Ben Toupein


Where are the eyeballs?!
October 19, 2009, 6:46 am
Filed under: Recent work | Tags: , ,

I love T-Shirts. I have about 900 million.

A friend of mine is starting up a new clothes label and asked me to draw something to put on a shirt.

I’m not really sure whether he is pulling on a shirt or taking it off? Either way he looks pretty creepy.

Just for kicks I included the original pencil drawing that turned into the final inked piece.

Hopefully ill see the finished result soon.

Click the pics to see them larger.



Punched in the face area
October 12, 2009, 11:14 am
Filed under: Older Work | Tags: , , , , ,

Here is something I did a while ago. It was for a poster show.

The whole was done for fun. I was kinda obsessed with boxers and astronauts at the time, so I decided to pit them against each other. The other 3 pictures are the side attractions that would have run alongside the fight.

The idea was to make everything look those old photographs that have been hand coloured. I used really watered down paint and different kinds of ink and watercolours.

Click on the pictures to see them in more detail.



Stuck at the Desk
October 9, 2009, 1:12 pm
Filed under: Recent work | Tags: , ,

Here’s something I did recently that went up at my old university.

Its a man sitting at a desk. I used watered down acrylic paints and black ink.

I posted a few close-ups so you can see some of the details.

To see them bigger, click on the pictures.



Fading Photos
October 9, 2009, 8:44 am
Filed under: Recent work | Tags: ,

Here is a selection of drawings from a recent show in Sydney.

The idea behind these came about when I was thinking about the advent of digital camera’s and how current events and gatherings are easily remembered as almost every minute of the occasion is photographed. Looking back at the older photo’s you might be lucky to have five photo’s of the entire day and more likely only one or two. I can find one photo for Christmas day in 1993 but 20 of a drunk night out 3 years ago in San Francisco. I had the idea of depicting the people in these older photographs as though they were aging and decaying, rotting away as our memory of the event gets less and less vivid. People’s skin becomes cracked and wrinkled and their heads skull like as they age like weird little Kodak Dorian Gray’s. Some people have become very distorted while some have turned into skeletons suggesting an even worse fate. The lines are faint as to suggest a ghostly impression of a event that it slowly slipping away from memory. If you squint your eyes the people disappear from the paper, highlighting the temporal nature of these snap shots.

The original drawings are really faint and unfortunately to see them properly on the computer monitor I had to darken them up a bit. In the flesh the pieces of paper looked almost blank and it wasn’t until you got up close you realised what was on the paper.

I think you’ll still get the idea.




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