blog.NewTangled.com

I am becoming increasingly interested in Graffiti and street art. The free-form wanderings, automatic doodling and dada-ism appeal.

Multi-zoomorph Keith Haring Tribute

Here is a negative of a sketch I produced during my holiday in Greece. I started out aiming to create a Multi-Zoomorph knot from a surfing manoeuvre sequence. I saw a set of pictures of Kelly Slater riding his ‘Wizard Sleeve’ self shaped surfboard.

Incidentally he named this board because of it’s looseness (someone’s been watching Borat!)

As the picture evolved I worked over the rider outlines, in the back of my mind this was suggesting the style of Keith Haring.

Haring was a trained artist and was caught up in the Graffiti turf wars in the Bronx, late 70’s. He started painting his distinctive figures on blank advertising hoardings in the subway. Sometimes his design would be a couple of low key figures, other times the work would fill the available space. He wanted to reflect the bustle of city life, dance, African art and the language of the street. Word.

I recently won a couple of commissions to design tattoo’s. One was pure Celtic waves based on my art, the other, a design of a Zombie surfer pin-up in the Style of Jim Philips! I couldn’t make it up eh? Probably the most fun brief I’ve ever been given.

Anyway, as a treat, and to try and break some artists block, I bought some cans of spray paint to play about in this medium. There’s only one way to go… Jump on in! Here’s my first attempt at a free hand knot in spray paint (on MDF).

Spray can Celtic Wave

Dabbling in this really makes me appreciate the skill it takes to produce a fluent crisp peice of work such as this (photograpphed on my recent trip to Athens):

Athens Graffiti

I suspected it took some practice… expect to see a few more of these in coming blogs!

More commissions are always welcome and any art you see on this site is available for sale, drop me a line!

Links:
haring.com Keith Haring Foundation Official Website

monstercolours.com Monster Colours Spray Can Vendor Website

Two things at the moment:

1. My face is puffed up like Marlon Brando. I had a wisdom tooth removed.  I have some time off work!
2. I’m scouring the web for links to my blog and to socialise.  This is a source of inspiration.

I came across a blog by Droog79 (reference below), it inspired me create a piece of Japanese Surf Art in the unplanned street style:

Three Zoomorphic Curls Sketch 1. 

I used Pro markers and aimed for bold lines, high contrast and lots of detail.  The surfers are like Jelly Babies, like a pop cult reference.  The soap suds are a reference to Graffiti writing.

What prompted me to create this…

Droogs art: awesome! For the UK it reminded me of

• ‘Supermundane’ an artist/illustrator I’d seen under that name (anything but run-of-the-mill)
• as well as album art of Mr Scruff.
• Generally it reminded me of unplanned drawings of the Japanese Street Style:  A great example of being Nobumasa Takahashi:

Check this out, an entire wall painted by Takahashi San from ideas given to him as he worked (spot the surfer heading towards the mouth of a giant head)

http://www.pingmag.jp/images/title/nobumasa_drawing.jpg”>

Source: Nobumasa Takahashi pingmag.jp
http://pingmag.jp/2006/02/08/nobumasa-takahashi-draws/

There’s some great art out there, surfing the web is a great way to find grassroots artists and big names which can open up new ideas to you.  Cheers for the blog Droog79 (check it out at http://www.droog79.blogspot.com/)

Also see:

• Supermundane: http://www.supermundane.com/
• Mr Scruff: http://www.mrscruff.com/
• Florence Manlik:  http://manlik.blogspot.com/
• Akira Yamaguchi: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/features/arts2005/fa20050105a1.htm (if anyone knows an official website please let me know!!)

You can also see a timelapse movie of my sketch:

Now I’m off to eat some more chicken soup :-/

Spray Fan 1 (detail)

The image posted shows a detail of the surfer performing a hardcore cutback… this was inspired by a pic I saw in September 2008 Surfers Path Magazine of Dan Malloy riding a Bonzer, since reading that article I want to try one of those gizmo’s… a more efficient thruster!!  Dating back to the days before the thruster!!

I’n this design I’ve tried to capture the motion of the surfer showing the carved wave and spray fan almost as a vector field.  I’ve aimed for lots of motion and energy in the picture, throwing paint at the canvas and where possible using fast directional strokes of the pen and brush.

The colours I’ve chosen are hot and cold, high contrast and of a limited pallet.  I was aiming for a simple colour scheme to create a bold high impact image.  I wanted to create a design that was a perfect accent colour for a room, and a strong statement of speed and power.

The execution of the image is leaning towards a street art feel, blocks of colour, graf style curves, stencil work, tagging.

The Celtic work is freehand over a concept sketch framework.  It forms a single line and depicts a single human Zoomorphic surfer.  The following you tube is a rough cut of a time-lapse film I made of the final stages of the painting.  Other bits of the film (and eventually a edited and set to music version can be found on my videos page)