effectively carry most of my project, because honestly I just want to spend most of it drawing and creating.

I have this interest in strange deep-sea creatures (anything bizarre found in nature floats my boat) and after talking to one of my friends yesterday it helped me crystallize the kind of feeling I’m going for in my drawings, the tension between the beautiful and grotesque, as opposed to making something purely beautiful or purely grotesque. I don’t know yet about how it relates to duality or Greek mythology but somehow I believe that in these early stages I should just let myself wander a little before I buckle down and focus.

Weekend sketchdump

This week’s progress on coming up with illustrations for my book. Still working on more of them, will do as much as I can so I have more material to work with.

Dotwork Documentation #1

My experiment with documentation derived from that Facebook video I shared a while back. While I didn’t add in the number of dots or anything fancy, I found it quite interesting to see my own stippling process at 300% of its normal speed. Reminds me a lot of the motion of tattoo guns. I know it’s not very HD (I draw at night) but I’ll probably try again soon and see if I can do something about the quality of the video.

Siamese twins

Drew this as part of an exploration on the Gemini twins/mortality and time. I enjoy doing quite a bit of macabre-looking illustrations in my free time and I’m carrying that aesthetic over in my explorations just to see how it works out. I liked the idea of using Siamese twins to see how else Gemini could be represented.

Dotwork documentation video

Making by hero

One of my friends tagged me in this video featuring a dotwork illustration process. I was thinking that this could be a good idea for me to show how therapeutic dotwork is for me. It may also be a good time-based documentation log, so perhaps I could produce my own kind of process video as one of my final three outcomes in my project.

Dotwork is personally really important to me because I got into the style when I was in a very sad headspace. The process of dotting helped me overcome my sadness and negativity and has now become something that I really enjoy regardless of mood.