monolith

Indian Ink on Paper - 760x570mm - 2013

Here’s a little opening side story to do with this drawing:
The first time I went to Japan I visited Diskshop Misery in Hiroshima. The store is run by a delightful person named Guy. When I walked into the store he instantly noticed my Discharge shirt yelling out ‘Oh! Nice shirt!’ and waved me over. Guy invited some Hiroshima punks as well as a Swedish punk to come hang out, we all had dinner and drinks, was a good time. I got to meet the artist Sugi (check out his artworks, the dude is good) which was super cool, we bonded over both being otaku.

Guy asked me if he could use the Monolith artwork for his band ‘Origin of M’. Guy had actually invited me to come to a band rehearsal with Origin of M, but I ended up going to karaoke with some people at my hostel and ended up black out drunk. I was quite shocked when I woke up in my hostel room. No clue how I got back. Also when he took me out to dinner I forgot to leave money for the food and beers (sorry Guy!) so I figure letting him use my artwork was the least I could do.

If you’re a punk visiting Japan, be sure to find Diskshop Misery.
End of side story.

A few influences went into the idea behind this. The first being the songs ‘Sphinx’, ‘Yog-Sothoth’ and ‘Slaves of the Crucifix’ by the German Thrash Metal band ‘Poison’. Poison are badass, doing 7-9minute thrash songs I can imagine is quite a challenge, let alone doing in such an evil manner as Poison, the vocals and guitar are so frightening mixed with the pure assault of the drums makes for some good listening. Poison really do the band name justice, they make music that is as evil and tough as the name implies.

I also dig classic Mesoamerican architecture, so I chucked a bit of that in there, and the whole architecture aspect came from Zdzislaw Beksinski. ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by HP Lovecraft was probably the biggest influence. It’s a great story, and the cosmic horror feel really influenced this drawing. The movie ‘The Thing’ (1985) is one of my favourite movies and if you enjoy that movie you should definitely give ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ a read.

I had a lot of people telling me at the time that maybe I should draw more things other than frogs. Being stubborn, my mentality for the drawing ‘fuck them I’m gonna show those guys how cool a frog can look’. So this is a drawing of a frog with its mouth open that serves at the entrance to the Monolith. I tried keeping the shapes of the structure to look man-made while adhering to a frog shape, this ordinarily would be quite fun, but mixing perspective into the picture made it more of a restrictive challenge. Not in a bad way though, it made me have to think more.

This drawing started out as my attempt to learn perspective. If I’m doing something purely for the sake of learning it, I can never seem to put the same focus as I can if I legitimately care for the drawing. I always get stuck in mentality that it’s a scrappy sketch that doesn’t matter which results in my mind no applying itself.

My knowledge of perspective was very limited (still is). I knew that I had to make a bunch of points and draw lines from those points, but because I only had a rough idea of what the drawing was meant to look like I ended up drawing a massive grid from 3 points and figured the drawing out from there. A very tedious and time consuming way to do the pencil skeleton of the drawing, the grid was impressive to look at least, shame it all had to be erased after the inking was finished.

Once the left hand side was fully sketched out I went over it with 2x A3 pieces of tracing paper then using carbon paper to transfer it onto the right side. Doing symmetrical drawings is one of the most boring tedious ways to draw for me. If a drawing requires me to do something regardless of how tedious, I have to do it.

The drawing took about 2 months to complete which I attribute both to my timid nature with inking at the time and also that I was using a 10/0 Mini Liner brush for the whole thing. If you visit an art store in the near future check one out and imagine using that on a 760x570mm drawing. Was pretty stupid of me, but that’s what learning is about I suppose, doing a lot of dumb things to figure shit out (dumb in hindsight).