Ink to me only with thine eyes

Another piece of SF proposal art, this one is my conception of the Great Orrery, a communications device ca. 100,000 AD. The Vacillators scattered around it are part of the same system. The novella is a 1910 work by J.H. Rosny Aîné, a fine work by a sadly neglected author.

The Vacillators have an air of Moebius to them, this sort of mechanical biomorph is an old motif with him and one which I suspect is ultimately descended from the Lions of Delos.

My last posting was a bit of a cranky rant against the growing trend of artistic amnesia, a trend which not reduces the resources available to both artists and audience but also lowers the visual bar, so to speak, and increases the rate at which visual rubbish can be substituted for visual substance, a process driven solely by commercial calculations.

What we have here is really an artistic version of Gresham's Law, bad art drives out good and the only remedy is providing a genuine education to young people to inoculate them as early as possible. The tastes of youth are a great influence upon adult consumption, which is why such vast sums of money are spent upon destroying young people's sense of taste and judgement.

In any case, cross hatching seems to be a dwindling art form, at least until Photoshop comes up with a filter to do it. Until then I will continue with my inky blobs and squiggles and crochets and I encourage you to do the same.

Ink the Bismarck!

I seem to be getting a lot of hits these days from other artists and I get the feeling that many of them are students or relatively new to the biz. One reason I did my Snark the way I did was that I was hoping to energize young people to lay aside their iPhones and toss away their iNsouciance long enough to take a look at what the old fogeys call Kulture.

The internet is brimming with sugary eye-candy but without at least a foundation in Kulture, you will be hard-pressed to find much of use and more importantly, your tastes will subtly influenced towards the fashionable, the flashy, the cheap-to-produce and worst of all, the pre-commodified.

In short, eat your vegetables and visit a museum, young inksters! And get the heck off my lawn. And wash off those tattoos before you sit down to supper.

The life of a freelance illustrator is a constant scramble to finish one thing whilst simultaneously preparing new projects to propose to publishers. This artwork is part of such a proposal still in the pipeline, a French SF novel from the turn of the last century, translated & illustrated by myself.

In this case, the style I chose for this proposed book was a deliberate homage to the great French SF illustrators of the 60s and 70s, artists like Bilal and Moebius whose work was such a formative influence on me when I was a squirt. Their inking style was a direct descendant of the classical European line techniques which stretched all the way back to Albrecht Dürer's graphic work, work in which he codified and clarified cross-hatching for all time. From Dürer to Moebius is an unbroken line, a glorious tradition embellished by such masters of the pen (and etching needle) as Holbein, Rembrandt, Tiepolo and many more worthy of careful study.

In short, the more historical baggage your style carries, the stronger its muscles will become and eventually it might even set off on some unexpected and very fruitful excursions of its own!