For those of you who are on my Facebook you are or maybe aware of my on going SNAIL GIRLS drawings, but for those of you not on FB with me or are unaware of the series I am going to recap a little bit. ONe day I sat down with my sketchbook and doodled out a little thing of a faerie riding on the back of a snail sort of like bull riding at a rodeo, I like it so much that I found a small piece ( scrap ) of paper that I had lying about and quickly did an ink thing of it:
....and here she is, the "first" Snail Girl. I believe I drew her in 2010.
At some point in the past year I was sitting in my living room ( aka Studio B ) and had messed up a drawing that I was working on, and as I sat there tore it up as usual, but then as I was sitting there looking at the torn paper, I drew a girl talking with a snail:
It was a fun thing to do, and I liked the image, for me it was sort of innocent a girl talking with a snail. After I a while I did another and another. All were done on torn sheets of paper of messed up drawings, and as my collection of Snail Girls grew I decided to keep the torn sheets of paper and have them on hand for the purpose of doing Snail Girls, this envelope sits by my chair in Studio B and is there ready and waiting for the next one to appear:
Here is an example of the approximate size of the drawings:
...and a few more closer images of the girls as well as an early family portrait:
As I continue to do these and looking back at them, I realized there is some sort of conversation going on between these two friends, and in realizing this, it became all the more important to me to continue with this until the conversation was over. At first it was for me about getting the body posture right, balancing the blacks and whites to where one did not over power the other, but now it is more about keeping the friends together...........sort of silly I know, but I like it.
I have to mention that all the drawings are done to the shape of the paper and not tearing the paper to fit the drawing, that would be cheating. The shape of the paper helps to determine what is being said in the drawing. The more of these I do, the more intense the conversation becomes in trying to find a posture or pose that I haven't done before..........who likes to repeat themselves in a conversation.
At the top of this I posted the "first" snail girl, well in cleaning out some things and trying to tidy up the place I found this:
This is the actual First of the SNAIL GIRL images, she was done in 2004, six years before the other First. As you see in the first to images the gals have wings and are in a sort of ironic action pose...........bull riding a snail and surfing on a snail, just something that leans towards my sense of humor, but as I went on they changed, no wings and more of an equality between them.
Anyway, this is some of what comes out in the evenings as I kick back and chillax to end my day. In the next few posts, I will be going to put up a few of the pieces that come out as I wind down and relax in the evenings before going to bed............or on the nights that I can't sleep and get up and try to get sleepy.