Beemouse Laboratories

I’m really excited about some paintings I finished for part of a Moleskine exchange I’m in right now. (A group of artists each buy a Moleskine journal, make art on a set amount of pages, mail it to the next person, etc, until finally you get your own Moleskine back, filled with the work of all the other artists.)

I took inspiration from old alchemical symbols that I found in my awesome Taschen book Alchemy and Mysticism (Amazon doesn’t have it in stock, but the version I have is the 25th Anniversary Edition that I linked to). I also used found paper from a very old copy of Kipling’s Kim. First I laid down a wash of walnut ink and salted it, for texture. Then I pasted paper in select places with “Netural pH Adhesive” (basically bookbinding glue), and illustrated over it with gouache and Micron pens. The patterns that make up the backbone of the paintings are taken from aerial shots found through Google maps. My favorite is the first one because I managed to slip in some crop circles. None of the paintings really mean anything… or do they?