Pasta Disaster

Saturday, 28 January 2012

Biro Doodles

I've taken to drawing in Biro a lot lately. I like the idea of not being able to remove one's mistakes, but rather working around them with a flagrant disregard for conventional notions of perfection, or some other deep and meaningful concept.

I started off drawing Success Kid in the top corner of a page in my diary because I had achieved something that week I was particularly proud of.

Success Kid

This, of course, erupted into another bout of pen drawings.

This one took up a whole page in my diary. I had been writing about the idea of a buzz/hangover cycle, a series of unsustainable successes immediately followed by failure. I had come across the gorgeous song Hangover Payback by one of my newer J-Pop obsessions, singer MAA. I listened to it while doodling her. I tried to see how far I could get in the sketch before having to restart the video I was copying from (it was a still image, audio only). I didn't get that far... luckily I like the song enough to loop it indefinitely.

I didn't really get her eyes (or nose, or lips, or jawline) right. Her East/West genetic mix makes her a challenge to draw in pen. Too many subtleties to be captured. A rare beauty.

MAA

My last picture was drawn tonight. I thought I'd break out the ol' sketch book to prove I'm still a real artist or something. I showed Dave and he was all like, "it's Sarah." So I know I must have achieved a reasonably good likeness. She's not online yet. I hope she likes it.