New Wave Dancer

Sometimes I'm inspired to draw just anything. Because of my association with Tod Streater I often thought up wild ideas for costumes. This wasn't based on anything other than the odd shapes I drew to form the coat. Something about bows and buttons, perhaps.

Tod Streater, 1990

I've not posted in quite a while. I think about doing things more often than I actually do them, which is how my brain works. One thing I actually did recently was take files off an old hard drive, so I could recycle it. Looking over these old files was, as friend Maxxwell says, like finding Pirate Booty. I started by sharing old photos of friends on Facebook that I'd not been able to do previously.
Here is another image I found. I'd been wanting to post it for a long time, but because it is so large it was resisting my efforts to digitize it. This is a portrait of a friend I drew way back in 1990.  I met Tod when I first moved to Seattle.
Tod was very intelligent and creative, designing costumes and props for several local theaters. He was a wizard at taking what he had on hand and making the end result look effortless. He also knew a lot of people in Seattle, so I met many interesting people through him.
Tod died in '93 and I featured him in my zine Gae-raj that I published the following year. I wanted to include this image in the zine, but never found a scanner that could do it justice. The original image is around 30x24, so I've stitched some imperfect scans that were sitting on that old hard drive together to create this image. I haven't done many pen and ink portraits, but I think this one counts as my best and favorite.

Dancing Thistle, now as a Zazzle tee shirt!

Those of you following this blog will remember the past posts I made exploring the development of this design. A few months ago I cleaned up the original using Photoshop's vectoring features and created this version which I've made available at Zazzle.com as a tee shirt. I'm quite pleased with the results and am inspired to use this as the basis for an animation that I hope to render as a GIF file.  We shall see how that works out.

Tattoo designs III

I began to consider more Tod's background in costume.  Here you can see more ideas which play with the idea of costume in mind.  The feminine figure in the upper right hand corner got Tod's approval enough that I came up with the larger central figure in response.

Tod really liked this design because it both captured the idea of a thistle and a figure.  It is the design he took to his tattoo artist, Vyvyn Lazonga, who's been doing tattoos in Seattle for almost four decades.  She had to alter it slightly, but in the following photos you can see it is basically the same design.

This last picture needs some explanation.  It was taken while Tod was attending Evergreen state college.  Tod held a "pink dress" party which was lots of fun.  The dress is of his own design and the wheel behind him is a roulette, which he was using to give gifts to the guests.  I'm not sure about the man to left baring his chest.  It was a pretty wild party.

Tattoo designs II

Here is my second page of design ideas for Tod Streater's "dancing thistle" tattoo.  I was thinking more decoration than figure, so here were more interpretations that use symmetry and natural sources.  There is even a sense of the "Pineapple" character from "Paula and the Purple Rayz".  I've often thought these would be great designs for tee shirts.

Tattoo designs I

When I first moved to Seattle I shared an artist's loft with a young man named Tod Streater. He was a costume designer and a very good person with big ideas. He admired my own design skills and asked me to design a tattoo for him.  I wrote a fictional account of our lives which appeared in my zine, Gaeraj and I've posted at my web page.

I'd never designed a tattoo before, so it was a great challenge for me, but also an opportunity to test myself and my design skills.  Tod and I had discussed it after seeing Disney's "Fantasia".  His favorite sequence was the dance between thistles and orchids, set to Tchaikovsky's "Trepak" music from the Nutcracker Suite.  He asked me to design a "dancing" thistle.

You can see above left a literal interpretation from the Disney film, and below right a stylized design that I think was based on art nouveau era wallpaper.  Some how a dandelion came into the picture, perhaps because they are similar.

Thistle design

I have always been inspired by Art Nouveau design. This design is an early inspiration which lead to my friend Tod requesting I design a tattoo for him. The sketches that I did subsequently are in another sketchbook and I will tag them with this one when I post them. I have very few photographs of Tod right after he got his tattoo, but I can say this sketch was the first inspiration.