03 Nov 2009 4 Comments
in Inspiration Tags: Fractal Explorer, fractals, photoshop, Pixel Bender
So I’m sitting at home with a cold. In the break between reading Deon Meyer’s far too intense thriller “13 Uur”, I’ve been taking my pattern obsession to a new level:
Subblue’s Fractal Explorer plug-in lets me take snippets of my own drawings and turn them into fractals. I got the link from this post on feuilleton.
Starting with this seed image copied from my Dragon Girl drawing:
I created these fractal versions:
02 Nov 2009 1 Comment
in All my drawings Tags: drawing
This is another one of those drawings that seems to have a strong story behind it. I like the bird headed woman – she seems caring and fierce at the same time. But for some reason I’m perfectly sure that she is not the girl’s mother.
01 Nov 2009 Leave a comment
in All my drawings, Inspiration Tags: drawing
A fairly recent drawing that did not go quite as planned:
I was able to generate quite a few patterns from this drawing. I’m fairly sure that these shapes are inspired by my reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars that I’d just finished, and Green Mars that I’m still reading. There is a lot of detail about mutating algae and other microscopic plants in the effort to terraform Mars.
In a previous post I quoted from Green Mars – Hiroko explains her understanding of pattern in nature. Here is a quote about different ways of understanding the world – the scientific, and the poetic: More
31 Oct 2009 4 Comments
in All my drawings, Inspiration Tags: drawing
From my sketchbook – an angry Dragon Girl:
I was able to generate quite a few patterns from this drawing. I’m still hopelessly addicted to making patterns. I’m reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars at the moment, and I found this quote about patterns and life-force:
30 Oct 2009 3 Comments
in Illustration
I promised to take some photographs of the folded out pages from my copy of John Burningham’s Seasons.
I did – and in the process discovered that Summer is missing. It must have got torn at some stage, and slipped out of the book and got lost.
Before I get to the fold outs, here is a double page spread of a page from the “summer” section of the book, to give you an idea of how the pictures flow across the pages. More
28 Oct 2009 2 Comments
in Illustration
I’m always saying “you can’t really get an impression of this book from my scans”. But in the case of John Burningham’s Seasons, that is truer than ever. Each (large) page is filled edge to edge with pattern and texture, and the book contains four fold out sections (one for each season) each of which folds out to about A2 size. Huge!
The illustrations are rich and varied – a combination of ink and crayon soaked, washed, scratched, layered and scrubbed into life. More
26 Oct 2009 2 Comments
in Inspiration
Cape Town Central Station is getting a huge face lift. I’ve been taking pictures of the old and the new faces of the Station. Because my cell phone camera is not great, I’ve used some heavy Photoshop manipulation:
A view of the old tiles at the turnstile:
The new white skin of the station, covering the old tiles: More
25 Oct 2009 1 Comment
in Inspiration
I’ve been doing some more work on our so-called garden. One of the reasons I’ve been neglecting it is this:
Apparently when this place was built, there was a fair amount of rubbish dumped in our back yard. Whoever did the landscaping (if you can call it that) simply covered it over with a thin layer of soil, and the occasional pool of old cement.
Whenever I plant anything my garden fork gets tangled up in rubbish. Ive found a bra, socks, many pairs of stockings, broken bottles, and the eternal, ubiquitous plastic packet. The dogs erode the soil, and so we have bits of this rubbish sprouting above the surface everywhere.
I’ve been systematically digging it out. Some of it is not bad – bits of tile and lumps of brick. But mostly its just yucky.
24 Oct 2009 3 Comments
in Myself
I’ve been working at the blasted wasteland that is our backyard, and changing it from what Brendon calls the “dog habitat” into a garden. There were enemies above and below the ground. Below the soil lurked cut worm that killed everything I planted. Plants that survived the cut worm were chewed, dug up, peed upon, stepped, rolled or sat upon by Anna and Pippin.
I dealt with the dogs by fencing off areas of the (already very small) garden. Pippin did not approve:
I dealt with the cutworm by putting out some poison – which I will never, ever do again. More
11 Oct 2009 Leave a comment
Here is another of my drawings done at the Field Indaba this week –
08 Oct 2009 Leave a comment
Another drawing that grew out of my long long two day meeting in Johannesburg. I’ve called it “Bokkie”. How do you translate that into English?
I must add that I was reading Charles de Lint’s “Memory and Dream” at the time. Not during the meeting unfortunately.
07 Oct 2009 Leave a comment
in All my drawings, stories Tags: heart of glass
I had to attend a two day long meeting in Johannesburg this week.
I did quite a lot of drawings in between all the arguing, including this one of the Bonewitch from “Heart of Glass”.
She did not come out like I imagined her, so I will probably be drawing her again. Hopefully not at another meeting.
04 Oct 2009 3 Comments
Its been a while since I’ve posted any drawings, so here are two more:
I seem to be inspired by insects, birds and plants at the moment. Done while I had the flu, if I remember correctly. More
30 Sep 2009 Leave a comment
in books
I’m not used to reading a book that is set in my own country. So reading Stargazer was like listening to the voice of an old friend.
Stargazer is a semi autobiographical novel. It’s set in the sixties; Verwoerd’s South Africa. It is told through the eyes of Timus, a thirteen years old boy. He is the youngest of seven children in a poor white family, living in a Railways house on the Bluff in Durban.
Now this is familiar territory. I grew up in the seventies, well after the assassination of Verwoerd. But South Africa under PW Botha was not that different. I recognise the smell of those times. More
26 Sep 2009 6 Comments
in Myself
As antidote to today’s very cold, rainy and grey spring weather, here are some pictures I took in Kirstenbosch the other day. I stuck my phone in right underneath the flowers to get an ant’s eye view of the sunny sky:
Masha du Toit 
Recent Comments