Because he said Kenojauk

Tuesday, June 16, 2015 11:26 Posted by leosaumure 0 comments
The noun that Aiden gave me was Kenojauk. I had absolutely no idea who, what, or where Kenojauk was.

Turns out, Aiden was learning about Inuit art in school, and they had been reading about Kenojauk. Kenojauk Ashevak is an renowned artist who's work I had never heard of, but once I started looking into her work and her style, I was captivated.

Usually, I don't have much interest in art from First Nations as I find they are often nothing more than variations on a theme (yes that is a broad generalisation). Kenojauk, however, has a completely different style to what I am use to when it comes to First Nation's art.

The closest I can come to, when trying to explain it would be First Nations meets Australian Aboriginal art. She seems to like the style of using stipple rather than solid colours or lines but she uses more muted colours than you would find in Aboriginal art. She also uses a lot of whitespace in her pieces, whereas Aboriginal art seems to use concentric circles or geometric shapes to surround the main focus so that it fills the whole canvas.

If you're into seeing some fantastic pieces, I encourage you to check out her work.

Here is the piece I created for Aiden.

An homage to Kenojauk

Because she said Disneyland

11:10 Posted by leosaumure 0 comments
As I talked about in yesterday's post, I had asked my niece and nephew to provide me with a noun, and I was going to create a little cartoon for them based on their suggestion. Then, I would take that cartoon and make a postcard to mail to them, because who doesn't like getting mail!

Alianna gave me the word: Disneyland.

The easy route would have been to draw her a cartoon with one of the many Disney princesses. There are oodles of them after all. But because I am drawing the cartoons with Night Terriers (my dogs) as a theme, I thought it might be more fun to create a cartoon based on what my dogs would do if they met Disney dogs.


Night Terriers go to Disneyland


Postcards from the Edge

Monday, June 15, 2015 22:05 Posted by leosaumure 0 comments
I'm have recently embarked on something a little different as a creative experiment.

My sister has two fantastic children that I'm just crazy about. They are intelligent, funny, and engaging and just a wonder to behold. In the past ,Alianna and Aiden, have sent me videos of themselves asking questions about science topics. So, being the science minded person that I am, they managed to endear themselves to me even more than they already were. In response to their questions, I created a couple of YouTube videos using some characters I drew of myself and bit of audio background. You can check out the one I made for Alianna here, and Aiden's is here.

For my newest creative project, I have asked each of them to provide me with (in this case) a noun. Using that single word, I am going to produce a little digital artwork for each of them. Then I will have it printed at a photo centre, because they can produce better quality than I could on a cheap colour printer. Then, I'll laminate the photo onto another piece of cardstock, which I have printed as the back of a postcard. So in essence, I'm creating an on-demand postcard based on their suggestion. Hmmm...You might have thought I should have led off with that sentence. Anyway. in addition to illustrating something based off their single word suggestion, they will also have an overarching theme to include the characters from my Night Terrier cartoons. I'm calling the project: Because She/He said... and each postcard will have that sentence on it; followed by the word provided to me.

I have already completed the first two postcards, and will post them on the blog tomorrow with a bit of an explanation of what I have drawn, and why I chose to create that particular piece.

I'm hoping that this project will continue on longer than just a couple of postcards as I am hoping to get two things out of this:

  1. Some inspiration to continue drawing and being creative
  2. Form a stronger bond with a couple kids who I am very fond of.
Hopefully this becomes a regular thing, and I hope you like them, and I hope my niece and nephew like them too. I mean, who doesn't like getting postcards?

Back of postcard