Winter Worker

I have a strange fascination with heavy work garb. This includes rain slickers, farm wear, construction gear and clothing, work clothes, and coveralls. I have a number of catalogs for this kind of thing that sell everything from construction shelters and equipment (I also love bulldozers, garden tools, earth movers, and on-site office trailers) to whatever you would need to get the job done. This is a study of a worker in a winter coverall, without the hood attached, copied from a model in one of my catalogs. It's done in "digital pencil," something I am trying to learn. Later I will color him in.

One of the origins of my fascination with industrial gear and sites comes from my heritage of "Socialist Realism," a type of art from the 20th century which glorified manual labor and old-style industry. In some countries, especially ex-Communist countries where the government had a lot of this art produced and published, this style is considered "ironic chic." The only things you cannot be, as an "ironic chic" designer, are honest or authentic. Our information age cannot show us heroic workers building the cities of the future, only computer users poking at their keyboards at three in the morning. And you don't need heavy winter coveralls to do that.