The Style Bestiary: the fitful start
This is my first drawing for the Style Bestiary, which is a bestiary of things I have seen, people-wise on the subway, at work, in the mirror… There’s the woman here, for example, who will notice that hair eventually and hope nobody else did. There’s the fashionista with the grey-stained underarms (stained by her black leather jacket, no doubt). There’s the man who didn’t think to un-tack the vent in his jacket, maybe he didn’t realize he should. The woman with the pedicurist’s toe-separators still in her toes. The lady with the hair wrapped around her head and secured with bobby pins: the in-between hair-do.
All these moments of inadvertence intrigue me. They’re “looks” that nobody actually aspires to, and yet they happen all the time. In between looks, looks that only happened because someone forgot to do something, or thought nobody would notice if they didn’t do it. We pretend not to notice them, but I do, and I love them.
Anyway, this specimen has not gone as I had hoped. While I have a long list of plates I want to draw, I’m still arguing with myself about the application of color. This is a scan with the (awful, incompetently applied) watercolor removed by Photoshop. This is pretty much what the drawing looked like till I ruined it! Sigh!
The style is illustration-y in this example, but I may yet go for a more Audobon-esque reality (what ambition!), so a different version of this specimen may rear its head ere long. I’m going to decide how the thing will look as I go along, and you’ll see it develop in real time.
A friend has promised to show me the watercolor ropes on condition I stop whining.
More TK!