Google Reader is fantastic. Pure and simple.
My reason for stating that is that it takes a look at the blogs you read and it suggests other ones you might like. Other feed readers may do this for all I know, but I’ve only ever used Google Reader and so it’s got my thumbs up. Today it introduced me to a blog I fell in love with. I found myself leaving it open on my computer, returning to it periodically through the evening to have another look. Rarely does a blog cause this behaviour in me.
The blog I refer to is called ‘Elephant Art’ and is maintained by character designer Andrew Shek, who as the blog name suggests, is partial to the odd elephant. Now I could talk at length about what I like about the images on Andrew’s site, but I think it would be more interesting to mention what I find bewildering. In some of his sketchbook drawings, he uses flat blocks of colour that seem to have no relation to what he has drawn. Take a look at the image above showing his sketches of hippos. I’m baffled by his choice of 
putting two grey rectangles over his drawings. They don’t frame the hippos, they don’t seem to highlight a particularly nice composition. The reason that I bring this up though is that I really like that those rectangles are there and yet I have no idea why!
On the left is another example. It looks like he has painted the page red and then painted white blocks over the top. What I can’t tell is whether he has done the sketches before or after the painting. I would guess sketching came first as that makes more sense. Anyway, yet again I love the use of these blocks, but I don’t know why. They certainly highlight the three rhinos drawn within them, but why has he left out the remaining animals?
Below is another example that I really like, but this time what he has done makes sense to me. When I first looked at it, I just thought that maybe he had chosen to mess his page up before drawing to get rid of that horrible “blank page syndrome”. However I came to realise that the paint not only suggests the colour of the elephants, but also their skin texture. Brilliant!
So could this idea apply to the rhino drawings? And the hippo ones? Well black rhinos aren’t necessarily all that dark in colour, so it’s feasible that the theory could 
apply there.
The grey blocks against the red background certainly give a feeling of these great beasts standing in the hot African wild. What about the hippos though? Yes they are indeed grey, but they don’t cover enough of the animals for me to believe that their purpose is just that. I find the small grey block on the left page to be particularly intriguing. I would love it if someone could explain this to me. I have written an enquiring email to Andrew in the hope that he can provide me with some clues. Should I get a reply, I’ll be sure to do a follow up post.
Colour in general is a subject that I find extremely interesting, yet I feel it is the part of art that I least understand. Yes I understand that red can mean warmth or danger and blue can mean cold, and I can look at a coloured image and try to analyse why particular colour choices have been made, as I have been attempting to do here. But when it comes to colouring anything myself, I struggle. I can paint in a fairly convincing manner to get colours that look roughly like what is in front of me, but I find it rather difficult to be more creative with it than that.
Flickr is such a great resource for artists. It’s great for sparking the imagination, but I’ve recently discovered how useful it is for drawing practice. Specifically I’ve discovered a section of the site that gives a random slideshow of “interesting” images from the last seven days.
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