i started drawing this as a joke because i look like a turtle. i have a long neck and a smaller face. its definitely the animal i most resemble. it doesnt help that i made myself an oval-ish green backpack without thinking about it. my very own turtle shell.
anyway, i started drawing this just as a silly joke because i was sitting in my partner’s room and we were both working on stuff, but then i kept drawing and drawing and made it more detailed and ended up really liking it a lot.
before my nephew was born, my sister really wanted me to paint a mural in her baby room. however, she went through an unexpected divorce which resulted in the loss of house/baby room. since she now lives in a rental, she couldn’t paint a mural right on the walls. we compromised with 3 large baby paintings. she has a jungle theme for her son’s room, his bedding, curtains, baby seat, etc all have the same jungle characters on them. so i appropriated those characters and put them into some super simple jungle scenes. she seemed very happy with the turnout of the paintings and they’re now hanging in thomas’ room for him to enjoy when he gets old enough to realize they’re actually there =0) he’s 9 and a half months old right now. just starting to really become aware, interacting with things and being generally awesome.
here are the three paintings i did, one big one and two smaller ones. these are bad photos because it was about a year ago back before i had learned to take photos well and before i had better camera stuff.
they hang in his room like this, left to right. this one is 2 ft by 3 feet, approx.
big one in the center, 2ft by 4.5ft
and other scene, also 2ft by 3 ft
and here’s my sister and her baby, thomas.
i’ve had the raw drawings of these sitting in my room for a while. i drew them on two separate days. one day, i rode to work and it was the perfect temperature out and all the colors were so beautiful. i couldn’t help but think about how amazing fall is. so i got to work and doodled out the happy fall picture. the next day, it was raining and windy and leaves were sticking all over me. all i could think of was the impending doom of winter. boooo. so then winter came, and i hadn’t thought about these drawings because they were fall drawings and fall was over. but recently, thinking about how fun it is to use color, i decided they would be the perfect drawings to incorporate color into to and i had a lot of fun working on them. these look especially nice when viewed at a bigger size, which you can do here.
i didn’t do the illustrations for this, just google image searched and put things together for a simple flyer that lets the type act as a main part of the visual interest, even though that is also really simple.
this is a show coming up in 2 weeks at our household. peter & the wolf, mr. mocassin, sine jensen (a former member of the frisby house!)
i was thinking today about how i should work with color more. i like to color digitally and sometimes i even like to paint. i used to really really like to paint back when i did traditional rendering. i’m not sure why i’m not as interested in doing that sort of art anymore. here are a couple illustrations i’ve done with color.
a 7 inch cover for the band wax & wane, put out by valiant death.
and a drawing i did in adobe illustrator of my dog, rover.
detail
here’s another sort of work-related drawing that i did while at work toward the beginning of my time working at the lab school. it was a really quick doodley illustration of me riding to work in work clothes.
upcoming show at charm city art space! obviously the key word i used here was ‘union’ from failure’s union. my partner in crime, daniel shea, spent a few months this summer in west virginia photographing the environmental and economical struggle with mountaintop removal in appalachia. he has an amazing blog documenting his trip.
these bands (failures union, dead mechanical, dead tired) are really rad. if you’re reading this and live in or near baltimore, please come to this show!! it’s at charm city art space and is cheap.
because i’m a receptionist at a school, i sit at the front desk and answer phones, answer questions, buzz open the door as people come and go, etc. between all that, i just have to be sitting there waiting for someone to need help. during that time, i often read, browse the internet, or better yet, i draw! i’ve drawn a lot of flyers at the front desk and a lot of doodles too.
here are two work related drawings. the first is just an observational sketch of the front lobby. i drew this on one of my first few days here, when i didn’t have my computer log-in info yet and was seriously struggling with too much downtime.
anyone who’s grown up with punk rock can identify with minor threat and their black sheep imagery. i know a ton of people who’ve even gotten the black sheep tattoo’d on them, since being the odd (wo)man out is a feeling we all had to deal with at one point or another in our lives, especially during our highly formative teenage years!
so this is an homage to minor threat and those days.
i drew this while sitting at charm city art space, my punk rock home in baltimore. CCAS is a collectively run diy basement venue, a place where all us black sheeps can come together and feel a little less alone. The other person in the picture is mr. dan bress of bad business fame, as well as paper dragons and dead mechanical. he’s a fellow baltimore punk and CCAS member, as well as one of my favorite people to g-chat with while i’m at work! he was standing near me at CCAS while i was about to start drawing and asked to be drawn in. my hand in this drawing sucks. i should go back and re-draw it.
click on the image for a bigger/better version
it’s been a few days since i’ve posted, mostly because i’ve been traveling and then getting settled back in to life in baltimore. my second day back at work (yesterday) i spent most of my downtime trying to work out a tattoo i want, and will be getting in february. a bicycle! on my inner right bicep. probably about 4 inches wide and 2.5 inches tall.
this is a sort of rough digital sketch, compiled from bicycle photos and using the polygonal selector, delete, and stroke tools in photoshop and GIMP (an opensource version of photoshop that i download on computers without photoshop, like my work computer). i’ll end up having to lose a lot of detail because of the nature of tattoos. for instance, unless i get it bigger than i’d like, i probably won’t be able to have spokes, or i’ll have to do really simple, unrealistic spokes instead. tattoo lines can only be so thin, and only so close together, without the risk of them fading away to nothing or bleeding together.
Ramsey Everydaypants 