armor, ink and digital

ever have one of those flash fantasies where you’re embracing and cutting through an emotionally unavailable man on a bed of twisting fiddle heads?  yea, me too.

god my choice in subject is so fucking weird sometimes.

sophia and i talked a lot about the direction of contemporary illustration (mostly editorial) and how it relates to our work.  i decided that i had to start creating art that had more balls.  seriously.  i’ve always felt so conservative with all my aesthetic choices:  anatomy, value, palette, texture, subject, media.  everything is always so bland.  considering the ink work on armor was already finished by the time i spoke with sophia, my attempt at addressing this problem came in the form of an uncharacteristic palette choice:  red.  mother fucking red.  

what i didn’t realize at the time was that i am intellectually incapable of working with red.  my natural inclination is to use it conservatively and offset it with its complement.  the first color sketches of this thing, therefore, came out green.  i stared at it and screamed, “NO, RED!”  then i got up and went to sleep.  my eyes wanted to bleed (but i’m sure it would have come out green instead).

so i finally muscled my way into a red palette, but i can’t shake how much it reminds me of a kurosawa film.  maybe that’s a good thing.  he was a little zany, which i like lol.

another thing about this color sceme that proved troublesome was the heavy use of black.  whenever black plays a dominant role in a piece, it tends to suck out the saturation from the rest of the colors.  i ended up spending a lot of time exporting different versions of this with varying levels of saturation.  some made my brain hurt, some looked depressing.  i think i arrived at a happy, juicy medium.  at least i hope i did.

regarding subject matter, i noticed that a lot of people seem to think my work is about “love.”  it’s come up in descriptions and conversations before, “well he clearly loves her,” “it feels so romantic,” etc.  the strange part is that almost none of my illustrations are actually about love.  it’s quite the opposite.  i explained it to a friend of mine:  the ambiguity or mistaken judgements in tone are due to my identical experiences in the last year.  i just thought i’d clear that up lol.

one more boring note that i’m sure no one noticed or cares about is the issue of the signature.  this is literally the first piece i’ve decided to sign in the last 5 years.  while a freshman in art school, my dear drawing professor, george parrino, berated everyone in my class for turning in signed homework assignments, “what are you showing your paper bag drawing at the Met?  are you having a retrospective at the Guggenheim?  get that signature off there.”  he scared the signature out of me– and i stayed scared for years.

To reiterate: THIS swag mofo is Tony Ballard-Smoot, also known as Captain Anthony LaGrange of Columbus-based Airship Archon.

fanning myself

My absolute favourite cat ever. This is a manul, or pallas cat. Found in the Afghan mountains, they’re one of the oldest pure-blood cousins of our own goggies.

there is someone here for you

Wallpaper by Dan Funderburgh

lady vengeance

david bowie

diane lane / the fabulous stains

lydia deetz

siouxsie soux

And done! So this is my attempt at a steampunk Indian character.  I was irritated into it by bad depictions of Western-aesthetic-pretty Indian Girlies in fake saris. Her hair is partly “inspired” by the Indian-rapunzels, because like Battameez, I cannot imagine an Indian woman with that much hair left unbraided. 

I’ve tentatively named her Amrita Bai, but that’s probably not period-accurate so it’s subject to change as I do more research.  Her family’s from Tamilnadu, & are Vishwakarma caste (specifically metalsmiths, I assume), but they moved to one of the forts under Shivaji’s control, and she’s training under a mechanical artificer there.  — All subject to change as I do more research.  (Plz do tell me if this is faily somehow…)

Real saris are hard.  And group-specific; this is a Tamil-brahmin 9-yard sari, and probably not quite period accurate but I’m not sure how it’d be different.  No blouse, because this is from my no-British-Raj alternate India. I haven’t actually worn a 9-yard sari myself, so I’m not at all sure I have the folds right on this one.  But I did get input from my mother, who has. 

Anyway ya know what’s not hard?  Making her skin dark.  I find that dark skin is so much easier to get looking human rather than zombie than pale skin is, so extra wtf to those whitewashers who say it’s haaaard.

But, ontological question, if you write fic of my original character before I manage to write my story about her, which one is the fic?

(I want to run thoughts about that story by you if that’s okay sometime btw, not that I’m well enough to write yet but hey! Apparently I’m well enough to draw again, which is HUGE, so maybe soon!)

ETA: Name and sari do need more work — they are not caste-period accurate (hmm, must chew this over) 

BUT OH MY GOD. 

Yeah the earliest sari reference I could find is early 1900s, which is of course way too late.  But *something* like it seems eminently practical for engineering work.  Must make use of university libraries. & problem with Tamil names that are actually period will be getting Anglophones to parse them at all - but that is also true for those foreign Maharashtrans XD So her name could get shortened, as mine & my brother’s did, because these northerners can’t pronounce proper Tamil names only (I was Shwetambari, he was Saratchandra, we became Sharad & Shweta).

ARGH