The New Adventurers: Eugene and Lucille

Well, I have been busy lately clearing my brain of all the ideas I have had for new work…I think of it as a fun form of Spring cleaning.  What it really means is that I have been starting new work left and right and that I have a few more irons in the fire.  I am excited and energized by this sudden burst of idea cultivation, it is Spring after all.

So, meet Eugene and Lucille.  You may remember them from an earlier post.  Well at that time they did not have names and it took me a heck of a long time to come up with them.  These characters, Eugene and Lucille, are the beginnings of a much larger art work: an altered book/graphic novel idea I have.

Now there are plenty of ways to alter a book, you can check some examples here and here.  The examples by these artists are pretty amazing, especially the intricate cuttings of  Brian Dettmer…WOWZA!   Here is a good website about graphic novels.  I la la love both art forms, so I am going to try to combine both techniques to make a book about the adventures of Eugene and Lucille.  YEEHAAA!

Here is the first page, I am using a book I bought here in Belgium way back in August. It is the French version of Gulliver’s Travels,  I thought it appropriate to create another adventure book in it.   I had other ideas for it back when I bought it, but they were all so boring to  me…thank goodness, cuz then I would not have a place to put Eugene and Lucille.

This project is a new adventure for me too, I have never written a book and I never made a comic type thingy, but I am real excited and I am having a great time coming up with a quirky story line.  And ya know, any suggestions would be helpful and appreciated.  Y’all were such a good help with generating titles for the work in one of  my previous posts.  A big thanks to the Glowing Wheel for giving me some concepts to consider and keep me going with ideas for that particular series.  Here is her blog, you should check it out…her blog has some great ideas for art journaling and is filled with beautiful work.

Take care and thanks for reading.

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In Process: Mixed Media Drawing

A few weeks ago I was a little down becasue I felt so uninspired.  I connected it to my environment.  Living in a big dirty city does not always inspire me to be creative, in fact it does the opposite.  I spent a whole day thinking trying to get my head around creating something more meaningful.   Out of desperation to get something down on paper, you’ll never guess what I decided to draw….yep your guessed it, a bird.

  I took this picture with my Hipstamatic application, so it looks a little peculiar… anyway here it is.  I have been drawing these birds, which really don’t have a species, for a while now.  I just like the way they look and they make me happy (reasons enough).  The plan at the time was to fill the entire paper with them, but then I stopped again, stumped.

…….(insert here special music that signifies time passing)……

Then I started to think about my childhood, which was filled with some good adventures and lots of imagination, but also some loneliness.  I started to think about the times I went to my grandparents and spent hours by their creek and wandering through the forest making up stories.  I also spent a good amount of time making things out of what I found in the forest.  A reoccurring item was a raft.  I tried countless times to make one and float it down the creek in order to get away and live a new adventure.  Needless to say,  it never worked.    So that got me thinking again about the stories I made up as a kid, my desire to escape and explore, and my love for these birds I have been drawing.  What I came up with is the piece I am working on now, which you can see below.

                            

The little girl is enticing the birds to try help her escape her reality.  It relates to my desire to escape on adventures back when I was a child and to my desire at the present moment to escape back to my home and out of this city.  I have an idea to create a small series based on this idea.  I have a lot to work on, and I am having some issues with water-color (an unfamiliar territory); however,  it has been interesting and challenging to work on.  I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Thanks for reading!