All drawings © 2019 Thorne Travers Ventura. All rights reserved.
I have always enjoyed drawing. Aren't we all given crayons as children? As long as we didn't draw on the walls, the world of art was limitless. I've made banners for my bands, posters and flyers for my bands' many gigs, and have a few blank-pages books filled with my doodles. I love the way gel pen ink flows onto smooth paper. It's so smooth and dense. I can color with 0.3mm and 1.0mm pen tips. And the myriad colors that gel pen companies manufacture, it just begs as a medium for drawing.
I've always been fascinated by kaleidoscopes and anything graphical like fractals and mandalas. The symmetry, detail and color seems life-like and organic. Objects growing out from a center mimics the Universe which is where we all live, where everything lives. Life starts from a center and grows outward into something where there once was nothing. It's very esoteric, sometimes existential. What I create in my art comes from within, from some center that manifests spontaneously. I am thankful for that spontaneity as it's what makes for infinte possibilities. All I have to do is let it flow (as we used to say when we were psychedelicized!). Add deviations from the norm and we have a Universe so wonderfully diverse and full of possibility.
I started a drawing book in 2018 and filled that book with over 50 drawings, at first, using magic markers on graph paper. Then I added gel pens to my arsenal. My artist and musician friend, Scott Swezy, an accomplished artist himself, suggested I expand from 7x10 and 8x11 pages to 11x14 pages. On this web page is the result of that expansion. At Scott's advice, before I add colored ink, I scan the drawing which is just outlines so that if I want to redo the coloring, for whatever reason, I can project the drawing onto a blank sheet to reproduce it.
It's unfortunate that scanners need a lot of help to render the colors correctly. Even a scanner with a CCD sensor doesn't render all the materials correctly. The oranges don't render well and the scanner does not do justice to the luminous pinks and reflective silvers and golds. I know Photoshop and such software can make adjustments, but if the colors aren't there to begin with (from scanned art), relying on software to generate them seems artificial. Besides, when I adjust one color using software, its complementary color goes out of whack.
I have so many different sets of gel pens that I must have every imaginable color! And there are neon, metallic, glitter, fashion and pastel textures within each color group. Some of the colors are so minutely different from each other that naming them must be impossible... even for Crayola, the kings and queens of color naming.
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