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| Day 26 of Intkober 2018, prompt word "Stretch." Dip pen and ink. by Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. [Image description: black and white drawing of an interior looking through two doorways into a third room with a window. A man sits in a chair in front of the bright window turning halfway to look behind him. Behind the door frame in the second room, just out of his view, is a woman standing with one leg bent as if hesitating to take a step, with her head tilted as if about to peer around the corner or contemplating what is around the corner, and her hand is over her heart. She stands mostly in shadow. The drawing is shaded mostly with horizontal pen strokes. The space around the doorway closest to the viewer is black, with reflected light from the window on the floor creating sort of a bright visual runway for the eye of the viewer to travel toward the man and window. Style is realistic.] |
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| Day 24 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Chop." Dip pen and ink. by Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. [Image description: black and white drawing of the head and shoulders of a woman. She holds a knife with a sphere impaled on the end of it, which she examines with a disinterestedly skeptical expression. The sphere contains an image of a bird flying over treetops, as in a crystal ball or a parallel reality contained within the sphere. The sphere is the light source; the background is black and the figure is shaded in high contrast. Somewhat realistic style.] |
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| Day 23 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Muddy." Dip pen and brush, ink. By Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. [Image description: black and white drawing the head and shoulders of a woman who is spinning around from upper left to bottom right of the image to face something the lower right of the viewer. She has wet stringy hair that is smacking her in the face and blobs of mud flying off of her face and torso. There's a big splash of mud through the negative space in the background in the upper section of the image. Most of the drawing is done with messy dark ink washes. The face is done with crosshatching pen marks. The face looks intense and angry.] |
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| Day 21 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Drain." I shamelessly stole the pinecone head idea from a phenomenal 1920s Dada / surrealist artist named Claude Cahun; she once wore a costume pinecone or fungus on her head and took some photos. I intended to come up with a more meaningful object with which to replace the head, but after serious effort I was unable to improve on the pinecone. [Image description: black and white ink drawing showing a woman with a big pinecone for a head who has just dropped to her knees and is reaching blindly for her human face/head, which has somehow come off and is melting and dripping through an invisible grid that forms the plane of the ground. The figure is top left, the face is bottom right, and she reaches toward the viewer. She wears shorts, sneakers and a loose cropped T-shirt. Her face is conventionally pretty and calmly smiling but one eye has dripped through the grate. A swath of abstract black brushstrokes behind and to the right of the figure highlight that area of the illustration. The style is graphic-realistic, not cartoony.] |
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| Day 20 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Breakable." Dip pen and ink. By Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. [Image description: black and white ink drawing of a woman walking on a beach. A more detailed rectangular section in the upper center of the page shows a woman in a sweatshirt and jeans walking near the waves viewed from far away. A piece of driftwood and seaweed sits half buried in the sand. Beyond the frame of that rectangular section is a series of five overlapping contour line drawings of a nude woman walking, looking up and looking down and ahead, walking forward and, with perspective, moving diagonally from upper left to lower right toward the viewer. The larger version of the driftwood also makes an overlapping appearance beyond the rectangular section. The horizon line and edge of the waves extends also beyond the section forming a triangular shape because of perspective. The overall style is realistic, not cartoony.] |
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| Day 1 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Poisonous." Dip pen and ink. by Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. [Image description: a black and white ink drawing with ink washes. A black rectangle covers most of the page, set to the bottom left of center. Inside that frame is an ambulance with open doors, viewed from the back looking straight in, slightly from below. A stretcher sits halfway out of the ambulance. A man floats or flies out of the ambulance slightly above the viewer and his head extends out of the black frame at the top left. He has two heads; one looks back at the ambulance, troubled, and the other looks straight ahead, determined. He holds a backpack. The interior of the ambulance is very brightly lit, and one door opens beyond the black frame. The dual light sources make the face very high contrast.] |
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| Day 19 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Scorched." I drew this to look like a solarized photograph (I drew from a normal cell phone photo which is grainy enough to leave something to the imagination). To make a solarized print in a photo lab, you expose the film onto paper, then put the paper in developer. Just as the image starts to develop you take it out and scorch the photosensitive silver salts with bright light for a few seconds, then continue developing the print as usual. You end up with a psychadelic quicksilver negative effect. Dip pen and ink. by Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. [Image description: black and white shaded portrait of a man leaning and looking intently out of frame. Where the darkest areas of his face would be, they are instead flipped and a bit marbleized.] |
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| Day 17 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Swollen." Dip pen and ink. By Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. There is ALWAYS this guy on public transport (and on a few memorable occasions, this woman). Still, overall Berlin has public transit has felt safer than Washington, DC., and Charleston, SC., public transit. Beer is allowed and commonplace in public, so there's more of a gradation between "normal" people, those traversing a particularly belligerent stage of puberty, sports fans, and That Guy. In Berlin the fights and shadiness almost never involve others so long as you stare at the wall pretending HARD that nothing is happening (and of course everybody does that). Whereas in the US the first thing the trouble-maker does usually is try to involve everyone around them. Though we did have a few knife-ings throughout Germany and a group of dudes kicked some lady down the stairs here in Berlin; but let's be real, that wouldn't have even made the local news in the US it's so common. [Image description: black and white realistic drawing of a long seat on a subway car viewed face-on. On the right sits a big slovenly man with a beer leaning against his duffle bag taking up a lot of space on the bench seat, looking out of frame to the right and shouting with his mouth wide open at nothing in particular. On the left is a smaller woman cramped into the corner as far as possible away from him, looking away and to the lower left through a glass partition. Her ankles are crossed and her purse is bundled onto her lap; her hands are clutched. Windows, hanging loopy straps that you're meant to grab onto when the train is moving, and several bars are also visible. The scene is lit harshly with overhead lights and the drawing is high contrast; the linework is scratchy, giving it an overall gritty, slightly cartoony feeling.] |
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| Day 16 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Angular." Drawn in the mirror. Dip pen and ink. By Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. [Image description: black and white sketch of the head and shoulders of a woman (me). Her head is turned to the left in profile and the viewer's eye level is collarbone height, so the neck is central to the image. A big neck muscle is central to the piece, drawn as a big black vertical line traversing most of the piece. The linework is very sketchy and bold. Angular measurement lines break the piece up into planes. The planes of the face and neck are also geometrically simplified, and the directional shading lines also are planar and angular. Round facial features, head hair, nape of neck hair and shirt collar intersect the straight angular lines of the skeleton and neck. Not a cartoony style; realistic but sketchy.] |
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| Day 15 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Weak." Drawn in the mirror (except the goat head and bottomless abyss, obviously, those I image-searched online). Dip pen and ink. By Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. This is meant to capture that feeling in the throat and chest when you feel like you want to cry, but you either don't have the energy or privacy to do so. [Image description: black and white finely shaded drawing of a woman's head and chest. There is a goat head awkwardly squeezed under her chin emerging from her neck, stacked like a totem pole. There is a black hole or nebula filling the space of her upper torso. The top of her head extends off the top left of the page and she looks down at the viewer with a slack face. There is blank white background space in the upper right and mostly blackish space around the nebula filling the silhouette of her chest and shoulders.] |
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| Day 14 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Clock." Text reads, "Heliotropism-- Sunflowers turn toward the sun as it moves across the sky." by CIana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. Dip pen and ink. [Image description: In the upper left corner are two standing bare legs visible from the back, from the calves down. Radiating from the feet are several overlapping shadows which extend across the upper page, diagonally down to the lower right, and straight down, all ending out of frame and differently proportioned like shadows on a sun dial. In the bottom third are three sunflowers, one on a stalk with leaves facing away from the viewer, the middle sunflower without a stalk facing skyward and tipped toward the viewer, and the third facing the viewer almost full-on. The placement implies it's the same flower on a stalk changing position throughout the day. Superimposed over the stalk and leaves is a white rectangle outlined in black containing handwritten cursive script that reads, "Heliotropism-- Sunflowers turn toward the sun as it moves across the sky."] |
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| Day 13 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Guarded," showing a minotaur in a labyrinth. By Ciana Pullen. [Image description: black and white ink drawing with light sepia brown washes in a realistic comic style. A bored naked woman with hairy legs and giant horns sits in a massive armchair reading a magazine and drinking tea. The chair has a shaggy fur hide draped over the seat, bull's hooves for legs, and the front of each arm is studded with a massive taxidermied animal paws (lion? demon?) clutching a human skull. The minotaur has her legs crossed and the magazine which she is thumbing through is balanced on her knee, her legs are crossed and she's absent-mindedly dangling a human skull from her toe by the eye socket like people do with sandals. Her other hand is lazily holding a big tea cup sitting on the arm of the chair. The scene is dramatically uplit from an unseen light source in the bottom right hand corner and a sliver of backlighting. In the upper left background a few corners of the maze are visible and a faraway second minotaur figure is walking, not toward the first minotaur.] |
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| Day 12 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "whale," after a painting by Mary Cassatt. This was my second attempt, at first I sketched out an interior scene of my own invention but it didn't have the right mood and looked too... invented. When I realized I wanted it to have the feel of Mary Cassat's painting, I decided to simply copy the painting and add my whale under the watery floor. I always thought the big blue sofas looked like they were floating in an ocean in the original. [Image description: black and white ink wash painting of a living room with several overstuffed skirted sofas and chairs in it at odd angles. In the chair closest to the viewer sits a little girl, bored and slumped back with her feet dangling. Instead of a floor, there is the surface of water with little ripples. The black shadow of a whale swims through the living room toward the viewer and underneath the chair the child sits on.] |
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| Day 11 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Cruel." By Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. Dip pen and ink. [Image description: a black and white line drawing on a white background. On the left is a large figure that appears as if it's assembled out of several pieces collaged together. It's head is a giant screaming infant head, it has one naked beefy arm and muscular pectoral clenched in a fist, its body and other arm is in a black cartoonish business suit, and one of its feet is a white foot in a sandal that looks like a Roman sculpture. To its right on the bottom of the page is a black square with a small upside-down figure drawn inside with its extremities extending outside of the black frame. It has a baby's body and an elephant's head that is turned to look toward the screaming baby figure. Standing en pointe on top of the black square is another figure with a large baby's head (or doll's head) in profile looking calmly at the larger screaming figure, with 5 ballerina legs attached directly to the head. Each leg wears pointe shoes and is lifted in ballet attitude except one which extends down and balances on the black square. Four diagonal lines stretch across the top of the piece over the screaming baby's face and converge in the eye of the ballet feet figure, like rays of light refracting from a prism or lines radiating out from a central point. The overall look of the pieces is clean and graphic.] |
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| Day 10 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Flowing." by Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. Dip pen and ink. [Image description: a black and white line drawing of a bathtub in the middle of some ocean waves, with a person in the bathtub looking out. The waves are medium-large, made up of flowing black lines that are loosely drawn. The bathtub is full of soap foam, with a dollop of foam on the bather's head. Only her head and shoulders are visible as she clutches the bathtub. Her facial expression is dismayed and confused. The bathtub and bather are also somewhat loosely and simply drawn. Above the flat waterline at the horizon near the upper edge of the image are little puffy clouds and a flock of birds.] |
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| Day 8 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Star." by Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. Dip pen and ink. I'm pretty happy with this, but if I had this to do over again (and who knows, maybe I will), I'd make it at least twice as large so that I could get a finer gradation of black and white. I wanted the figures to pop less, to blend into the night sky a little more with the direction and texture of markmaking setting them apart rather than a distinct white outline. I'd also make the faces a little less cartoony. I wanted to capture that wild-eyed look that prey gets in the last seconds before its capture, but instead I got more of a "ruh-roh!" expression. This might be one to try again if I'm ever in a particularly obsessive mood for hours on end. [Image description: Black and white drawing of stars in the night sky. Stars are small white twinkly shapes, while the black space in between is a flowing texture of black lines very close to each other. In the center part of the black space between the stars, a lion is closing in on an antelope. The antelope is running toward the viewer with the lion right behind it, looking back at the lion in horror. Both animals are made of the same linework texture as the rest of the black space. But the eyes, teeth and claws are white.] |
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| Day 7 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Exhausted." I was happy with the previous two drawings, but I felt my actual drawing was too uptight. So for this one I drew laundry because it doesn't need to be exact or precise like a human figure, and tried to just have fun with markmaking. I'm especially happy with the socks on the top and the hem of the jeans on the bottom. By Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. Dip pen and ink. [Image description: black and white line drawing of a teetering pile of folded laundry. Some of it is loose contour drawing, some is a variety of markmaking and patterns.] |
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| Day 5 of Inktober 2018, prompt word "Chicken," by Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros. Ink with dip pen. [Image description: black and white realistic style drawing with shading and crosshatching. The top half is a man's face, turned 3/4 toward shadow and looking back over his shoulder in horror with bulging eyes. The bottom, where a mustache would be, is instead 8 or so human legs attached under his nose, running to the right and away from the viewer, kicking up a cloud of dust.] |
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| The finished portrait of painter Berthe Morisot, by Ciana Pullen. |
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| The original photo of Morisot that I worked from. I also looked at other photos of her over her life to get a better idea of what she looked like, since I had to fill in and make sense of a low resolution image. |
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| A detail of the shoulder. I like the texture of the erased lines. |
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| Detail of the face and hand. |
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| Detail of the fringed blanket. The blanket didn't exist in the original photo but the composition needed something black in that shape. I suppose I could have made it anything; a backpack, a roofing shingle, a large sheet of nori. But I went for the obvious. The fringe was fun, especially the white spaces between the threads which took on an unexpected stained glass effect. |
