Doodles, cont.

Poor Twirlita.
All she wants to do is finish her dance:

 Doodles by the great Lynda Barry

  

Lynda Barry is of course a cartoonist, and as such, her basic tools are pen and paper. There's a brilliance about the way in which she uses drawing to convey humor -- from the willowy legs of the dancer to the motion lines and stars throughout. There are 40 examples of this on the page, and all of theme, either taken as a continuous narrative or viewed individually, are hilarious.

Disorderly Digression

Occupy Wall Street is this generation's very own Kent State. As the demonstrations heat up in cities across the country, here are just a few of the signs captured by photographers on the ground. They're an important record of the times, a combination of political cartoon and performance art, coaxing factual knowledge and interpretive skills from viewers. And there's the drawing technique - sometimes slick, but mostly raw and emotional, with shards of cardboard boxes as support for the varied illustrative styles.

I like the one with the little girl in the tiara. She seems to be caught up in the festivity of it all, but it's doubtful she really understands the context in which her poster appears. I think it's an example of grammar school expressionism, juxtaposed with the expressions of an angry proletariat, which makes it kinda sweet.

Grime Writing

Street artist Moose Benjamin Curtis was once arrested for creating graffiti on a South London public wall. Which is ironic, because Moose wasn’t creating marks on the wall – he was subtracting the dirt and grime deposited there over time by air pollution. The result, as you can see in the above “drawing” at the Broadway Tunnel in San Francisco, is a more beautific public space, created with scrub brushes, rags, cleaning fluid and sometimes a high-pressure hose. Check out these other examples of his negative space art:

  The one below says “Thank You For Not Breeding.”

 

Subway Drawings on an iPhone

 
A friend of mine posted these amazing drawings on Facebook. The artist is Dug Winningham, a sound technician who was born with an ability to draw what he sees. He used an iPhone app called Brushes to create these drawings. The program allows for intense detail via its zoom capability, and the drawings show a much more sophisticated approach than what seems possible, given the diminutive nature of the tools. Each drawing is multilayered with color and line, produced with just a finger treading on the screen. It's interesting to see how artists' tools are evolving along with technology. We have literally at our fingertips the ability to create a project like this one, which involves more sophisticated technology than that which attempted to launch the Apollo 1 spacecraft.

Line, Pt. 10

This amazing linocut by Marc Snyder demonstrates the importance and agility of line to produce meaning. Every detail is rendered either by the creation of line, or the complete excavation - the absence - of line.

How to Draw a Drowning

"How To Draw A Drowning," 8"X3" intaglio by Marc Snyder, 2001

This schematic of a critical event is calmly rendered by artist and printmaster Marc Snyder, who runs the Fiji Island Mermaid Press. A visit to his website is strongly recommended.

Best Use of Graphical Representation of Landforms

Drawing by Marc Snyder

About Narrative

Have you seen this band? Of course not. Polish artist Jakub Julian Ziolkowski made it up to satisfy an insatiable craving for storytelling. 

His work is a product of his imagination and presented in non-linear and disjointed narratives, grotesque figures fraught with death and decay, otherworldly forms, and obsessively created and rehashed imagery.

"I really like to create artificial, imaginary names and situations," says Ziolkowski. "I just invent them, which I think is more real. If something is completely imaginary, like a portrait without a name, it's surreal, but if you've got the names, you think, "Who is this Timothy Galoty?  What's going on here?'"