Optical Intrusion

About My Art

My art is something I have done from a young age. I can't remember exactly when I became interested in it but I do know that by age 11 I was capable of some quite reasonable painting, drawing and craftwork. I have one chalk and charcoal drawing I can look at today and see that it was quite good for my age at the time. But that's all it was. Quite good, and that's how I feel about my work to this day. Because, although my attention to detail and concentration levels are very high, my mind tends to hop from one interest to another before getting any of them anywhere near fully grasped.
This is the case with many of my behavioural patterns. 'Oooh! That's fun.....I'm bored. Wow! Look at that.......yes. I like this.....Hmmm. Good but not good enough, I'll try those.......for a while.......and this at the same time.' etc etc etc.
I have been through so many phases that I have become 'quite good' at loads of things in the art world but absolutely brilliant at not very much.
This sounds like I'm putting myself down. Not so. I know I'm talented but I need to focus my abilities together rather than exploring them individually and I am reaching a time in my spiritual awareness (another story) that I am beginning to at least see a path I may attempt to follow.
These are some of the techniques and mediums I can and have used:
Drawing. - Ink pens including fine detail graded size technical drawing type pens of various brand and style, normal felt pens, fine ball point gel ink pens, calligraphy and many shape and size point marker pens.
Painting. - Oil (to a lesser extent), acrylic, enamel, water colour, fabric paint and aerosol sprays. The mediums used have ranged from canvas, paper, stone, wood, plastic, metal, and pottery, right through to the walls and other flat surfaces of graffiti art.
I can work quite well work with fabric, especially denim, in a wide range of ways including bleaching, printing, stencils, fabric paints and pens, ripping, sewing, additions and alterations.
Those are just a few, so you get the idea about the large variety of techniques I am capable of using.

NOW! How did Optical Intrusion come about?
I have been drawing the stick characters with the egg bodies for about three years now but I used to do them by hand.
In my facebook group page I describe about how the work I do is based on stuff I was doing a few years back. A few years back I was drinking very heavily and there were some very dark resentment issues going on with me - at everything really.
I used to draw them first on sheets of A4 paper divided into little boxes then I would transfer these 'draft' pictures onto highly adhesive 89x37mm address lables. From there I would go wandering around at random placing these stickers anywhere I could find a flat, dry and openly visible surface. On buses, in bus shelters, in cafes and restaurants, libraries, shops, churches, trains, random buildings and park benches. The one thing that I would spare was people's cars and other vehicles. Even I knew this was an awful thing to do as the stickers are so hard to remove. It is also direct and illegal vandalism bordering on criminal damage.
I came out of that phase, both the alcohol and the level of spite and resentment and sometime around christmas 2009 I got my first PC. A crappy little thing I still use. I discovered the 'paint' application soon after that and at first I could hardly add a speech bubble to a photo but I learn very quickly. The first Optical Intrusion pictures are a clear indication of how I've progressed between then and today.
Although 'paint' is clumsy and painfully slow, (some of the picture I do can take about five hours to draw) I enjoy doing them and I like the results. I may try a better art application at some point, but I'm happy at the moment.