Consentacle witches in progress + Hokusai art talk

These are a smattering of unfinished things I'll be hopefully cleaning up this week, I didn't want to let things drift and go un-shared like I did last month!

I watched Look Back this week and it's suuuuuch a beautiful film, I've decided I have to seek out the rest of that director's work because I really love the sensibilities. It's got a certain amount of messiness that I find really validating since I have been trying to work up the urge to do more animation but also not get obsessed with getting everything juuuust right. I can't stop thinking about it.

That doesn't have a whole lot to do with this mess of sketches i've been making but everything gets tossed in the same soup creatively.

 Speaking of creative soup, I also saw one of the GOATs in person today:

It's a part of a traveling Hokusai exhibition. I haven't looked at this many woodblock prints since I was in a Japanese Art History class in college, which was a shamefully long tie ago. It's really fun seeing these at their original scale, it's just such a humble size and yet it's been so impactful as an image. (same goes for a lot of the other prints in the show, but I was, for obvious reasons, drawn to this one.)

Here were some other highlights for me:
The kind of decadent and yet restrained detail in this sketch, there's so much to look at and the isometric perspective just makes it feel even more like an adorable miniature.

 Or who could resist the luscious texture and sparse composition of these fashion-plate lookin' spreads. I remember being frustrated by how alien these compositions could feel earlier in my art life. They really care nothing for western art sensibilities and so it kinda broke my brain. Now I understand why all the impressionists were probably shook to their fucking cores seeing this for the first time.

 Such an extreme level of craft being applied to something that doesn't give a shit about western art feels like breaking rules I didn't even know were rules. Like I don't know wtf is up with that gentle red gradient at the top of these pages but I love it.

Or check out the economy of these snow-laden pine branches. This was the kind of thing that was in the back of my head when drawing Ivy & Pine. I wanted to to be a little less literal, more graphic and design oriented in how I treated the backgrounds because I didn't really think lovingly rendered trees would be necessary to get people into the story.

Upon a second viewing these are way more Hokusai than I remember 😅 These background gradients are extremely Japanese print-y. Funny how often that happens without you even realizing it.

I'll leave you with this charming gal I saw in one of the books on display. thanks for reading my rambling thoughts. Don't be at all surprised if some of this stuff starts seeping into my work over the next couple months. I'm very sponge-y in that way. 😁Happy Saturday!

🌊Winton