art

[egypturnash]

"I have occasionally kicked around the idea of doing a coffee table-style book: The History Of Furry Porn." - ursulav
"Dude. This is a perfect opportunity for a group effort. I think Arphalia and me are going to have to battle it out for the Noveau-era porn..." - me
"(link to glamorous noveau porn drawn a few hours later)" - arphalia
"(draws this)" - me

(excerpted from comments on this friends-only entry in pseudomanitou's LJ)


The Seduction of a Metaphor
(bandwidth:vcl)

This is the first time I've done a finished piece with outlines in forever. You really have to have outlines to nail the Art Noveau Hair, and having strong outlines printed in a color besides black is also good for a lot of points of Noveauness.

In case you haven't noticed yet, I like raccoons. They're the only kind of critter I have more than one example of as an active character I play on a muck, unless you count the two sequential variations of a crazy butterfly. This does not mean that any girl raccoon I draw is Me, though this one has much the same arrangement of sexual characteristics I do. I have a nicer ass, though.

The sketch started out as a cheetah, for no immediately obvious reason, and got revised into a raccoon. Weird.

(Addendum, May 27: removed from DA. OH NO PORN. *shrug*)

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the mechanical precision of my work is more Deco than Noveau. They're interrelated, and there's a lot of hidden Noveau in my work. Mardi Gras in the seventies was chock full of Noveau, after all, and WInsdor McCay's very Noveau Little Nemo was an early addiction.

And... it's such a tempting idea, isn't it? Porn Through History.

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

See below. The background, especially, on this piece reminds me of some of the retro comic artists that seem to be referring to old printing processes -- Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan stuff is a big one. Very precise and orderly, not quite Deco but it puts me in mind of 1930's newspaper illustration for some reason. What you have going here doesn't strike me as quite florid enough to be pure Nouveau -- in my very limited knowledge of art history -- but it's a nice hybrid and I'd love to see you do more in this style.

Besides, it'll keep you from doing something nasty like a Daniel Clowes or Peter Bagge homage -- although I will note that if you did an anarchopunk riff, like Seth Tobocman or Winston Smith or Peter Kuper, Rik would probably [brings you in close and whispers lurid details] until you [mumble mumble mumble] and had to do laundry again.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's somewhere in between. Keep in mind that my biggest conscious Nouveau-slightly-Deco influence is Winsdor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland (the strip ran from 1095 to 1914), which was definitely Newspaper Illustration. I'm aware of Mucha's tropes as the Incarnation of Art Nouveau; the only one I really used was the hair. And yeah, it needs more flowers and vines and stuff. I'm just not enough of a plant-lover to really do Nouveau properly. My initial mental image of the big abstract element included more overtly-floral elements, but it got lost somewhere in the process. I don't know if I'll do much more in this method; using outlines feels like a step backwards in my artistic journey, even when they're an integral part of the image's design.

I have this giant tome of the whole strip's run, too giant to really wrestle with to scan excerpts. Someday you will see it, because McCay is, quite possibly, one of the first artists I was conscious of Being Influenced By. Maybe I should throw it into the suitcase when I come out for Anthrocon...

And there is no way I'd do a Bagge rip! I find all his drawings to be ugly, and unpleasant to look at.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Here, I've done a furry parody of Peter Bagge (http://www.conmicro.cx/~kturtle/misc/furrybagge.gif). Now nobody else in the world will ever have to do one!

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Going back and reexamining the original pic, I've decided I really love that particular style, and I might be forced at some point to keep you captive in my apartment for a month or longer, while you are given/deprived of regular croppings until we complete a psychedelic romantic science-fantasy in this look together...

In short: coongirl needs airships. Coongirl WANTS airships. And a maid with three eyes to provide "local color." And outfits that would make Barbarella howl. You can just see it in her eyes.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I might be forced at some point to keep you captive in my apartment for a month or longer

Okay!

until we complete a psychedelic romantic science-fantasy

Mmm. You can provide story and encouragement and Certain Distractions. And spankings and Certain Rewards. What does coongirl do in this world of the Future of the Early Nineteen Hundreds, modulo the dreams and hopes of denizens of the Early Two Thousands? Does she have a name, a Secret Goal? Does she ever need a gun?

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Well, how do we reconcile the two of her? How does she get from a scattered, gloating miscreant to an elegant, serene seductress?

I think she's some kind of thief on the Arsene Lupin/Raffles/Rififi model. She eventually gets embroiled in the byzantine interdimensional politics of her world and becomes a secret agent, in something more like the Cate Archer/Modesty Blaise/Emma Peel mode. She's been known to carry a gun, but she's never needed to fire anything but warning shots. She usually conceals a knife on her person -- you don't even want to know where and how, given how she's dressed -- but it usually just hacks through ropes, which seem to end up around her wrists with uncanny frequency.

No ideas about names, but this is a great resource. Something central European? I'd try "Arsenne," because I like the faint cognate with "arsenic," but that'd be too obvious.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I think the very different finishing styles might reflect inner mental states in the character. Or very different states of the world. I've seen people do this to great effect now and then, though almost never in mainstream comics, and I can't think of any examples offhand... I think you'd probably find several in Matt Howarth's work, and you'd likely find more than a few in Sam Kieth's comics, as well. Something's happening in the newer image, either internally or externally.

Fragment I drew last night. Just fooling around and thinking on the artboard. I might do it up and see how quickly I can finish stuff in variant styles with very very simple color harmonies.

Also I thought about it last night and ended up doing worldbuilding rather than character stuff: if her world is the Floating Rocks, I nominate it being an orbital environment, possibly a Smoke Ring, possibly a big bubble of air. That seems like a pleasant place to have retrotech adventures. Although it kinda doesn't work with the Modernist Mega-Architecture thing; little chunks of rock only give room for modest cities, at best. But it does offer lots of opportunities for zeppelins.

Thief/agent kinda works. It might be a little too much playing into the common stereotype of the raccoon in furry fandom as a kleptomaniac prone to conspiracy for its own sake, but I'm not aware of anyone who's done that much with it outside of how they play one on a mu*. And it offers opportunities for all kinds of exotic locales and visual approaches.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

late-night notes. yes, high-end thief with morals works for me.

I did an IM scene with ovon involving her and a high-ranking person on the Other Side who'd just caught her red-handed: she was quite polite about it and let him(? we never even quite pinned that down) cuff her and threaten her most deliciously. they implied this was far from the first time this'd happened, to the point of her making a bet on when she'd manage to escape, after a week or two of being "tortured" and "punished". she's such a show-off that she casually picked the lock holding her hands behind her head, caressed him, then locked herself back up.

the officer/miscreant romance is far from an original element in this sort of tale, but it certainly makes for fun banter. so there's a possible recurring character... a spymaster on another side of politics, who she always seems to get captured by and always manages to escape from, after a few weeks.

sex stays just off-screen, i think. the erection-and-gown drawing might never appear. but insinuating she's a total pervert is fine by me! (i'm not too comfortable with the idea of doing a sex comic...) i wonder if her genitals will ever be a story point, with sex firmly off-camera...