Sketchbooks

 





"Word of the Day" was an excuse to experiment with letter forms. Nupastel on newsprint.



I like to draw faces, so you'll see a lot of them here.




Have always been an admirer of Honore Daumier, and whenever I can't think of 
some other subject I will think back to his terrific caricatures of French nobility
for inspiration. Here are a few 18" x 24' Nupastel on newsprint sketches.  









"Make It Come Alive!"
A friend gave me a trombonium, and I used it as a prop for a exercise 
in my drawing class at the University of Georgia. 



From a trip to Kentucky's strip mining region...


"Dream House"





The Jack Davis Distinguished Visiting Artist program. 
Ralph was the first speaker we brought to Georgia for this series.




Italian faces... shades of Luca Signiorelli



"Wood Rats"


"Sleeper" in Nupastel on newsprint




Hadrian'a Villa north of Rome




Tuscan Fever Dreams of Tasty Prochetta Sandwiches

Sketches from a short visit to the cloud forests in Costa Rica's 
Guanacaste Province, one of five world heritage sites in that country.

Happened into St. Peter's Square during the annual blessing of the relics.
















"New Gove Old Glove" was an exercise I gave my drawing classes. Take a stiff new 
glove and compare it to the energy in an old warn glove that had taken on the character 
of the hand that wore it.








All images © 2020 Alex Murawski

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Classic Images

Image
So, here are some of my classic images. This is the sort of thing  I did from 1972 until I couldn't take it anymore.  As you can see these images are based on an ink stipple technique that is traditional to scientific illustration. It can be laborious and time consuming. I did some of my first work for a new edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and liked the look and feel of stipple so I kept at it. My intention was to take it from the fairly flat interpretations I was familiar with and impart a sense of visual drama though the use of high contrast and extreme perspective. These characters were created for a software company and their products tackled office  management problems. They specifically didn't want any copy on the cover, just images that  would scare the clients into looking inside for a description of all the issues their  product could remedy.   Nemonic devices and their power to shape public opinion. That was the point of departure...
Read more
Image
    I have always been a black and white guy, thinking primarily in terms of values, light and shadow rather than color. So materials like soft charcoal, Conte Crayon, or black Prismacolor pencils were my tools of choice when I was learning to draw. My parents had all the Illustrated Classics, and before I could read I was scribbling imitations of NC Wyeth, Howard Pyle and Rockwell Kent. Later on, looking at Bill Mauldin’s Army and anything by Jack Davis introduced me to what it meant to really draw the figure. In 1972 when I started working in Chicago, art directors were casting about for black and white art that would work well in newspapers, notorious for hastily produced half tone separations and poor quality reproduction. Since line art always seemed to print well, and stipple mimicked the look of continuous tone art without the technical problems, it was a perfect solution. For the next twenty five years my work was based almost exclusively on this technique. B...
Read more

Current Work

Image
                                                                         At some point stipple became to time consuming to be practical in the marketplace with its ever faster turn around time. Deadlines that used to be several weeks were now several  days from start to finish. Just not doable! So for quite a while now my commissioned  work has been produced as graphite or ink wash drawings modified in Photoshop.  "Black Night Is Fallin'" for the annual Blind Willie McTell Blues Festival in Thomson Georgia. "Off The Top" was inspired by a trip to central Kentucky where there was a lot of  strip mining and poverty right next door to horse farms and wealth.   I was invited to do "The Web Spinner" as part of an exquisite corpse for an online  literary site.  "Don't You Talk...
Read more