Hand Painted Zine, Part 10 (Faces on Grids)
Some of my earliest memories involve construction toys. I think my father believed they helped with cognitive development, or he just really liked the toys himself and I was just a good excuse to buy them š .
Back in the early 80's I had this Made-in-Colombia lego-like toy called "Estralandia" with blocks that were mostly brick red, here is an appropriately aged page from the catalog I found online:
Look at the "wheels" on that train!
Of course actual Lego sets with wheels eventually came into my life. Growing up an only child I spend many lovely afternoons building weird vehicles and space ships by myself. I've never stopped thinking about construction toys.
I like that a good construction toy has restrictions, so you don't struggle too much with making decisions, but at the same time it's open ended. Like a sort of ground, or starting point, for your imagination to grow.
When I draw using a grid and basic shapes I feel like I treat drawing itself like a construction toy. Most of the latest drawings have used an isometric grid as the base, but this month I decided to go back to basics with a square grid and some basic shapes.
When I doodle on a square grid I gravitate towards these constructions of squares and quarter circles, here is an actual thing I mindlessly doodled while on the phone as an example:
And I wanted to apply the same principles to drawing faces, or masks.
I started by making a basic grid with a face overlay just to help me keep the proportions in mind:
Then I printed several of these and sketched some ideas by hand using mostly combinations of squares and quarter circles. Like this:
As you can see in the sped up video below, the process for turning the image into vectors is very construction toy like, as I have a set of basic shapes and I drag them and connect them together using the grid as a reference:
After this process, I transferred it to watercolor paper and made it imperfect once again with some watercolors:
I wanted to break the symmetry just a little bit with the hands but overall I enjoy the heavily geometric look. I hope you like it to.
Other Updates:
The four postcards above made it to the 9th Annual Postcard ShowĀ at Gallery Nucleus in Portland, they will be available at the gallery starting December 15 and on the website later on. This is my first time participating in this show so yay!
I keep on learning about ceramics and I recently made a short videoĀ about making this little guy using a technique I learned from woodworking.
That's it for this month, thanks for your support as always!
See you soon :)
Federico.