Gau's Drawing Blog

A gouache painting about the relationship between part and whole. 8x10″ 

I’m honored to be included!

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Drawn with rulers only! Can you guess where these perspective exercises come from?

I made these patterns as a stencil for the concrete floor of my friend's studio. They might be interesting as a textile or coat lining.. thoughts? You can also see the illustrator livetrace of my sketch that will be laser cut for the stencil..

testing out some patterns with my new stylus :) I might like to imprint these on a chocolate bar, what do you think? 

The case of Julian Betton shows how aggressive police behavior often invites disaster and how unwarranted violence is sometimes willfully covered up through perjury. It deals with the entrapment, shooting, and subsequent permanent paralysis of a smart young man. Some details: the Myrtle Beach drug enforcement unit in South Carolina coerced a woman to ask her friend Julian (not a dealer) to sell her $100 of marijuana. Several plainclothes officers were deployed thereafter with AR-15s and a battering ram in an unmarked van to "bust" Julian. They lied about announcing themselves before entering. Surveillance footage shows they busted open the door unannounced. They lied about Julian firing first but forensic analysis shows his gun was never fired. Three of the officers fired 29 rounds at Julian Betton in his home and he miraculously survived. The officers' lies are recorded in signed statements. These officers were never prosecuted, though Julian received a multi million dollar settlement. The commander of this force Bill Knowles stated publicly that the officers "didn't do anything wrong."

My favorite painters include Willem de Kooning, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich. All of these painters engage the question of the nature of abstraction and gesture. Can we make art outside of representation? Or does our cultural context always leave a mark on our work?

Stylistically I tried many variations to address these complex themes which I will share later. This was a kind of whimsical style using ballpoint pen and diluted ink.

Recent sketches from a painting class at work and a storyboard for a friend's music video about letting go. 

some strange watercolor doodles. I used masking fluid on the bottom one.. 

Weird watercolors. Sorry for the long lapse in posts! These images are from a long-term project I’m working on - a children’s book about a sea captain who makes soup in her sleep. I’m really just learning watercolor so I’m enthralled with discovering new techniques, etc. 

The website “feedspot.com” listed this blog as one of the “top 25 drawing blogs on the internet!” While I certainly don’t feel like I deserve this title, I appreciate their encouragement and take it as motivation to draw, create, and post more :) 

Sketches for a class about visual development for animation. 

An ink line drawing from a series of sketches I'm doing about a short story called Mrs. Midnight. I'm taking a class about creating a style guide for animation :) In this scene the main character Danny, a washed-up journalist in modern-day London has a run-in with his alter-ego from Victorian London in an alley. The image is supposed to show the two worlds bleeding together..

This is a sketch of an 19th century theater using ballpoint pen, watercolor, and pencil lines (no paths but inverted in Photoshop). I made this for a class in visual development for animation by Assaf Horowitz at CDA. We were assigned stories and had to create a visual style for a hypothetical animation about the story. In this scene a cross-dressing vaudevillian character called Mrs. Midnight is about to perform for a drunken audience and things will go badly :) i was trying to make this scene look surreal and ghostly, as the performer has discovered a path to immortality through eating animal brains haha. The theater is supposed to look vaguely baroque. #ballpoint #pen #drawing #sketches #ink #animation #concept #design #instartist #art #illustration #narrative #art #storytelling

Here are some sketches of a concept for a fancy jacuzzi with water wall designed by my illustrious friend Chris Nelson. He is smart, hilarious, multi-talented, and a millionaire. Consequently, he wants to build a huge $150,000 hot tub in the pool area of his loft building downtown haha. So I sketched up this concept using ballpoint pen and colored pencil, and shaded it in photoshop as is my usual strategy at work. One interesting challenge was to represent the board-formed concrete elements, which may or may not be very readable. But cool idea anyways!