Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Rippin' Flesh, Crackin' Skulls

I did these with markers over the weekend and cleaned them up a bit for posting. Look at the crazy range of hues that can be squeezed out of strictly warm gray markers...the brown colored stuff is 1 and 3 warm gray Chartpak, and the purple colored stuff is 10, 30, and 50% warm gray Prismacolor. Some black and white pencil can alter the intensity of marker hue considerably.

For each design, I focused on 1. diverse shapes and curves, and 2. diverse ways to marry wood and stone. I imagined these to be the master works of the greatest axsmith in the land, somewhere around 12,000 b.c. In the comic I do for this phase of the class I'm going to invent a primitive technology where the axsmith crafts dozens of blades by firelight in his cave, then goes out the sacred tree where he embeds the blades in its branches. Over many years, the tree grows around the blades, and when sufficiently joined, the axsmith lops off the blade-containing branch and has his naturally wrought power ax.

This process is relevant to today's designed objects...materials and design elements should flow seamlessly in and out of each other.

2 comments:

David said...

These are very well-rendered. Serious textures happening, and nice designs, too. The idea is very clever.
Some of the shapes look a bit fragile for stone, but all in all, they're extremely well executed.
Five stars.

Paul said...

Fabulous work, Dimitri. I think the only criticism I can muster would be my desire to see a version with handle & rock interweaving/locking...such that there is not always an uninterrupted handle depicted. Maybe this is purely spurned from what Dave mentions...the rock at times looks fragile, leaf-like.