Barbara

 

It's a piece that came out of nowhere, or at least that's how I feel. 

Back in 2006 in its original form, it was part of an illustration in watercolors (for which i used reference, you can't get this dramatic kind of lighting other way)  . 

In October 2010, I put the watercolors in the photoshop laboratory, eliminating all the kinds of "noise" (pencil, paper surface) and giving it finally this impressionistic feel ( the light is as if it consumes the figure and its details). 

Last August, I was working on a collage, using different paper textures and some patterns I had already made in Photoshop. A piece of it, you can see on the wall, behind the figure.

Last night I worked on another project, and I started browsing old pieces to find things I could incorporate in it. That's how I run into them and thought ... hm! why not?

practise continues: sonic youth

 

A big part of this work, had been done back in December, but somehow i wasn't pleased with certain of its details, so i had to put it aside . Thanks to the past few projects, solutions or certain ideas became more clear and concrete, so i finally managed to put it together, in a way that evokes the feeling i had in mind.

Practising on illustration

Ok, let me explain you what is going on here. Usually an illustration takes me about two weeks, half of the time goes to rendering the face, since my work is mainly "portrait oriented". In this case I tried to cut down the time to three days (in fact, it could have been just a couple) and produce a coherent result. It took me just a few minutes to make the rough sketch,(since the point was also to make a figure out of my imagination, with no reference) and I thought that I shouldn't try anything more elaborate, just go on and develop it into an illustration. What i always bore in mind was to respect the pencil lines, that's why I tried to keep them as they were, without making them more smooth in the photoshop. The certain feeling that comes out, i believe that is the result of the scanned pieces of paper i used, pieces that i had already washed in chlorine bleach, to make them lose their color. 


"Io sono Juno", means in Italian "I am Juno", the Roman name for the Ancient Greek Goddess Hera, Zeus' wife. The white part of her costume, was mend to resemble the column of a Greek temple. Finally, chromatically this piece of work is based on white, red and blue colors, which are often used in flags, such as those of UK, USA or France, and in this case i chose them to give a sense of power to the figure.

You've got mail

Here is a heavily stylized piece, made entirely in photoshop. It was mainly inspired by the work of Alphonse Mucha. Much attention was paid to the quality of the line, which was meant to be as firm and smooth as possible. It was the same feeling that drew me to use mostly clear colors (with the exception of the sky) without the one messing with the other.

This is Hermes, or Mercury for the Romans, the herald of Gods, delivering a message to you. Ι always found fascinating the way ancient Greek heroes, gods, symbols, survive till today in various aspects of everyday life in the western world, Apollo theaters, Hercules gyms etc.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die

It's been ages since I've worked on this theme, but since I never stopped loving it, I thought that I could share it with you. 

The idea behind it was to create a crest. In this case I've tried to incorporate elements relevant to the work of Douglas Sirk, such as the title of one of his last films, as well as the deer, a symbol that appears before the end of "All that heaven allows". Also it was an early Bond film, where the hero searches for his family tree, and he locates a crest of his ancestors with, among the others, the phrase " The world is not enough", which was to become the title of another Bond film. So I had also in mind the idea, of a crest with a film title in it. Finally I remember, that I always loved the label work on the bottle of Jagermeister, which depicts a deer head. 

So this is my chance to present a label-crest with a deer in the center of it.