Automagical Realism

I think he’s kinda cute… (Taken with instagram)

Crazy collage creature (Taken with instagram)

19 Mar

Come join us for the Art On First Friday featuring the art of Clay Newton! I’ll exhibiting a new series of pictures I’ve been working on, and The Deadlies will be performing!

I’m naming the series of work I’ve done for this show after this blog, Automagical Realism. The stuff I have been posting & reblogging is really the content that has been shaping the way I think about aesthetics and culture lately. It’s been exciting to draw from this crazy well of content.

Here’s my statement for the show:

The imagery that fills my life is transient, yet steeped with concrete meaning. I create images daily which convey concepts and information in the most crisp, objective fashion. In design, the friction of information transfer is a risk. These are off-ramps: points where people can abandon your message.

This friction is an agent of entropy.

In my recent prints, I have sought to exploit and enhance this friction.

I’m focused on repurposing imagery to riff on their symbology. The source materials I work with are both obvious & obscure. Using recycled paper, spray paint and stencils, I draw from the economy, abstraction and style of street art to provoke new meaning with each viewing of these pictures.

Come join us for the Art On First Friday featuring the art of Clay Newton! I’ll exhibiting a new series of pictures I’ve been working on, and The Deadlies will be performing!
I’m naming the series of work I’ve done for this show after this blog, Automagical Realism. The stuff I have been posting & reblogging is really the content that has been shaping the way I think about aesthetics and culture lately. It’s been exciting to draw from this crazy well of content.
Here’s my statement for the show:

The imagery that fills my life is transient, yet steeped with concrete meaning. I create images daily which convey concepts and information in the most crisp, objective fashion. In design, the friction of information transfer is a risk. These are off-ramps: points where people can abandon your message.
This friction is an agent of entropy.
In my recent prints, I have sought to exploit and enhance this friction.
I’m focused on repurposing imagery to riff on their symbology. The source materials I work with are both obvious & obscure. Using recycled paper, spray paint and stencils, I draw from the economy, abstraction and style of street art to provoke new meaning with each viewing of these pictures.

Darko inspired (Taken with Instagram at La Salle Animal Park)

I did this piece in collaboration with ZZ.

It’s bunny time (Taken with Instagram at La Salle Animal Park)

A little lunchtime spraypainting & bondage… (Taken with Instagram at La Salle Animal Park)

7 Jan

3 notes

Phase 3 complete of my octopus stencil. Follow #octowip to see all the phases I’ve completed.

This phase:
With the composite image complete, I knocked out the background color on the iPad using Brushes & my Boxwave stylus. Instead of spending a lot of time color correcting, I added a white layer at about 40% opacity above the base image. I later traded the white for the pink color in the palette.

When I knock out the color, I like to do the “outline” first. This provides hard edges for the drawing, and let’s me add some form suggestions that would be hard to insert later. Once that was done, I selected some octo-like colors from the base image. Straying too far from the palette of the source image can make it very difficult to follow the contours. That’s mostly because you have to pull from the light source of the base image. A color you are following may abruptly end, but since you are basically posterizing the image manually, you have to rely on the natural shading to ensure that you are creating realistic forms.

I started with the darkest color I had, and went through and built out all the dark areas. I draw these equally with pencil and eraser. That allows me to get tight corners and lines with variable thickness. In order to make this technique work better, I drop the opacity on the layer I am working to about 80%. This way I will see places where I need to trim off section overlapping with the base knock out.

I then went successively through the colors until I had five total layers, each with its own contour drawing.

Next phase:
The next stage will actually be a slight refinement of each of the separate layers to ensure that I have “nice” shapes to deal with. After that, the next phase that I will document, I will lay out the drawings in vector form on Omnigraffle, lay out registers for each layer, and export as an EPS to slice up a cnc router.

7 Jan

2 notes

Phase 2 complete of my octopus stencil. Follow #octowip to see all the phases I’ve completed.

This phase:
I took the images I collected for Step 1 and found the base image I wanted to work with. This was the octopus image that had the basic shape and flow that I wanted. Of course, it had been cropped in a way that made it look good as a photo, but the tips of most of the tentacles were lopped off and some of it’s dynamic potential was off.

I selected tentacles and the eyes off various other images I collected, trimmed, tweaked & transformed them so that they fit the other body in a frankensteinian mash. From that I began the nuanced process of marrying these parts. This step is really the “rough sketch” point, where I have the basic mojo of the image determined, but it’s still pretty far off from where it needs to be to complete the next phase.

Next phase:
In the next phase I will color correct the various parts so that they look like they came from the same base image, and then begin the process of knocking out the colors for each register.

Phase 2 complete of my octopus stencil. Follow #octowip to see all the phases I’ve completed.
This phase:I took the images I collected for Step 1 and found the base image I wanted to work with. This was the octopus image that had the basic shape and flow that I wanted. Of course, it had been cropped in a way that made it look good as a photo, but the tips of most of the tentacles were lopped off and some of it’s dynamic potential was off.
I selected tentacles and the eyes off various other images I collected, trimmed, tweaked & transformed them so that they fit the other body in a frankensteinian mash. From that I began the nuanced process of marrying these parts. This step is really the “rough sketch” point, where I have the basic mojo of the image determined, but it’s still pretty far off from where it needs to be to complete the next phase.
Next phase:In the next phase I will color correct the various parts so that they look like they came from the same base image, and then begin the process of knocking out the colors for each register.

7 Jan

5 notes

I am working on a four-register stencil of an octopus. The final size of the stencil should be about 3’ x 4’.

I will be doing the best I can to document my process.

This phase:
In this phase, I have collected about 30 source images and narrowed them down to these 7. At this point I have done only a minor amount of editing, primarily inverting to flip the contrast, and flipping the image horizontally. I’ll likely undo most of that in the next step.

Next phase:
Slice up these images into the rough design for the stencil.

Bunny Z (Taken with Instagram at Newton HQ)