The source for this painting is an advert for some expensive wristwatch featuring Pierce Brosnam as James Bond. The inspiration comes from my work as a software engineer for HP OpenView, which sells a software component called an agent, with which I frequently have to deal with. In particular, this piece of software automatically installs itself in a directory which just consists of a long sequence of seemingly random numbers (in computer term, this is called a GUID). With this painting, I tried to address the similarities between the imaginary British agent 007 and the software agent 790....
| date | Jun-2002 |
|---|---|
| time | 3 days |
| object | T-shirt |
| technique |     |
This one's a hybrid painting, with the background image of James Bond done with the airbrush, and the foreground letters done with a brush. The airbrush is a perfect instrument to create the smooth shades and shadows of the face. The main challenge here is applying just the right amount of color to make it look natural and human. You can argue how well I succeeded with that - I've heard some comments that the face looks more gorilla than human :-)
The airbrush also did a great job in efficiently drawing the light background numbers - it's almost as fast and convenient as writing with a normal pen.
On the other hand, the foreground numbers had to be sharp and precise, so I used a normal 0-size brush. Opaque textile colors like white are always hard to apply, because they have to contain a plastic-like substance to be opaque. You're saving yourself a lot of trouble with blocked nozzles and cleaning if you avoid using opaque white with the airbrush.
The images by Ingo Karkat on this page are licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
