Artist: Sashiko Yuen

Yet again I find myself admiring the illustrative qualities and imagination lying behind such works which feature girls with wildly coloured hair as well as neatly penned and sketched bodies. Sashiko Yuen is yet another artist whose style I admire but there's definitely a bit more edge and malice about their work compared to that of Ann Muddy, another artist I have recently discussed on this blog. The main difference in their styles is that Yuen seems to favour portrait shots of cute and colourful girls with an innate darkness about them and there's a softer type of pastel shading and blending between colours in these drawings.

Anything that features a Disneyland souvenir cap in their work or online store wins a lot of acclaim with me, especially at this time of year when in 2011 I had just returned from a twenty day exchange to America and bought my own Mickey Mouse cap. Similarities between Muddy and Yuen is their knack for capturing luscious curves and also their prowess for drawing women with fantastically coloured hair as well as dress sense.

I'm not a large fan of rockabilly style myself, but I do like the curls tinted with pink hues for this girls hair as well as her rose bustier top. A lot of the drawn women feature wild tattoos full of colour that are added for decoration and colour such as the skulls and hearts but I think that without them and keeping the ribbon scripture tattoo would be a little more powerful in terms of design and colour. I love the whimsy of the hair and how unrealistic it is- if you ever did try to create such a look for yourself in real life I think that it would fail abysmally unless you had a runway class hairdresser controlling the colour and style of your hair. That's what's great about drawing and imagination though, you can create unrealistic things and make them beautiful.

I love the control of the lines for the eyebrows as well as the different texture of the hair drawn for Sashiko Yuen's work- it makes me want to fill my 2012 personal diary full of whimsical drawings in a similar manner. Also the oriental style of the eyes makes me want to go out a little more and perfect the use of my new liquid eyeliner, although it will be quite a long time before you catch my using pastel colours for eyeshadow. While I'm still discussing the face, I've always had a personal struggle when drawing noses from the front-on profile but Yuen's really nailed it for this drawing with carefully placed lines that aren't too fussy. I love the eyeball collar of her outfit, I wonder if it was inspired from a real collared shirt...

Artist: Ann Muddy

You wouldn't be able to tell now by my horrible illustrations, but when I was a child I loved nothing more than having time on my hands as well as large stacks of paper and anything to draw with including pencils, textas and crayons. I still have a few pencil cases full of my old tools in my room including those Korean crayons that are much like mechanical pencils. So it's been a while since I've been up to drawing but I wish I could still draw the same way I used to; or in the style of artist Ann Muddy!

 

I came across one of her images and just had to find more and dig up a little bit about her; all the images shown in this post can be found on her Flickr where you can also find the means to contact her should you be interested in presenting her work. While laying about in bed this morning I got to think about what I need to get back doing; i.e. playing guitar, drawing and reading. I read a little bit this morning and yesterday broke the proverbial drought between guitar playing but I feel somewhat intimidated by a blank page. As a perfectionist I thrive on doing something 100% correct and hate mistakes- I know that if I begin to draw I'll hate what I see but without practice, I will never improve!

The technique of this self-portrait of Ann Muddy absolutely took my breath away- I couldn't believe the movement of the small lines contributing to something greater than themselves as well as the tinted texture and shading on the face and hair. Realistically I will never achieve anything this awe-inspiring in art but if I could maybe achieve something equally as great in my chosen field I would feel a little satisfied. This is the type of thing I would love to fill my diary pages with but without formal training, how can I hope to fill an empty page with so much colour as well as spiritual depth?

I know it's morally wrong to imitate someone else's work, presenting something you don't own as your own and the like but I find it hard to find my own voice and expression when it comes to drawing. When I read a book, I absorb some of the words used in the passages with unconscious effort and my style of writing changes too; isn't it normal to try to imitate something you admire? They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery and I wouldn't mind being able to master curvaceous lines like the figure above. Although the hips of the woman above are small, something has to be said about those sizable thighs. I do like the way the face is drawn, those are what I struggle with the most and the lines and design are simple but also feminine.

I mainly stick to using pencils and shading- that's my main squeeze at the moment but I've also been tyring to create movement with lines. I've never worked with proper artistic markers but I would love to see the process undertaken to create this piece. I admire the stick thin and bony figures of the lady above, as well as the red and white polka dot dress reminiscent of Minnie Mouse in contrast with blue hair. I love the way the face is done, the lines around the eyes as well as nose and shading in water colour.

Here we can see Beauty on the left and her sister Envy with adequately coloured green hair breathing in her fume like hair with sunburnt shoulders (something I suffered yesterday). One thing that's great about art and drawing is that you can colour things the way you choose as well as constructing images from your own imagination onto paper and letting other people see your vision. I have a rather large love affair with hair in unnatural shades so that's probably a contributing factor into my love for Ann Muddy's work. Perhaps it's healthier that I love drawing weird coloured hair than turning myself into a girl with extraordinarily coloured hair.

Occasionally you'll see something unlike any of Ann Muddy's other work, like this piece simply named 'Watermelon'. I've drawn with rainbow coloured pencils before and things turned out sick and vomit looking but maybe there's something about Muddy's technique that I have yet to gain an insight into. 

For a shape that in real-life may be labelled as 'unattractive', for some strange reason I find the colour pallet used including the mint green hair as well as nude skin and blossoming pink cheeks to be somehow satisfying. I think it reminds me of gelati and ice-cream and the hot weather is frying my brain a little.

Last, but certainly not least is the drawing that led me to discover this artist! It was a drawing done to express the artist's wishes to own these pieces of clothing and I strongly identified with her style including the heart framed glasses, bone bow tie, alphabet skirt and cat tights. The handbag with the cover 'Lolitta' looks like something from Olympia Le-Tan who I have a mild obsession with so I'm more than happy to see a drawing combining so many trendy things all at once. This is the beginning of yet another brilliant fascination and obsession of mine.

Witch's Magic

I'm getting back to my usual self: adoring my long black hair and dreading getting it cut on Sunday, finding photographs that have an eerie vibe to them and getting inspired to wear all black again. I would want to burn candles at the moment but my mother is home and still thinks that at the age of eighteen I'm likely to burn down the house with all the loose paper about in my room- so that's why I mainly stick to burning it in the lounge room. Still, I've fallen in love with the smell of Cherry blossom and the Osaka inspired scented candle, it's a shame that I've almost burn it all away but I guess that gives me an excuse to buy some more in different scents and flavours to brighten up my room.

Today I finally received my American Apparel blouse in white and I'm looking forward to wearing it under a large black and loosely knitted jumper. I love the appeal of black lace and spindly black knits- it's like looking at strong black spider webs strung by monstrous arachnids. While I can't easily replicate the orange glow of the lighting behind this girl, the silhouette effect with a bare and strung crochet top would be a nice idea. I'm mainly attracted to the idea for the dark hair and dark clothes underneath, it reminds me of old fairy tales and witches dancing under a full moon to perform sacred rites, or so author Terry Pratchett will have me believe.

I've always had a mild fascination with glass bottles including the orange bottle of iodine, that is until I sliced my skin open and actually had to use its stinging contents to keep my wound clean every day for about a week. Once I even dug up a small glass bottle in my backyard, but I broke it when washing it under the tap and getting rid of all the dirt. In retrospect I really should have been a lot more careful with such a precious item, I can't exactly remember the shape correctly but it was about the size of my hand. I had replaced it a few months ago with a glass bottle, perfectly round and thick as a gift from the Tim Burton exhibition at ACMI in Melbourne but I gave that away to my boyfriend since he lent me the DVDs of the creative genius before we were going out.

I've looked down on people who aspired to become artists throughout high school always thinking of it as unsteady and unpredictable endeavour but I sort of want that freedom and flexibility of lifestyle. I'm not sure how I'll take to the 9-5 grind day in and day out and after seeing photographs of Olympia Le-Tan's studio space I wish I could just do what I felt like each day, drawing this and finishing off that and colouring in bits and pieces. I'd love to be able to create so many different textures with the mere flick of my risk as well as command colours and make them melt into each other but I always press too hard into the paper and scratch it deeply. Besides, hands can be surprisingly hard to draw and I've never really gotten good at drawing people. With the slightest mistake in detail I feel guilty about botching someone's face I'm attempting to draw.

The images you're clapping your eyes on have come from the blogspot of Bloodmilk Jewellery their banner reading 'Supernatural Jewels for Surrealist Darlings', I was at a loss for what images I could to pull together a gold old fashioned spooky post that emanates dark magic and the forbidden arts so I may be a tad unoriginal. I highly suggest you check out their blogspot as well as their Etsy store as well if you're interested in dark silver jewellery, thick with oxidation as well as obsidian stone and the occasional rose gold piece.

I'm really adoring studio spaces for jewellery and fashion geniuses, if I'm not careful I may just sell a lot of my possessions to clear out space in my room for the same minimalist impression. Or that may just give me the opportunity to collect all of the same thing or mature more in my taste in decorating my room as well as my own appearance and body.

I could never hope for such a dark and moody effect in my room as this, while I have been after some vintage frames I haven't yet taken the initiative to explore second hand shops properly. I like the spooky Polaroid films in the background as well as the motifs of eyes, triangles, arrows and ghostly hands. The last book I read had a ghost in it but it was more an excuse for the hero and heroine to knock boots together and for him to protect her; that's what i get from picking a romance book at random off the spiral rack but I was trying to find the least ridiculous cover possible. I should try and read something that's properly frightening with actual ghosts, the closest I've gotten is finishing Frankenstein which I actually enjoyed unlike every other person in my Literature class.
 

Seeing this makes me miss the days away from home when I was with my friends from high school and fooling around on the beach. Though we did climb around on the nearby rocks turned into islands by oncoming tide returning in, we never wore out best clothes or were perfectly silhouetted in out photographs. I don't think I know of anyone who has fingers that long and frail in real life, when I was born my mother knew I would have long fingers as a baby but the photograph seems to really accentuate long and thin fingers. They must be topped off with thin and pointy fake nails for extra emphasise.

I could turn on the air-conditioner to keep myself company but I usually feel guilty using it when it's just me on my own. I might need it if I found something so abominably furry to wear on my sleeves though, maybe I'll just wear little clothing and plain cropped camisoles and top while the weather is so hot looking like a wild fairy rather than a witch weighed down in black. So many options and it seems so little motivation to do any of it.

Although the last few images have all been from the same set, they have distinctly different moods just from changing the lighting and angle. Since I take my own photographs I'm not so keen to move about in location or change the position of my tripod once I've found something that works. Changing location isn't so much of a difficult task once I have a rough idea of what each shot looks like from certain heights. Even though all the images are not taken from the same position and have varying angles they all look the same and that's something I'd like to achieve when I finally try to construct my own outfit posts.