tara draws stuff

petit dieu de fume
the little god of smoke and smoking.
He takes your smoke as offerings feeds off that drunken cigarette you didnt mean to smoke, or that pack you promised yourself you wouldnt buy.
not malevolent per say he also feeds off ritual and pipe smoke
the celebratory cigar at a birth or celebration the quiet pipe by the lake your father smokes

sketch and digital 

more digital coloring practice, 
sketch from a few days ago

oranges and tropical ocean colors
summer summer summer.
 

an air spirit?
based on a sketch i did while i was in australia
a warm wind spirit maybe, like that hot summer wind you get sometimes in tropical countries maybe the one right before a storm

anyways, working on a new digital illustration style, sorta watercolor-esque

inks n digital

Studio times!
Man I’ve been working down in my cave hole (its actually really rad but it is in a basement sooo) like 12 hrs a day for the last couple days. I’m actually starting to see a show shaping itself out of all the chaos, so i’mma keep at it and hopefully i wont flail and i’ll get it all done for the 15th. Im the worst procrastinator ever i swear, if i’m not under some crazy pressure i’ll probably be looking at internets instead of doing my work. Le sigh.
anyways, heres a little sneak preview of some work in progress stuff for the show, all brown paper and paint pens and so much drawing.
i really hope it all comes together, i have high hopes that it’ll look pretty cool when it happens so yeah the 15th hooo boy.

The Darkbringer

My latest linocut! working my way back into linocutting, this one is aprox 5x8 in dimension and much more detailled than the last one, I’m working on figuring out light effects, its really interesting working from dark to light, everything is reversed.

The darkbringer is a mythic figure that does not exist. I know it sounds strange but when researching real mythology, i often come up with characters and myths myself, to fill holes or just to please my imagination, this is one of those non-myths.

  The darkbringer is the harbinger of night, twilight and just before dawn is her domain, she strides across the sky with her dark lantern and the sky behind her fills with night, (behind her rides the night lord who lives only in darkness, but thats another story) she is endlessly walking around the world, bringing the night and this is why we have night and day.

Sortof a strange little story, atlas-esque in her eternal task, i drew her sitting, which she does only very rarely and that is why sometimes the sky goes dark in the day (eclipse)
Writing myths is a pretty fun exercise, coming up with stories that explain everyday & unexplainable phenomena. I that may be why i’m so drawn to the supernatural, the endless potential, unfixed by science or reason.

dont ask me where i got the time to knock this one off between all the design contracts but here it is, i’ve been aching to do more lino prints since the cold weathers set in (whats with that) so look forward to a few more of these over the coming months, most notably, krampus! to tie into my st nick print from last year, two faces of christmas anyone?

this one i’m tentativly calling the bone god,

a sort-of dangerous forgotten old god that eats your sorrows and comes out during storms. Its a little over 8.5x11 in size and one of the biggest other than my st nick one, cut myself three times. it took about six hours total to cut.
Cant tell you how fun it is to get back into printmaking.

sorry for the long delay between updates, i should put up some of my design work just so you know i havent been slacking :)

Heres the second piece for the Jamrock show! its the sun!
heres what I wrote about it for the show:
Title: Sunshine in my soul:
In this piece i chose to represent the sun. In all my brainstorming about what to bring to the show, I felt that across culture and history, especially in this music, the sun is the perfect symbol of unity and warmth. I really feel that the sun is a palpable presence in all reggae rocksteady & ska and really reflects what I get out of this music.

to be honest i dont listen to ska music really, and i only ever listened to a bit of peter tosh and bob/damien marley in the reggae genre. (I totally respect it as a root genre for tons of music i do love!) but of what i’ve heard of reggae and all the rest..the statement stands.

this is another mixed media piece, a bit bigger than the spirit of jamrock one.

One of two pieces I did for the Skafest sponsored Jamrock show. This one is a depiction of the god/spirit of jamrock! heres the description i posted for the show: 

Title: A little god of music:
I wanted to try and represent what I see when i listen to reggae and ska, The spirit of the music manifested and made visible. I’m heavily influenced by mythology and and ancient culture so much of my work reflects this exploration & imagination of the spirit world.
its a mixed media/collage peice, cut paper paint markers, sharpies acrylic medium & washes.

lots of fun to do these, longer process to make, about a week spent on both of them, Im considering putting together a show using this treatment, its a lot of fun and seems to be getting a really positive response from people so far! I’ll post up the other one tomorrow

cheers and sorry for the long hang time between posts!

quick vector of my Sukiyaki peice, in this one she has an eyepatch! going to mess with the colors a bit and add one more, but the tan is staying, love it.

Sukiyaki! 
ok so i acknowledge that SukiyakiWesternDjango is an altogether silly movie, and i could barely understand what everyone was saying but whaaa the visuals!
frontier town japan! i really couldn’t resist!
so i sketched this fine lady up while watching it, lots of Yoshitaka Amano References here, and its definitely not finished but, I really like it at the stage its at now. (also i havent posted in a while so….)
this is tech pen (GtechC4) and standard paper, scanned and colored/textured in ps3
more to come soon!