Our Chosen Instrument - #8 - Claudia Pomowski

Claudia Pomowski is a graphic designer for book design and illustration who has embraced many disciplines to become a cutting edge in her own field of graphics. 

She is interested in the narrative elements of arts and in the interplay between texts and images. Apart from drawings and graphics, collages currently constitute her preferred means of artistic expression. This freelance artist and lecturer lives near Trier, Germany. Claudia teaches colour design and communication at Trier University of Applied Sciences. She combines "form and colour", "drawing generic perception", "typography" and "sound editing" and her students develop both the theory and practical skills to expand their areas of expertise. (Please note that I have translated from a German website with Google translator, so any mistakes are mine and Google).

Claudia Pomowski - http://www.c-pom.de/

Her work can be found on various social media platforms including Art Stack, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter as well as her own website.

Exquisite Corpse Panel 4

In our first regular art project, the collected creatives who use the Blackwing pencil, we bring you the fourth panel by the digital artist, Giuseppe Lama. Giuseppe shows his work on different sites across the web, have a look at his past stuff at Pinterest, Facebook, Behance and his own website. Giuseppe very kindly shows us his process for his Exquisite Corpse panel in a series of shots, before he reveals the final piece. 

Giuseppe lets us into his thinking behind his Exquisite Corpse piece: "I wasn't too sure how to continue the visual narrative of the theme after the previous panels so I decided to take a few key elements from those panels and just give them my own twist. The image is a blend, if you like, of Simon's woman (female bust), Bart's holed wing (the hole in her stomach) and the reptiles very loosely themed to your crocodile, all in one big anthropomorphic monster. The statue-like reference is there to represent the idea of a fetish/symbol of our Exquisite Corpse. The vaguely Corinthian-like capital from which she emerges reminded me of the Greek caryatids in Athens, just to reinforce the idea of a cold piece of marble... Don't ask me why I didn't do any preliminary sketches, I just went for it and "took a line" for a wander on that very same piece of paper

As for the technique, as I mentioned there was a lot of smudging, then pencil shading on top of it, then erasing to obtain areas of light, then repeat the process over and over until I got the smoothness I was looking for.

I hadn't done anything like this for a very long time, last recorded time I did was back in 1999 and produced this: 

(Do have a look at these other images at the link above, they really quite spectacular and spooky - Ed). 

So you can tell my style hasn't really changed or progressed since... One thing I can tell you for sure is that I really had a lot of fun doing it again!

This piece promotes the Blackwing as an extension to, what we presume, Medusa's hairstyle - where snakes, hair follicles and feathers vie for attention. As Giuseppe states on his website, "Religion and pagan rituals coexist to this day, in a chaotic blend of surreal beliefs where messages from the dead are still coming to us in our dreams." It adds so many motifs, classical mythology, sculpture and maybe a hint of Henry Moore's internal spaces. But I leave it to you to make your own mind up, but don't look Medusa straight in the face otherwise you may turn into stone.

It will be interesting to see where Tim goes next with his Exquisite Panel. 

Exquisite Corpse Panel 3

In our first regular art project, the collected creatives who use the Blackwing pencil, we bring you the third panel by the artist and photographer, Simon Newbury. Simon shows his work on different sites across the web, have a look at his past stuff at Pinterest, Facebook and his own website. See if you can find the past echoes of the previous panels.

Exquisite Corpse Panel 3

Simon says about his portrait, "I wanted to continue the narrative and was inexplicably drawn to the  hole in the wing of Bart's winged man. Unsure of the significance of the hole but with the theme of Blackwing, I had to include it, to look through it and wanted to see someone gazing back in sadness at this void and the wing's inevitable uselessness." He used both the Blackwing and the Blackwing 602. Who will be next? Did you find the echo from the first panel? Crocodile Tears.