For the automatic drawing piece I did, even though I got that drawing approach from Sigmund Freud, my favourite person who draws from imagination alone is Illustrator Katie Scott.  Her images have inspired me to draw without any visual reference, which is something I'm very new to at this stage.  Her subject matter doesn't apply to my work as its mainly botanic style drawings, however its the drawing approach (drawing from imagination) I got from her.  Her imagery is stunning and I hope to reach this level of technical brilliance someday as well as keep up the naive, child like drawing style as well.  Here's some of her work.

When I was doing the woodcuts, I wanted to improve my technical skill and convey my message as clearly and effectively.  I came across an African American graphic artist/sculptor called Elizabeth Catlett.  She's one of my favourite woodcut artists and like me, she's dealing with issues of her time.  In her case, it's the African American experience of the 20th century.  Her level of skill regarding woodcuts is remarkable and I looked at her work in order to improve my own visual imagery.  Her subject matter doesn't apply to what I'm doing.  Here's some of her work.

This year I finally got the chance to try out the digital printer!  I'm sure it'll get easier the more I do it but for the moment I hate it!  It was very hard to use, there's like a million different steps and a million more different types of paper!!  I ran into countless difficulties trying to work the thing which included things like corrupted files, wrong type of paper selected, colours running out of the printer etc.  Overall it took like 3 hours but I finally got there in the end!! YAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!

Here's the print.

Here's how it looks on my wall.  It came from one of my other drawings from the start of the semester.  Here's how it looks on my wall in my studio!

I scanned in one of my drawings, re-sized it and put colours on it in photoshop.  I robbed this way of working by Jean Jullien and I want to do it more often in the next semester as I want to be comfortable with using the digital printer.

I got the opportunity to try out "Photolithography" a while back.  Instead of using a photograph however I did a simple drawing on assotate with a light sensitive marker.  The idea was to keep it transparent so the light would go through it in the light box.  I'm glad I got to try it and it's another print process under my belt!  Here's the Photolithograph.

I thought it turned out ok for something I didn't expect to work in the first place!  The idea behind the drawing was that people are obsessed with keeping a record of where they've been on social media without really appreciating the moment itself.  If we've a picture of the view on our Tablet, why bother looking at the view in the first place right?

I expanded on this idea a little more by making a woodcut from my imagination.  I'm getting out of the need to always have reference material as I enjoy the spontaneous nature of drawing from my imagination.

Here's the woodcut.

This one took two days aswell!  I've a habit of making things harder for myself than they have to be!

While I was researching Sigmund Freud's ideas on humour I rediscovered his automatic writing technique and I remembered learning last year how Surrealist artists adopted this idea to drawing.  At this stage I was getting weary of the basic drawings, sketches, etchings and I wanted to do something that would keep me occupied for a while.  It didn't have anything to do with the idea I was going with but I wanted a break from my concept without having to stop working.

So over two days I shut away all reference material, blanked my mind and started drawing with nothing in mind.  I wanted to let the drawing evolve into whatever it happened to turn into and to be honest I surprised myself!

Here's the result.

It's A3 sized and the photos below are just close ups.

It was fun to do!  I'd never tried automatic drawing before and I didn't use a lot of colour this semester, so it was a nice change from the naive childish cartoon doodles i was doing so much of!

I realised I never put up the pen drawing! Here it is!

It doesn't look like it here but when you look at it up close you'll see that I drew this out of scribbles.  

I got this idea from an artist called Vince Low who creates these amazing scribble portraits that I love!

I was quite fond of the Gollum metaphor and I wanted to take it a step further so I got an idea from contemporary artist Richard Prince to draw on top of the pictures that I used for drawing reference.  This is the picture from Prince.

Here it looks like he took a photograph of some kind of tribes person and put collage and marker on top of it for humorous effect.  I wanted to do something similar with the Gollum photocopies.

I think these are more effective than the pen drawing and the etching I did a while ago.  They're simplistic yet they convey the message I want to put out there.