Kesa's emo art -like stuff

[KesaYomi]

Ummmm, this seems all too show-offy and self flattering, but then, maybe other people collect pics on the internet, and some might find a use for this. And, after all, I AM an exhibitionist ! :D
so ---

______________



Some drawings I did a few years ago for a story I made up :


A birthday card I did for a friend :





A poster I did that groups all my favorite Egyptian Goddesses or their name cartouches in one place:


Unfortunately, as I got older, my hands shake really bad and hurt a lot now. So I don't draw much. Instead, I'm a GIMP fiend. The following are various things I gimped up from various images I collected or used from around the internet . So of course it's not all original , just the way I put things together ----

A poster I did for a friend , the themes come from the game Dawn of war :


A book cover I did for an AAR . ( I wish I could show you a picture of a Gimped-up Empress Audrey, but, alas, it was nude. so no postin that )


I really like to make.....advertisements . :P Don't ask me why. These are some advertising posters :


My signature of course ! you can see it in my profile, but hey, why not ? :


Hmmm , yes, I know it doesn't look realistic. It wasn't supposed to. It was supposed to look pretty :


I wanted to see what Artsy's latest avatar looked like in a dress, so :


A frozen frame from a Vonage commercial. I wanted to see her made up like an upper class woman of ancient Greece. I thought their manner of dress and makeup was really exotic :


Now for some Wow stuff --

Cheerleading and Wow ; what's not to like ? :


celebratory dance when I earned Exalted Champion of Undercity in Argent tournament :

[kreotis]

You need to stop using GIMP and acquire Photoshop. Using GIMP only gimps you being able to progress.

[KesaYomi]

More WoW stuff :
Concerning a religious cult I just made up for my own use in-game :




A mixed blood Elf / night elf character of mine before she died and became Forsaken :


Saraprissoxia is supposed to be a minor member of the black dragon flight. I made her up. Just an image that's part of the background story of my blood elf warlock main char :

[Mahati]

Ummmm, this seems all too show-offy and self flattering, but then, maybe other people collect pics on the internet, and some might find a use for this. And, after all, I AM an exhibitionist ! :D
so ---

______________



Some drawings I did a few years ago for a story I made up :

These three. /bow teach me, master. I especially noticed the attention to detail. They almost look like medieval paintings.

[KesaYomi]

These three. /bow teach me, master. I especially noticed the attention to detail. They almost look like medieval paintings.

Gee, someone actually took an interest. :D

Hmmm, not sure I can really teach anybody anything. One reason I have always been a convinced theist is that it definitely seems to me that our talents, or, at least our peculiar obsessions , not sure you can always call it "talent " , DON'T actually COME FROM US. It seems to come from somewhere outside yourself. You don't really direct the pen, so much as the pen directs you. You don't build the house. The as yet un-built house commands you, " build me " and so you must build it , your mind and heart will know no peace until you do. you are something of a puppet. so I'm not sure you can really share completely and usefully something that isn't even really of you.
But I'll tell you what I can, for what good it is worth ?

I never had an art lesson. Such things are generally for affluent people , a small detail affluent people often overlook or discount. It seems to me that often it is not that the poor are stupid or lazy. It's that it is hard to make something out of nothing. My family was -- is -- poor. Indeed , I suppose that was a primary reason I started drawing. All you need is paper, a pen and or pencil, maybe a box of crayola crayons. It's hard to imagine a hobby much cheaper than that.
I've been told before that my art looks medieval , and I would certainly agree. One reason I suppose for that was that I grew up in America , apparently one of the most stridently nationalistic / jingoistic nations around.
What is its culture, what culture does it push at you ? Clear glass, bare concrete, plastic, Big girls with big breasts in bikinis draped over Chevrolet's. That culture clearly has it's merits, but I did not appreciate those fine points at age 5 , and that culture generally repelled me then.

So, in taste , I looked to Europe primarily ----medieval Europe. In everything from architectural styles to typography. It might have been different if I had been raised in Europe, which these days looks really more or less like America. But hey, I've never set foot in Europe, and I certainly didn't appreciate that when I was 8 years old. To me, Europe was Castles and stained glass windows and Gutenberg type.
So, when looking for copies to emulate, I largely ignored much of what was around me and I seeked what I could find of that culture , and copied / emulated it instead.

Another reason I guess it looks medieval is because , as I said , I never had an art lesson. ----consequently I never really learned perspective. I would look at pictures, and try to figure out by myself how the artist accomplished a particular task. And so it had to be . Normally, what adult wants to go the great trouble of explaining or teaching something to a ten year old , unless they get something out of it ? There really are few saints in the world. The easiest to figure out was cartoons ---what is generally now called anime. Flat, two-dimensional simple line drawings , colorized after the fact which tends to give them the effect of depth.
If you see them in plain black and white , you see how actually simple and flat and solitary in context they are. Another thing, both my parents happened to work in the building construction industry. So I saw blueprints every day. Blueprints are also simple, direct, easy to copy. They are meant to be. They certainly were meant to be in the 1970's when I grew up. We didn't have copy machines or scanners then. So it was common practice for blueprints to be copied out by hand .

I never learned perspective adequately though. That escaped my intuition, I couldn't figure it out by myself.
That is to say, to criticize my own work, it tends to be flat and two-dimensional. The transitions from background to foreground tend to be abrupt. One trick I came up with to somewhat disguise this was to fill the picture with detail, so you might not so easily notice that the distance from background to foreground is a bit too abrupt. Another trick ; place a third object between two objects that obscures the ground between the two objects. It ---might --- give the illusion of depth.
Things aren't rounded , or shaded.

Perhaps to some degree to compensate for that , I later went into drawing females almost exclusively. ( I'm female by the way. ) The delicacy , softness, rounded nature of their features was a change from the definite , direct, simple lines of the male.
Here again though , I tended to stick to what I knew , so I drew females with quite narrow hips, flat-chested, as spare as possible. I didn't use as models 20 or 30 year old females, I used 10 to 14 year old models.
That's an exaggeration of the softness and smoothness , but a lot less rounding , depth, and deep shading.

another important thing, I don't think I'm really an artist by temperament or desire. That is, I almost never do art for arts sake. Art is, in my case, a means to another end. For example, I generally don't care much for modern fashion in general. In many cases it's not the taste itself in particular.
It's that apparently the western world got rich, and put the manufacture of clothing on an assembly line basis -----but so that everyone could dress as simply as possible. Generally , even a peasant of a hundred years ago dressed more elaborately than a rich person now. You see this in whats left in musuems. A peasant wore embroidered underwear --it was underwear, nobody would even see it --- to go out and dig ditches.
Anyway, so, quite commonly, I'm not really drawing, I'm designing clothes ---clothes I'm not going to find in any store.

As I said, those pictures were part of a story I dreamed up. Virtually every detail DOES have a purpose and a motive for being there . The details are deliberately placed there.
It would be another wall of text to go through it all , so I'll just cover briefly the middle picture.

The story is that it is the year 2171. Human beings are almost extinct. They have been replaced by a species , the Latin name of which is Apis Fomera ; " Smoking Bees " . You can see for yourself what they generally look like. The average height is 4 foot 9 inches. They look, superficially, like 12 year old human females. There is only one sex, really no sex. Each regiment needs X -number of troops , and they are manufactured in labs.
" Test tube babies ". By an organization called RUSHA , who wear pink uniforms and are known by the nick-name , " Flamingos " . It's not a perfect system, actually the regiments are chronically under-staffed. Or there are more than they need . Life is really very hard. The economy has long been moribund and stagnant. In america for example, there are more trees than people , there are wolves in the woods in Connecticut. Average life-expectancy is 45.
It's a world-wide Empire , the main capitol is Prague , in Bohemia, in Europe.
Anyway, they live communally in what are a bit like Army regiments , in camps , collections of large buildings that look like or remind you strongly of castles or prisons. These camps typically have as their central showpiece a library / museum. This is an example. You can see a fragment of another part of the camp out the window. A big status symbol today is a car, a big status symbol in their world is a mechanical clock.
So these libraries typically feature one or more fancy clocks. This is a copy of John Harrison's first Marine chronometer . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison
Their libraries / museums tend to feature exhibits that try to make the point that their extermination of humans was a natural progression of things. So , lots of fossil exhibits . Naturally I put in the picture two of my favorites ; a skeleton of Pteranodon , and a skull of Gigantopithecus.
The persons in the picture are Census Enumerators , persons whose job is travelling around counting stuff. Basically accountants. They are comparatively "upper class " , though there really is no social status . You aren't given a job because you want it. The "better " (? ) jobs don't result in better housing, better feeding, or being treated better. They got the name " smoking Bees " originally from humans because they reminded humans in their character of Bees , and an odd typical characteristic of them is that while there is no drunkenness or other drug abuse among them , they are typically heavy tobacco smokers. It's often easier to find cigarettes than food. Cigarette manufacture is very high priority in the Empire.
Anyway, manner of dress typically reflects job or role, like uniforms. I won't go into what every detail of dress means. Generally , they are dressed up in fancy , but informal , dress , except for the girl on the far left.
Her full lace dress and the gold net in her hair fastened with coins indicates high rank. And the girl in the plain brown jumper is of course dressed in a most basic informal style. Really how they would be commonly dressed just sitting around in barracks washing the floor or doing other light chores.

On second thought, I'll say a few things about the first and third pictures. In the first picture, you see that RUSHA has played around a little with genetics. They've made unicorns, and they brought the Ivory Billed Woodpecker back from extinction. Also made a tree with blue leaves .
The third picture : Afghanistan is one of the few places that still has any sizable population of humans. World-wide they constantly prepare for war --- except there isn't actually anyone present to fight. It's more like a mystical ritual. ( and a terrible economic drain )
There is actually fighting in Afghanistan , other parts of central Asia, and the Amazon. But it's largely show.
It's tanks and muskets versus bows and arrows and captured muskets. Tanks and muskets ? Except for genetics, pretty much all their technology is what they borrowed from humans. Their strength is togetherness selflessness, and ruthlessness, not creativity or individuality.
The story was actually a first-person autobiography ( much like the diary of Anne Frank ) by a 13 year old Kurdish human female captured in Afghanistan and spared because she had red hair, and was very petite in build ---much like them . Red hair is something of a fetish among them . They even wear red wigs when they aren't red-heads. She was shipped over to the mountains of North Carolina in america, and is kept by an Imperial regiment as a sort of pet / living museum exhibit.
Interesting, but quite emotionally draining to write, so much so I never finished it. It made me cry.
She loves them ( who else would she love ? there is nobody else ) but of course is absolutely terrified of them.
Ironically their society is so communally close its like drowning in a sea of love. It's utterly pervasive, ubiquitous, total and enveloping. BUT , of course, there is no option but complete conformity which comes to them naturally, but not to her, and privacy is zero. Indeed, they don't really understand the concept of privacy. You may , for example, see one sleeping in the middle of an office where others are working, and they just step over her / work around her.
She is writing her story because they ordered her to. She is afraid when she finishes she will be killed and stuffed and put on display. They have discussed doing so in front of her , while caressing her hair no less.
Her great hope is that they will see more value in keeping her as a pet , that she will conform well enough to be almost excepted as one of them.
So, I guess, it's sort of like a love story ---between serial killer and potential victim / captive. And it's all about the most terrible kind of isolation.
So, yeah, hard to write emotionally, if that makes sense.
Anyway, the fighting is largely show, they go in , kill a few humans, take lots of pictures , plaster it all over the weekly General reports ( like Newspapers ) . But don't kill them off completely. They leave enough to keep the show going. It's really more a low-level hunt than a war.

Ekk, this is already a wall of text.
But I'm not known for brevity I'm afraid. And you ---apparently --- asked . so....

Oh, and I found another picture in that series :

[kreotis]

Work on anatomy

[yuffie030]

I love the artwork, it has lots of detail in it, I wish I could do something at least half as good as your work ._.

[Mercy]

Work on anatomy

Something tells me that Kesa wasn't aiming for realistic proportions.

Where were these screenshots taken?

[Artsy]

Most likely the Argent Tournament Grounds. There are mini tunnels where statues as such could be found unless I'm mistaken.

[Mercy]

I had forgotten about those. Thank you.

[Mahati]

Amazing. I actually red your WHOLE reply on the topic, and as a fellow "artist" and "writer", i must say that the setting in which your story and drawings take place is absolutely original and awe inspiring.
I have a feeling that you know your history and politics, therefore you are capable of writing legit stories without messing with the system.

Congratz on leaving such a good impression on me. It doesn't happen a lot.