Pattern

Every night the soul shutter to a million pieces
In the morning we weave back the pattern
over and over again.

Illustration Friday - Strong

This drawing was made yesterday for illustration Friday. The word of the week was "Strong".

In the past week I've been dealing with some medical issues that were somewhat painful but mostly really frightening. I felt like both my body and my mind was feeding of each other making me feel worse and worse about how I'm feeling.

I really hope this will get solved in a couple of days, I do try to remind myself to stay strong through it and not let my mind or my body take over.

Tango

When I do illustration Friday I usually like the obscure and abstract words that i can make mean anything or relate to how they make me feel at the moment, usually I start of with an idea or a sentence and move from there.
With all the shoot and being busy with some design projects, i didn't draw for about 2 weeks, so I thought that doing Illustration Friday this week might get me back into shape. I decided to challenge myself with it.

The word was Tango, which is neither obscure or abstract and I don't really relate to it at all, I ended up downloading a bunch of Tango dancing photos and printing them, and just started drawing.

While I was drawing I thought about how i never really found this type of dancing as sexy or even something to do in a couple. My dancing abilities are very limited and often just involve jumping around in a concert, actually, the only situations I could do even that was when I was single and going to shows on my own. Somehow the getting carefree enough to jump around while being in a relationship doesn't really work for me (plus, I was drinking a lot more back then).

So those dancer people pictures were somehow more embarrassing in their dramatics and exaggerated motions then attractive or sexy.

A while later i remembered a violent and pretty sensual movie called Tango, by Carlos Saura, which I saw many years ago, the combination of dance scenes and a vague story line as well as pretty extreme light and set effects, actually did made me see someo f the beauty others see in this dance.

Illustration Friday - Theater

The word of the week for "Illustration Friday" was Theater. I used to love theater in high school, I don't really like acting but I love studying the plays and history and going to the theater to watch plays.

One of my favorite theater genre is "comedia del-Arte" which is basically the root of all modern comedy.The characters are almost always the same, and the plots are very similar, the show doesn't really follow a script but just put up a story guideline that allow the actors to make fun and joke and improvise all the time.

In this illustration I wanted to not only show the characters of the play, but mostly to give the feeling of a theater - the way that theater is a little perfect world of it's own, and so I created a couple of shadow boxes made of paper showing a few of the characters from Comedia del-Arte.

There were supposed to be 4 pieces in this series, but, building stuff out of paper is a pretty fragile thing and one box didn't make it, so I had to change my plans. looking at the figures in the box made me think of those butterflies in display cases and so I decided to give this a shot as well.

clandestine or Staying undercover

This is a drawing of the spy Mata Hari who was executed for espionage at the end of world war 1. I love the fact that she made her spying carer while not trying to hide herself, but quite the opposite - becoming a performer and being a very public figure.

I've been keeping myself in hiding in the past couple of days, I decided after the last trunk show of the holiday season, that since it's not going to be much of a busy Etsy week, I'm going to take some time off and just rest and, well, do nothing. It's hard when you are working from home and when what you love doing is also what you work at to just stop. Also, because promoting is a big part of my work, taking time off meant, for me, not producing art or blogging or going on flickr or doing anything like that.

I'm not quite sure what the purpose was, I think I just needed a break without feeling bad about it. And so, I spend the last couple of days on vacation - I played Spore for a couple of days, then watched Ned play it for a couple of days. I've slept in strange hours, I've eat junk food and snacks, and the house is even more messy then usual, including a bunch of pots still full of food on the stove which, since I didn't pack - I will have to throw out. I didn't answer any e-mails, work of friend related and basically just been wallowing in my own body, even though I showered - I feel like a mess!

I guess sometimes I just need to slow down and do nothing, even if it means 10 hours of stupid computer games. I'm trying not to feel guilty, and I fail...