Mica Angela Hendricks - Collaborating with a 4 year old

Hello everyone! Sorry I haven't been on here for a while. Summer has been very busy, I went away with my parents to Greece, and then shortly after went with a couple of friends to Thailand for 3 weeks, then almost as soon as I came back started an internship at a Financial PR company called Abchurch which has been going really well.

But I just had to blog about this latest craze which is sweeping the likes of Reddit, Tumblr and the general social media sphere. Mica Angela Hendrick, a graphic artist (check out her blog here), on the 27th August updated her blog with her latest collection of artworks to share with her followers. These were slightly different to previous works of hers because they are not entirely her own, she collaborated with her 4 year old daughter. 

Hendricks explains the collaboration delightfully, describing how she received a brand new, squeaky clean sketchbook in the post and she started sketching an old movie still (she claims are her favourite photos to draw). Her daughter came up to her and insisted on finishing the drawing. Hendricks thought to herself that she'd just let this drawing go, but by the time her daughter had finished she'd fallen in love with the finished piece. 

Hendricks draws the head from 20s, classical Hollywood movie stills, and then her daughter completes the drawing by adding the body and the background. The finished figure could be anything from a dinosaur to a stick insect. Hendricks and her daughter also both jointly add colour, her daughter being a little more free with her markers, and Hendricks a bit more tidy with acrylic paint. 

The pictures are quite lovely! Combining old traditional style with the young, free imagination!

www.busymockingbird.com

Huang Zheng

Huang Zheng, a Chinese artist, paints hyper realistic portraits up close of women's faces.

Art Slant

Picasso's Blue Period

In the spring of 1901, Picasso learnt about the suicide of friend and fellow painter Carlos Casagemas, and fell into deep depression. These blue paintings are a representation of Picasso's melancholy and sombre mood throughout the years 1901-4, his mood dominating his paintings. Picasso's Blue Period was followed in 1904 by his Rose Period, when his mood improved and this reflected in the pink, red tones of his paintings.

La Vie (1903)

Casagemas in his Coffin (1901)

Portrait of Jamie Sabartes (1901)

The Old Guitarist (1903)

The Rose Period (The Actor - 1901)

Beth Galton

Beth Galton has made a series of, in her words, 'Conceptual' artworks in which she has examined the way we look at food amongst other things. 

Cut Food: Here Beth has taken apart the food we rarely see inside of, such as the favourite pot noodle or ice cream cone

Beth kindly sent me a statement about Cut Food: 


This series was inspired by an assignment in which we were asked to cut a burrito in half for a client.  Normally for a job, we photograph the surface of food occasionally taking a bite or a piece out but rarely the cross section of a finished dish.  Charlotte Omnès, the food stylist and I thought it would be interesting to explore the interiors of various foods particularly items commonplace to our everyday life.  By cutting these items in half we move past the simple appetite appeal we normally try to achieve and explore the interior worlds of these products. I chose to light them with a harder light, and to place them against black.  Daniel Hurlburt composited elements in retouching to achieve the final image. Both Charlotte and I felt that this approach helped highlight our exploration of the world within.

Landscapes: In this series of photographs, Beth zooms into food and captures the different textures we experience with sight instead of touch and taste, creating images which look like abstract landscapes.

Idioms: The last set of images I'm showing is perhaps the most interesting, called idioms. An idiom is a set of words in which the meaning isn't deductible if they are not put together, for example 'raining cats and dogs'. Beth has used this definition to place together  in photographs, things which we put together instantly in our minds, (much like my post on David Schwen a month ago).

Beth has posted loads more of her projects on her website so take a look!

Kiss

Some beautiful watercolours such as the one above can be found on fhgalland.tumblr.com

A modern take on Vermeer

The original

Unfortunately, I'm not sure who has done this, but it is a comical take on Vermeer's classic, 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this painting, and many of you are probably also familiar with the myspace camera shot. The artist here has combined the two, and the result is quite humorous.