GazeAndStare

Audrey Kawasaki On Board

Love her work. Been feeding off her beautiful work for a long time now.

Taken off Ms. Audrey’s website. Her bio.

The themes in Audrey Kawasaki’s work are contradictions within themselves. Her work is both innocent and erotic. Each subject is attractive yet disturbing. Audrey’s precise technical style is at once influenced by both manga comics and Art Nouveau. Her sharp graphic imagery is combined with the natural grain of the wood panels she paints on, bringing an unexpected warmth to enigmatic subject matter.

The figures she paints are seductive and contain an air of melancholy. They exist in their own sensually esoteric realm, yet at the same time present a sense of accessibility that draws the observer to them. These mysterious young women captivate with the direct stare of their bedroom eyes.

She has been rocking hard at numerous art shows and it seems she is getting the recognition she deserved. I would be hard pressed if I was asked to pick out my favorite piece. Her artwork was chosen by Gelaskins (the people who makes protective covers for your beloved iPods)

Check out Aud’s online journal to see what she has been up to recently. You might find something like this.

Wall Street Journal - Stipple/Hedcut Illustration

For those of you who reads Wall Street Journal or even glanced through it before, you will definitely be greeted by stipple potraits. The Wall Street Journal utilizes the detailed art in their articles and personally every one of it, is beautiful. The two artists responsible for bringing the art of stippling or hedcut illustration to thousands of readers daily are Randy Glass and Noli Novak.

Randy Glass’s work - Website

Noli Novak’s work - Website

Stipple/Hedcut Via Wikipedia

Stippling is the technique of using small dots to simulate varying degrees of solidity or shading.

In a drawing or painting, the dots are made of pigment of a single color, applied with a pen or brush; the denser the spacing of the dots, the darker the apparent shade — or lighter, if the pigment is lighter than the surface. This is similar to - but distinct from - pointillism, which uses dots of different colors to simulate blended colors.

In printmaking, dots may be carved out of a surface to which ink will be applied, to produce either a greater or lesser density of ink depending on the printing technique. In engraving, the technique was invented by Giulio Campagnola in about 1510. Stippling may also be used in engraving or sculpting an object even when there is no ink or paint involved, either to change the texture of the object, or to produce the appearance of light or dark shading depending on the reflective properties of the surface: for instance, stipple engraving on glass produces areas that appear brighter than the surrounding glass.

The technique became popular as a means of producing shaded line art illustrations for publication, because drawings created this way could be reproduced in simple black ink. The other common method is hatching, which uses lines instead of dots. Stippling has traditionally been favored over hatching in biological and medical illustration, since it is less likely than hatching to interfere visually with the structures being illustrated (the lines used in hatching can be mistaken for actual contours), and also since it allows the artist to vary the density of shading more subtly to depict curved or irregular surfaces.

Images produced by halftoning or dithering and computer printers operate on similar principles (varying the size and/or spacing of dots on paper), but do so via photographic or digital processes rather than manually. These newer techniques have made it possible to convert continuous-tone images into patterns suitable for printing, but artists may still choose stippling for its simplicity and handmade appearance. The Wall Street Journal features stippled portraits known as hedcuts in its pages, as part of its long-standing avoidance of photographs.