EKC 01/2012: Kaleidoscope Culture

Hello world! A few new paintings have been completed, but first a short update:

Its' been a while since I took the time to update my art blog and that's because I'm slowly getting used to living a life that isn't scheduled by school but instead is ruled by the regular hours of working a day job. So. As expected, my artistic side has taken a serious hit now that school has ended and after spending day after day maintaining two part time jobs, I had a striking realization. It became clear to me just how easy it is to lose momentum and forget about the art degree that we all worked so hard to get. Its' very easy to fall into the routine of paying bills and paying student loans but at the end of the day, I still have a passion for creating things and its' what I'm going to continue to do. This all being said, my seemingly never ending hiatus from doing art is reluctantly over and projects are going to be completed again.

I'm working multiple projects at the moment, including creating the backgrounds and character concepts for a video game with a few SCAD graduates. We have several projects lined up and we're actually thinking about creating our own studio together. Things are still young, but expect more updates to come from this in the very near future. Now on to this painting.

A group of fellow illustrators decided to get together and form an art group called "The Electric Keychain Collective" straight out of SCAD. Its' primary purpose is get everyone motivated to create art after graduation and to get our name out there and bounce off of each other for ideas. Its also pretty cool to see art up there from everyone I went to class with and to see how far they've come with their individual techniques and ideas. Anyway, EKC comes up with a theme every month for the artists to work with, and all of the art is eventually displayed on their website: http://www.electrickeychain.com/

The theme for January was titled "Just Cause" and each artist was to create a painting about an issue that he or she feels strongly about whether it be social, economic, whatever. Here are a couple of sketches that I did to start out with.

I wanted to make a painting about debt, not only national debt but on an individual scale as well. I wanted the concept of debt to be of this abstract beast whose form couldn't be easily comprehended, as if it was something that couldn't exist in the natural world. So I ended up making this creature made up of various shapes, with a whirlwind of different images inside the stomach. Things like hospital buildings, a school campus, a battlefield, cars and gas. A man steps through a doorway and falls into this new world, into the beast's stomach to be trapped inside with the torrent of buildings and objects. Here's the final painting:

I was originally going to do this one in the cut paper style, but the lack of time made that pretty difficult. I decided to paint it instead and use pen and ink make it look more like paper edges. It reminded me of of looking into a kaleidoscope, so I called the piece "Kaleidoscope Culture". It felt great to get back into painting and I guess I have EKC to thank for getting me started again.

See this painting as well as all the EKC pieces at: http://www.electrickeychain.com/#2552179/05-Just-Cause. There's some cool work on the site, so check it out.

Oh! And if you like what you see or want to support, their facebook page always loves fans: http://www.facebook.com/electrickeychain.