Kozyndan

Just Another Uniform (aka - Timeline of an Aimless Japanese Girl)

ink and color pencil on illustration board
2009

Kozy made this piece for a show at Gallery Nuceleus called "Sweet Streets: Art Inspired by Japanese Street Fashion".

Kozy and I have no interest in, or love of Japanese Street fashion and tend to think of the young Japanese who are so slavishly devoted to the various styles to be vapid and conformist and not expressing unique personal style at all, but rather just trying to fit in. The theme of conforming is a huge part of Japanese culture and the Japanese street fashion culture is just another prime example.

Kozy's piece is not so much a celebration of Japanese street fashion as it is a critique of the people who love it.

Click on the thumbnails above right to read the piece.

Like Sands Through the Hour Glass...

pencil, digital

2003

What we said about it at the time: (...so are the days of our lives) A little street in London that we love and hate. Great produce and crepes and record shops, close to all kinds of yummy adult video stores and gentlemen's clubs, but also a place where we had a huge fight while on a whirlwind tour of the city on Spring Break. It is sort of about time passing, moments of action, lifetimes, events. It's also got a family of veggie monsters having a feast. We are still not sure how those 2 things fit together in our minds when we were laying this piece out - your guess is as good as ours.

Looking back: Still one of our favorites in the series. I think the balance is just right - variety and flow of characters, variety of topics (from the passage of time, to our love for eachother, to the war in Iraq), and nice color scheme. In case i haven't mentioned, all the images we paint digitally are generally painted in true colors (as they would be in real life). At the end of the painting process we decide what color the image should be, try different over all tones by adding adjustment layers over the color until we get an overall color we like. Gotta love the flexibility of Photoshop.

This piece also was the debut of the so-called "veggie monsters", who have since appeared in another panoramic that was set elsewhere in the UK, a few other drawings of ours, and also were animated in CGI for a live action trailer for RES Fest by motion theory that was based on our panoramic series (what a fun project that was!!).

http://www.kozyndan.com/_qt/Like_sands_ThroughVR.mov