Milla

I'm a pretty big fan of Milla Jovovich, but I've not drawn her very often, I think it's been twice, including the drawing that I'm going to show off now.

This is my reference:

This is the end result:

I used two pencils, a mystery pencil and a 3B Faber Castell pencil. The mystery pencil, is a mystery pencil, because it has no information about what it is on it, it's yellow like a Mongol 2, but the graphite feels silkier and I also had no issue drawing over it with the 3B, like it has happened with the Mongol.
It was also considerably dark, when I applied pressure, it was rather nice. So nice, that I considered finishing the drawing with the mystery pencil. HOWEVER, I only have that one mystery pencil and I have no idea what it is, for me to get another one, so that was stressing me out a little bit lol!

Since my reference leaves out a fourth of her head, I decided to leave that part really sketchy and have the face and part of the hair real proper detailed, 'cuz I thought it would be cool and fun and it turned out very cool! =D

I drew on a Strathmore drawing book, smooth surface, 80lbs paper, 11 x 14 inches.

ALSO, I mentioned Milla at some point, with a progress shot of the drawing AND SHE REPLIED TO ME and that's how she made my entire month/year/probably life. So I screencapped that shit, posted in everywhere, retweeted it and then I exploded. So here's the screencap, because it's related.


I also mentioned her with a picture of the finished drawing, but she didn't reply to that one. I can't imagine how many times she gets mentioned lol

So now that I've shown that off, remember my Facebook page, which you should seriously like and share with your friends if you haven't yet: Gabriela Handal Arte

Thank you for reading, guys!

Somebody that I used to know

I heard this song and saw the video for the first time two days ago and I was immediately reminded of an ex-lover. Specially, the part where he says that she now treats him like a stranger and how she's now somebody that he used to know.
Break ups are seldom easy, and a person that you were amazingly close to at some point, becomes precisely a stranger. I like to think that when there is a break up for genuine reasons, there is no right or wrong, either party has the right to feel however way they might feel. The song shows both perspectives of a breakup, neither one is right or wrong, they just are.
Now I'm going to try to talk/write about what I like in this video and song, which is difficult, because I absolutely fucking LOVE every single thing about the video and the song. The song in general is mellow, but it manages to be really intense.
I'm not one to claim that I *know* what art is, so this might be an iffy statement, but I love how ARTISTIC this video is. What with the body painting, the merging with the background wall, the painting of the background wall itself, the fact that I feel that both singers are doing a performance and an installation, rather than just performing the song. The colors, the stop motion of the painting, the presence of degradation of color.
I LOVE what a good job both singers do at conveying the emotions and feelings of the song. The guy, very genuinely hurt, serious, raising his eyebrows, staring sincerely into the camera, with crazy huge, beautiful eyes. When he raises his voice to sing, the frown in between the eyebrows, he opens his mouth wide, maybe in desperation, channeling the need to scream out the sadness. I love his teeth, I love his fucked up teeth and how they just take over his face, when he opens his mouth to sing, but only peek through shyly, when he doesn't open it much, how the huge canines push through to give his mouth that shape.
Kimbra does an amazing job, what I like the most of what she does is when she gets close to him and she's done singing and does the vocalizations with a frustrated face, she knows he doesn't understand and isn't willing to try. She opens her mouth wide, almost clenches her teeth afterwards with frustration, looks down. Also at the end of the video, when she's slowly unpainted, I guess, that's when she stops being somebody he knew, she's different now.
I like how truthful it is to the break up situation. The way they look at each other at the end of the video, with resignation.
I've done you and myself the favor of screencapping a couple of shots of this dude's crazy gorgeous face and a screencap of his awesome teeth.

Sunspots

Warning: This entry is kind of longwinded. Sry.
I'm pretty enamored with Nine Inch Nails (and Trent Reznor, as well, no doubt) lately and I've been channeling that in different ways. One of the ways, was the "Closer" drawing, for example.
It's difficult not to idolize him and the music, but I guess it's also easy to do, when you don't know jackshit about somebody. But that's completely besides the point, this isn't about my thoughts on NIN, it's about the most recent channel.
The most recent channel, was a mental image that I had of "Sunspots", which is a ridiculously sexy song, in my opinion. The song, as I've read here and there, is about heroin, like "With Teeth", and it's referred to as a seductive woman. This is because Trent was a junk addict for a good while.
I think one of the oldest memories I have that refer to heroin, is a documentary that I saw, where I very clearly remember this dude injecting some shit that looked like tar right into his neck. So, heroin's always been some kind of tar substance for me and after looking up the appearance of heroin, there is a kind of heroin called "black tar heroin". Which works perfect for what I had in mind.
Also, according to what little I've read about heroin and what I learned about it from "Trainspotting", the high from heroin is absolute pleasure, a kind of orgasmic, sexual pleasure. So I guess it makes sense for it to be thought of as a sexual and seductive woman, if you're a dude or just somebody that likes women in general.
The lines from the song "She turns me on/she makes it real/I have to apologize/For the way I feel", kind of stand out, even though my favorite line from the song probably is "peel off our skin we're going to burn what we were to the ground/Fuck in the fire and we'll spread all the ashes around". So these pictures revolve around the four lines from the chorus and correspond kind of as the title for each of the four pictures.
My mental image is a jet-black woman/creature type, and the pictures are a progression: The moment when you see her passive, the moment when she sees you, the moment when she's seducing you and the moment when there's some sort of inexplicable pleasure.
She's not meant to be necessarily beautiful, she's meant to be a strange and intimidating personification of heroin. There is also a progression in the poses in the pictures, she starts by looking down and her head progressively looks up, up to the last picture. I wanted the pictures to be as symmetric as possible, but for the last two, I didn't like how it looked with the face being full front. It was much nicer to look at with a 3/4 angle.
So it can be said, in a way that this is what "Sunspots" looks like to me, kind of my interpretation of the song. My personal interpretation, which could be wrong, but that doesn't matter to me.

The photographer is Jose Esteban, that's a link to his Facebook page, where you can see more of his really cool work. He offered to collaborate with me in this idea and was super great to work with.