Papernoise Sketchbook

I don’t know what happened, but I had a couple of days where I was totally inspired and just kept on drawing in my sketchbook!
It all started when I noticed that it was about time I’d draw some nudes again, to exercise my anatomic skills (which are lacking a bit as you can see).

It’s sunday night and I’m still at work. The last days have been a total mess because of a big project we have to finish until tomorrow morning. Fortunately computers are slow sometimes. They need time to open documents, copy data and mostly to do stuff nobody understands. In these moments, instead of sitting motionless in front of the screen I draw. I’ve been working on this sketch for 2 days now, a little bit at a time, a line here, a fill there. It’s an interesting way to work, but now I’d like to have some time again to do these things properly!

I’ve been following the indie game website/blog/forum Pixelprospector for some time now so I decided that they deserved some kind of tribute… and a thread on their forum was the final trigger. The drawing is an interpretation of the website’s mascot, a miner with a glowing joystick in his hands.

Random doodles of weird creatures that suck your brains out.

Sometimes the forgotten past comes into your life like an unexpected visitor and sometimes you re-discover parts of yourself through it…

A couple of weeks ago me and Elisabeth went with my mother up the mountains, to the village where she was born, to visit our relatives. At one point we took a walk through the woods and I discovered this really weird “pietà” sculpture (a Madonna holding a dying Christ, which you can’t really see in the picture above). What I like about it is, that the face is completely white and the eyes look more like empty holes giving it a pretty unsettling effect. The figure looks more like a ghost or a vampire, than the grieving mother we are used to see.

According to my mother this sculpture was made by a granduncle of mine called Joseph Ploner, better known in the village as “Weber Våter”, who got into wood sculpture when he was 80. Somehow it makes me think that a certain interest for the macabre and the unsettling  might have its root in the family… at least on a latent, unconscious level. Now that I think of it, many of the old iron crosses in the village’s cemetery where made by my grandfather (should take pictures of those too, there were just too many people in the cemetery last time).

The unexpected visitor might have opened a door I had forgotten.