Kat Johnston

Tag: favourite

  • Announcement: Oh. My. God. My Zombie Jeebus is a tattoo. A real one!

    Kat Johnston: My Zombie Jeebus is a tattoo! A real tattoo on a real person! Thanks, David, for getting this done - I'm stoked.

    I was contacted just a few days back with a request:

    “Kat – would you be OK with me getting a tattoo of your Zombie Jeebus. I know it is unlikely you would ever find out but I would feel shitty if I got it done without at least asking permission from the artist!”

    My response was an instant ‘Hell Yeah!’ quickly followed by a ‘But please send me a picture so I can put it up on the site, ok? I wanna see it!’

    Talk about being stoked – I love my Zombie Jeebus, and the fact that someone would want him on them for life is just awesome to me.

    Well, a few days have passed, and David (hope you don’t mind that I’ve used your first name here) has gotten tattooed – apparently this was the quickest he’s ever gone between seeing something, immediately knowing he wanted it as a tattoo, and getting it done. I’m really flattered.

    Just in case you’ve come in late and want to see the originals, Zombie Jeebus was first found in the post ‘Zombie Jeebus wants You!‘ then quickly followed up with a touch of colour in “What to do if faced with a Zombie Jeebus‘. The tattooist did a great job of converting it to ink on flesh, don’t you think?

    Thanks for asking to get Zombie Jeebus as a tattoo, David. Your email with the photo of the finished tattoo today just made my day.

  • A few of my favourites… but certainly not all.

    So it just so happens that I had an interview today, and because I was rushing out the door, I didn’t have the chance to grab any images of some of my more decent drawings or paintings. As a result, I gave a link to this site. Sooo, to make it easier to navigate through the loads and loads of pictures here (because I haven’t got the gallery section up and running again), I’m going to put just a few of my favourite images up in this post, ranging from a few paintings to some of my sketches. So… here we go!

    Kat Johnston Art: A little further progressed… and still untitled.

    My most recent completed painting, this one just blows me away… I love it to utter bits. Originally, it was meant to be completed in colour, however when the black and white was mostly completed, I realized that it was just not destined for that. This painting was completed in gouache on canvas, and finished with a semi-gloss varnish. The piece is called ‘Escape of the Nubian Contessa’.

    ‘Rat King’ 2

    A painting still in progress, this one is ‘The Rat King’, though it is quite possible that the name will change by the time it is actually completed. Again, gouache on canvas, as yet unfinished. My apologies for the quality of this image – I should really retake this photo.

    ‘Miniatures’

    Some miniatures, measuring no more than a couple of inches by a couple of inches. Surprisingly enough, despite the tiny size of these, they remain something that I utterly adore to this day.

    Ok, now onto a few drawings…

    Kat Johnston art – looking at a blank page is hard. Its so full of potential, and -you- have the potential to screw it up. But as the saying goes: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

    This one has a bit of a story. It is entitled “Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia” which is a word a friend and I coined meaning ‘the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper’… in other words, staring at a blank, beautiful, fresh sketchbook and going ‘oh god, I really, really don’t want to ruin it’. Not so surprisingly, I suppose, it is drawn inside a sketchbook… and a nice one at that. Completed in plain, ole-fashioned biro.

    Kat Johnston Art – A book unwritten remains unread. It takes a pen to paper and a risk of failure to make those words take wing. How’s that for a bit of philosophical mumbo-jumbo for you? The unwise owl gets a little sense, perhaps?

    Another from the same sketchbook, even. This is an image of ‘The Unwise Owl’, which means a fair amount to me, but perhaps not to others. Suffice to say, the Unwise Owl believes he is wise, yet does not realize until it is too late that this may not be so. He was the basis of a little childrens’ story I wrote.

    Kat Johnston Sketch – this is maggie… I was testing out a new pen.

    “Maggie’ is the name of this lovely lady. This  picture was just drawn quickly, to test out a new and wonderful ink pen, however the results went above and beyond what I could have wished for. Working with different mediums is just so incredibly fulfilling – I can take a break from one, switch to another, and when I come back to the first I have a whole new take on how I can work with it, too.

    Ok… that should do! At least for now. Unfortunately, posting a picture of every favourite image I have here would take a long time, and just be silly. Clicking on the tag ‘favourite’ for this post, however, will bring up a wider list of the sketches posted here that I love the most. Hopefully I’ll get the job (cross fingers, everybody), and if I have to resort to offering bribery with baked goods, I’m willing to do it. Everyone likes cake, don’t they?

    Regular programming resumes tomorrow… in the meantime, I’m going to try and dig out some of the pictures of jewellery I’ve made, which are buried somewhere on this computer… if I can find them, I’ll throw up a few pictures of those as well.

  • Sketch: Her heart sits upon her collar.

    Kat Johnston SKetch: She held her heart at her collar.

    This picture was drawn last night, alongside a couple of others – each of them displaying a head devoid of the body which may support it. This in itself is not unusual for me: I quite often draw only a face without what lies below it. It is on a slightly rarer occasion where there might be a particular reason why this is so, other than my own sense of laziness.

    One thing that I haven’t drawn a lot of recently is dismembered bodies… quiet with the ‘should you be seeing a psyche?’ thing please! It wasn’t until a few weeks back that the first started to creep back into something I was doing – in this case an armless woman that I really must get around to finishing painting. The lack of arms is carefully masked in such a way as on first look, nothing seems out of sorts… its on the second take in which it hits. These head drawings are far more direct.

    There are two others, which I may post later on, should the mood strike… heads which lack the cleanness of the severing of this one. Its rather amusing to me, actually – each of the last two (of which this is one) bear the sort of ‘craft’ or ‘scrapbooked’ sort of embellishment somewhere on them… in this case, a little hand-sewn heart, the other with a very decorative scolloped edge to the cut.

    Rather a perverse thing to be sketching while chatting away aimlessly and watching others play Risk, huh?

  • Sketch: Box kitteh sez ‘I iz live nao? Wheee! Kibble Plz?’

    Kat Johnston: Box kitteh… Is she alive? Is she dead? You’ll only know if you ignore the ‘do not disturb’ sticker!

    Lord I am tired tonight… and I’m not even entirely sure why. I guess that some days are just long, and when they are, they bear down on you, making you feel worn and weary. That aside though, I’m very happy with my sketch today! A little while back, I did a picture with a scrawled cat… it was the last thing drawn on the sketch and honestly, my favourite part of it. So today, I had another peek at that sketch and thought, ‘yup… I’m going to try this again.’

    I did-so, and today’s picture is the result. It is by little wonder that my picture reminds me so much of my darling Lolita, a little tortie cross who is one of two apples of my eyes. Penny, being the other, is not currently pictured.

    You see, each night before he goes to bed, my dutiful husband does a round of the house. He makes sure that the doors are locked, that the air-conditioning is off (if indeed it were on on the first place), and so on and so forth. One of the other things he does is check to make sure that both cats are around and safe. We have indoor-only cats, and although there is very little chance that they have somehow performed the great escape, it never hurts to check.

    One evening, he does his regular rounds, calling out to the cats to make sure that they are safe and secure like the rest of us. ‘Lolita!’ he calls, ‘Lolita, baby-girl, where are you?’

    This goes on for a couple of minutes… then a couple more. After which, he comes racing down the stairs. ‘I can’t find Lolita!’ he cries, his eyes wide and gripped by a certain paternal fear. ‘Come help me look!’

    Thus, I join the search. From high to low, from top to bottom, in every perceivable nook and cranny we search to discover the missing feline. She had me quite as mystified as she did James. With a rising panic I realize that it does indeed seem that our magnificent moggy had finally discovered a special secret way known only to cats to teleport from one part of the room to another, but further, how to do it to the outside.

    How would she survive? She had no opposable thumbs, no pre-prepared sachets of food designed ‘for pet consumption only’ strapped to her bluish back. She had, of course, wrestled a gecko or two in her day, but that was nothing when put beside the territorial neighbourhood tom.

    With a sigh of resignation and no small measure of puzzlement, we were almost ready to admit our defeat. Our cat had somehow escaped, despite all odds of both means, opportunity and brain-matter. ‘One last time,’ murmurs James. The search begun anew.

    A bare few minutes later, I hear an exuberant cry. ‘She’s in here! I found her! Come look!’ he bellows, motioning frantically, as I approach the downstairs door. There, curled in the bottom of one tall box, lay our cat, quite content to nap while all around her we scramble in search of her. She had not only jumped into the box – she’d pulled the lid closed after her, effectively sealing her off from view in a place we would not think to look. I mean, we know she liked boxes… we just weren’t quite sure she was smart enough to work out how to put up her own little ‘do not disturb’ sign!

    If you’re curious about the title of today’s post, and don’t get it straight away, perhaps you haven’t heard of Schrodiinger’s cat? Go check it out. It’ll boggle your miiiind.

  • Sometimes an idea is a heavy burden to bear.

    This creature peeked forth without my real intervention… I think he’s cute. Talk about a lightbulb moment, huh?

    Ahh, what can I say about this little creature of mine… I did not summon him forth, he crept onto my page of his own accord. I was just going to draw a light-bulb. Ok, ok, perhaps a light-bulb with wings on it. It was not to be.

    You know, sometimes I draw with a purpose in mind, a way I want people to see things… not always, but sometimes. It often isn’t the case with sketches. Sketches seem to be my own little way of just… brainstorming, or working through ideas without actually having to ‘think’ them first. There isn’t the same pressure as doing actual work, since in the end, only I have to see it… unless we are talking about sketching in sketchbooks, which you’ve seen me tippity-type about before at length.

    What is incredibly fun about sketching without much thought, is that if you are me, you see the thought behind it after the fact, or perscribe a meaning to it that wasn’t originally intended or sought. That is the case with this little fellow.

    Laden with its own little meaning to me, I can shine a light on him a little… pun partially intended. A light-bulb moment: a sudden realization, for good or bad, concerning most anything. It isn’t always associated with a moment of divine inspiration, but also for that time when things just click into place and the light flicks on… a puzzle is solved, and the resultant realization is not always for the better. Then again, perhaps it is divine inspiration, after which it is going to be on your shoulders to see things through – while the idea itself is easy, the culmination of these thoughts into something credible may be far more difficult indeed. Now… what to do with all that.

    For some, it might be easy, for others it is burdensome. In this particular little case, the load is not easy to bear, but my little creature gets by with a little determination, a touch of dark humor and perhaps a wry grin when asked why he has a light-bulb on his back. Coffee doesn’t hurt, either… That said, he’d better be careful – that bulb looks as if it might just consume him if he doesn’t watch out.

    Anyhow, that is my sketch, with a little hint of what it kinda means to me, as the person who drew it with nary a thought in my head other than ‘I’m going to draw a light-bulb with wings’ to start off with.