Over done

I loved this at first, I'm less in love with it now that I'm revisiting it.

Pleased with the Untitled legs piece earlier, I've been considering doing a series of similar mixed-media pieces, exploring digital image manipulation combined with hand drawing. That first one started as a photo, became an abstract digital canvas, and was finished with a digitally altered scan of hand drawn sketches. Each piece had its own reason and purpose and came together to a nice whole.

The process here was entirely backwards and I think the results speak to that. This time I started with the hand drawn sketch, with which I am very pleased. I should have just left it at that, and when I get a chance I'll likely revisit it as a standalone image.

I like the digital additions in theory, but I realze now that I was too conscious of the overall end result, so rather than creating a piece of background that had its own artistic reason, I was trying to fit it into a false constraint of "a piece" and ended up with something...canned. I look at it and see graphic filters, not a complete image. Meh.

Fun Guy

I don't know if it's simply the increased amount of drawing I've been doing, the confidence that posting it publicly has given me, or the results of the artist's program I alluded to in a previous post, but it's getting harder to stay true the the name of this blog. I keep ending up with drawings I actually like, which is a whole new experience for me. So if you're here for the self-deprecation, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint as it's being replaced by self-confidence at an alarming rate.

But enough of that, on to the latest entry. I'll be bold and say that this one's a triumph. Six years. That's how long I've been trying to get this one down on paper. After six years it is, of course, radically different than I first pictured it. But after countless doodles and aborted attempts at making something of it, it's exactly what it needs to be.

And for the first time it's something that carries some personal meaning beyond being aesthetically pleasing to me. I probably shouldn't be too specific about what that meaning is, thought the post title does give a clue as to what spurred the original vision. Yeah, "vision", I'll stick with that word. Definitely something I saw in my mind's eye that's stuck with me. The final product is more interpretive of that vision than representational, but it gets the point across.

Color was vitally important. I spent a lot of time pinning down exactly which to use and how. And I couldn't be happier with the results. Finally having this down on paper, concrete is a big relief to me.