Quick Post, Guitar

Hello,

I'm in the midst of making something else, so this will be quick, but here is a personal piece I made last week. It is based on a thing that happened to me and I thought was kind of nice for a drawing. Any process questions, just let me know.

Dog

Hello, loyal readers. This week I thought I'd show you a piece that was a little bit less of a rigid assignment. This was an image I wanted to make because for some reason I'd been drawing dogs in my sketchbook, and I wanted to take it a step further.

The process on this piece was a little looser than normal as well. Recently the things I make that I am happier about are the pieces where I make a quick loose ink drawing and then color and texture it digitally. I keep forgetting to actually track these illustrations as I make them, so I can show some of my missteps and how I correct them, but a couple of this drawings issues are recorded in this neat gif.

Sketchbook Creatures

In my sketchbook I was stuck for a while. I always used it as a place to experiment with media while I was working on projects. It was supplement. This summer, my doodling had become constant; I was drawing with the same three pens and I didn't feel like I was making any progress.

I bought a new sketchbook and started drawing creatures. At first it was about designing the creatures but after drawing at least one a day for a while, became about trying something new, even something simple. From "I've never really used that color before," to "I've always loved x but am bad at drawing x," to "There is a pig living with me and that pig looks ridiculous." These are experiments I could stand long enough to not erase them-- each of them represents me learning something, mundane or otherwise.

Sheets

Last week Lauren proposed we each work on an album that the other would not normally listen to. She assigned me Electra Heart by Marina and the Diamonds which I had definitely never listened to. This one took a lot of sketching; it's about the protagonist of the album dealing with the archetypes for female pop stars and I spent a while figuring out what was interesting about the music through drawing. To me a lot of it ends up being about the creation of a pop mythology through sexualization. There is a happy insistance on casual sex to construct the pop facade. At a certain point it became clear to me there needed to be a heart shape, because as a symbol it is important to both the meesage of the album and the image of the creator.

I don't mean to try to explain the image. Especially in the context of the music, I think it stands pretty well on its own. But the thought process took most of the time on this one, and I wanted to give some sense of why I ended up focusing on what I did.

As far as making the thing, I've been using photoshop a lot on projects like this one, which can be really fun. Pretty much a key drawing that I scan and color. For the sake of variety I might show you something I used more traditional media on next week. Who knows, also maybe not.

Chameleon

This image is a bit older, but I'm a touch behind on work this week because I had to move. Which happens sometimes. This image was motivated by a friend of mine, and also myself right after I graduated. I wanted to use a sort of modified digital 3 color print to keep the analogous color pretty unified. The gray layer is my ink drawing with digital grays added. There is some texture in this layer that you can't see when it isn't on top of the other layers

Next I added most of the color with dark blue green layer.

Finally I added the bright blue. I didn't separate it from the black layers because I wanted to use static texture with both black and blue in it and it was faster to keep them together. This goes over the darker layer.

And the Final.