Hi

Breaking the silence... It was kind of a busy sprint getting to the end of my last semester of the Illustration program, so I have sorely neglected my updating duties here. To get rolling again, I thought I'd put a few before and after images to give some sense of how my sketching and development stages for a piece go. Exhibit One:



This is a self-promotional piece I did recently, part of a series of pieces inspired by lyrics of some of my favorite songs. The song is 'Blue' by A Perfect Circle, which talks about self-denial and the inability to see or accept another's distress or suffering.



This is the sketch after some minor layout-tweaking in photoshop to get the proportions and dimensions just right...



...And this is Leda. Hi Leda. I took a lot of reference shots for this. It was a really complicated, dynamic pose to try to capture, primarily because of the movement and action in both the anatomy and the cloth. I also snapped a load of hand reference photos of myself. Dropping what felt like five thousand of those hands into the sketch made me feel like I was in Human Figure 101 again...



Figure Two: This piece was done on the subject of postpartum depression.



This is the initial sketch. A lot of my sketches can look rather minimal or empty because in the finish I let the texture-building techniques I use (collaging, sanding, transferring, etc) do a lot of compositional work in the background areas.



After a while, I realized that my first sketch was simply too tall/squarish to fit effectively in the horizontal space that I had, so I reworked it to this version.



And here's an example of when the unpredictable nature of my materials gets the better of me. Originally, my plan was to transfer this wallpaper pattern into the back of the piece and feature it fairly prominently because I thought the look of it really went great with the atmosphere. When I put it on, though, I realized that it was simply too delicate to show up well on top of what was already there. If you look close you can see it in areas, but it basically became a secondary element. I did add some graphic elements, however, in the form of the halftone dots I transferred in the shadows. Love those dots.

Hope this was fun... I'll do it again some time maybe. Bye for now.