fab ciraolo: Dorothy

fab ciraolo: Dorothy

I love this guy's work! Great colours and concepts.

Work in progress ...

Photos of my new work at different stages. Another sea inspired one, I was kind of going for a Medusa feel this time. Almost finished now, just have to make the tentacles more solid before I have a go at colour. I love doing these types of pictures with tons of detail - maybe I have OCD -but they can leave me feeling a bit burned out. I think I need to do some more quick expressive stuff for a while to recharge my batteries!

Tentacles!!!!! They’re everywhere!!!!!

Tentacles!!!!!!!!

I finally seemed to have pulled myself out of a Christmas coma and done some drawing. It feels good to get things going again. Not sure what to call this one yet but it’s been inspired by my love of the sea, watching Miyazaki’s Ponyoover the holidays, the Greek goddess of the sea Thetis who could change shape, and my lovely Christmas present from my boyfriend, ‘Art Forms In Nature’ by Ernst Haeckel. I also haven’t quite decided on how I’m going to finish it but I will be putting up a cleaned up scan shortly.

In the jungle, the mighty jungle…

Here are the photos of the finished mural! A big thanks to Becca for letting me do this. She, Matt and Riley seem very pleased with it, as am I. Actually, it’s turned out a bit different than I had planned. I was initially going to keep the colour quite flat like a gouache style kids book, but once I accidentally started putting a little bit of lighting and shade into it, I sort of ran with it and I’m really pleased with the depth it created in the picture. My only concern was that it might be a bit derivative, (a certain monkey might be a bit Jungle Book, and a certain tree might look a bit like Up) but hey! He’s only two, I’m hoping he won’t notice!

Jungle Boogie

For the last few weeks I’ve been designing and painting a jungle mural for my friends 2 year old little boy. It’s a bit of a departure from my usual subject matter, but it’s been nice to have a break from portraits and people and I’ve found out that animals are really fun to draw!

As soon as I had agreed to do it and we had settled on a jungle theme I quickly realised that I had no idea where to begin! So I decided to embrace the kid in me and watch the Jungle Book (any excuse!).

I really liked how the balance between the detailed foreground, the simple flat colours for the characters and the misty, diffuse backgrounds where trees and plants just become simple shapes. I’d also just bought ‘The Art Of Up’ by Tim Hauser and really loved Lou Romano’s gouache paintings, his use of bold shapes and colour.

I also liked the work of Daniel Lopez Munoz, Rickey Nierva and Dominique Louis. In fact, the entire book is great, and I was drawn to the idea of ‘simplexity’ they used to design the film. 

“That is the art of simplifying an image down to it’s essence. But the complexity that you layer on top of it - in texture, design or detail - is masked by how simple the form is.”

I also looked a lot at Mary Blair and Joey Chou ( http://choochooclan.com/) for inspiration. I used the way these artists use simple, dynamic shapes to design my Tiger and monkey characters. Also I tried to emulate the way the Up artists had used texture and colour to create depth.

Here’s my first sketch of the jungle.

Here’s the design spread over two walls for the room.

And here’s my tiger design, painted in gouache.

"I think that one’s art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows."

— Emily Carr