Art Mining

So.. After posting my latest piece to DeviantArt, I waited. I had a plan and it succeeded.

I'd had a tough time finding stuff I was interested in looking at on DeviantArt. So much crap, such an unfriendly user interface.. So I made Alice and put her up to show, but also as bait. My fishing expedition was a success. A couple of people added her to their favourites. I then went and looked at their stuff, in particular, their favourites list. This lead me to more art that I liked and artists much better than myself and their favourites lists. I then scanned down these and found a lot of art that I really enjoyed and added watches for those people.

I have a tought time quantifying exactly what it is that I like and even aftr this search, I still don't know. The vague answer seems to be 'Outside the US'. Almost none f the artists I added to my watch list were yanks, though there are a few in Canada. Mostly though, the stuff that was really working for me was in Germany, France, Latvia, Turkey, Russia. Not saying there aren't good american artists, just that what turned me on was mostly from outside the US.

What I like seems to be largely surrealist juxtapositioned stuff with lots of dirty scratchy noise 'polluted fantasy' one artist refered to his work as. I think that suits it well both in style and headspace.

I also seem to like overwrought fantasy/sci-fi art and clean vectory pop-art with some collage.

Other things learned on this fishing expedition are:

• All sci-fi/fantasy artists are required to make at least one cthuloid monster.
• Furry artists are big fish in a little pond
• You damn well better be making art for yourself because there are dozens of other people out there way better than you and the notion that you'll ever be anybody famous is almost pure fantasy.

This stuff should all be depressing. I usually look at other people's stuff and whine about how mine sucks and I have so little time to work and stuff but right now it's not hitting me that way. Also, it's funny, I realize that some of the stuff I like is probably pretty highschool-angst type stuff and stuff that I might have thumbed my nose at in the past but eh. I'm being more honest with myself. I like it. Who cares if it's dorky.

A couple new sketches

( A couple of sketches from the past few days )

These guys are similar in a lot of ways. The one on the right was one of those 'happy accident' things. I hit the wrong button and inverted the colour and suddenly the shadow from the curve of my sketchbook page became a weird shaft of sunlight or something. Anyhow, I liked it. I might work both of these drawings into more finished pieces but I'm not sure yet. I seem to be doing a lot of this sort of stuff lately. Maybe I should stop listening to Sunken Cathederal and looking at depressing eastern european art. Or maybe I should keep doing it.

as usual, these are in my temporary directory and may go away after a week or so.