Post Apocalypse

My new animated adventure called "Post-Apocalypse" is now under design and construction. Post-Apocalypse will be a surreal and allegoric world full of fantastic and utopian/dystopian situations, creatures, puzzles and places! The basic character's appearance has been inspired from Dahm's "Rice Boy", however the concept, the story and the deliverable outcome is not at all related to the comic series. Since I am an amateur artist and have no previous experience from comics construction, I decided to provide a very simplistic texture all over it; from time to time, two dimensional formations limit the perspective of the reader. However, the colorful contrasts and the symbolic temptations bring Post-Apocalypse to another level of meditation. My intention: to make the reader wonder right from the first comic strip! I hope to complete one chapter of "Post-Apocalypse" sometime during 2012! The world, the settings and the landscapes are inspired from Yves Tanguy mode of painting. Here I will be sharing 3 random strips!

Dream Complex

This is a watercolor painting, completed in Toronto during winter of 2010-2011 and is termed as "dream complex". Being illustrated through dark-pale green and blue, this painting is characterized by a pessimistic cliche background, most probably oriented in a waterworld environment. I wasted lots of colors to achieve such dark and color-rich areas at the level of the horizon, since watercolor is generally less condense.

The cave depicted on the right has been described as also demonstrating and illustrating an alive entity, with the upper tunnels as "eyes" and the lower bigger tunnel entrance as "mouth". The two figures on the left seem to even be erotically intertwined or fighting for dominance to each other.

I was quite skeptical and tortured by certain things, when I drew this.

This painting has been incorporated in the series "the mote in mother's eye".

River from "The Mote in Mother's Eye"

This is one of the pretty much early works of mine, belonging to a larger series of works called "The Mote in Mother's Eye". In contrast to the series "Monsters and Constructions" which included paintings with alien objects that were well-circumscribed, this series has works that depict a surrealistic and abstract view of nature in a more free form.

Still, I always like giving a fake representation even to real concepts like mountains, cliffs and rivers, as shown here. If for example someone notices the sky, he will immediately realize that I used very strange colors that they are absent from realism-paintings that the sky is drawn. Also, it is evident sometimes that colors within the sky change very drastically, without a smooth gradient applied there, giving the impression that the sky is not real but there is a canvas behind the mountain.

Another deliberate misconception applied in this painting is the disorientation of the theoretical light source. If someone notices the small cliffs on both sides of the river, the lighter brown on the left side of the mountain, as well as, the lighter sky colors on the left side of the painting, he/she could easily tell that the sun is probably on the left side of the paintingthrowing light over these objects from a big angle (around 60-70 degrees). However, the beams of light seem to have obtained a totally different direction, as well as being hidden behind smog, as shown in the upper right corner of the sky.

The work is entitled "river" and is the first of this series.

Snow - My new comic strips!

This is my new comic series entitled "Snow". "Snow" deals with the disturbed human mentality, the daily routine that leads to isolation and loneliness, the depression, the futility of participating in the happiness of single moments and finally the disrespect to novel innovations and ideas that bring our civilization back to darker eras. The characters of this series are: a) an oldy rusty TV thrown in the snow, but still in power, b) a fat bird and c) snowy the snowman; they all represent a pessimistic and distorted perspective of the real meaning of life's surprises. Although surreal to a certain extent, "snow" deals with the realistic feelings and pains that we receive from stimuli of our network and environments.

I am giving below 2 out of the 15 strips I created.

God sent an angel to bring love, down to Earth

This frottage work with pencil only is entitled as "God sent an angel to bring love, down to Earth", represents one of the numerous attempts to make use of sets of coins, compact discs and pencils under a soft piece of A4 paper!

Mouse - Digital Spraying

This work has been accomplished in Microsoft Office "draw" and belongs to a series of works, appointed with the name "digital spraying". Actually, the reason for naming this series that way, is that only the tool "spray" was used to draw these pictures. All the lines are free style, no prefixed shapes have been used to complete the drawing.

The name of this drawing is "mouse".

It took no longer than 2-3 hours to draw it as well as some cups of hot black coffee, sitting against a window at my room, in a cold Greek night, along with some potentially-forgotten memories of my pre-Toronto life.

Bereaucracy

This is another work belonging to the series "Monsters and Constructions".

I came up with this idea, while waiting in an endless queue of people, as a student to receive some confirmation documents in a public agency in Greece.

In terms of technique, this was my first work in which I tried to create a sky gradient using three different colors instead of one conventional one (like blue or yellow sky as before). In this attempt, one can notice several mistakes on the painting, but it eventually got accepted by me (and others later on)!

After all, when it comes to mistakes, we are confident that they belong to us!

Rational Discrimination

One of my early works, also belonging to the "Monsters and Constructions" series.

I initially named this painting "Three Random Encounters and Two Random Birds", but I decided to eventually name it "Rational Discrimination".

This was a small attempt to create a sunset gradient for the sky.

Our House

One of my very early works called "Our House", being included in my first painting series named "Monsters and Constructions". At that point (and even now) I was greatly influenced by surreal artist Yves Tanguy, so I put myself into painting what was described as "alien creations and objects randomly placed in distinct and deserted landscapes". These objects seemed to have no meaning or hidden message, but came as an automatic schematic representation of thoughts and emotions of the given time.

To date, many people have been trying to match the title of this work with what they actually see... and they came up with the conclusion that this gargantuan white structure represents actually our very first house; our common house; the one that brought us to this planet; to this earth. This is a very very touching point of view for this work, indeed. Thank you for this colorful and meaningful interpretation to all of you!

I am astoundingly fond of such interpretations!

There Is Not!

"There is not!" represents my first attempt into watercolor painting; although it is rather simplistic, I like it very much and it is true that it has drawn quite much attention to the people. When I came up with the idea behind "There is not!", I wished to test the watercolor techniques in making different layers with the colors; thus I wanted to only draw the gradient in a sky and in a soil and nothing more. Then I thought to put two columns on it and some shadows....

The idea behind "There is not!" doesn't have any controversy as yet; many people tell me that it's impossible for the shadows to exist unless the true objects exist... since the wheel does not exist, then the gigantic monster doesn't necessarily exist. We do tend to create shadows; from our lives, from our pasts, from our futures; and usually these are very dark-scary and monstrous shadows.

This is the first of a series of works that are included in a collection named: "Monsters and Constructions"