I wish my sketchbook was just this beautiful curated artifact of immaculate thinking and execution but it just ain’t. I wanted to showcase just what happens to my brain sometimes when I’m drawing and overlapping ideas incoherently. I thought it would be good to show full pages without any editing or cropping.
This place is a refuge where I often digress into drawing ears or eyeballs and not feel any of the pressure that exists immediately outside the pages of the book.
2021 just feels like an amendment to 2020 and I’m not that upset about it. I had a piece featured at the SAD mag first official gallery show “The Lost Show”. I’ve included some process below along with some design sketches. Enjoy.
Costume iterations. I wanted the central character to look giftwrapped.
I really enjoy doing these collages, I’m not sure if it helps masks all the mistakes I make but it’s fun to see them all together. Below is just some more foolishness as I care less and less about defined process and just focus on throwing shit against the wall. I’ve also been getting more into time-lapse drawing.
This is my take on Judith and Holofernes, in the style of the Otomo Akira poster artwork. Seeing other artists do their take on either subject (especially the Akira poster) always made me jealous, and at last, I was able to turn that jealousy into a few nights of poor work–life balance.
The above is a more developed version of the original sketch, which has loads of perspective errors. This poster combined a lot of different things I wanted to try, and thankfully I ended up breaking down some personal walls when it comes to digital image-making.
Often, at the end of an illustration, I feel completely drained or at a loss, like I just paddled up stream; now I’m exhausted, and I’m not really sure if my destination was actually desired. With this piece, I felt different. There seemed to be more harmony in my process, and I wasn’t left with acid in my muscles after a long haul. Despite the technical drawing involved (into which I can get way too deep), things had a nice flow to them. I relate this to climbing, in a sense: when I’m on the wall, I know I’m going to have a good session not if my arms feel strong, but if my legs are moving the right way. The pride with Judith is not with the final product, but with the process. It wasn’t a hostage negotiation this time.
I relate to this guy the most.
I look at guys like Abbey or Frank Craig and hope that I can have the confidence to leave areas unfinished, to really focus on what matters. I could have spent three more days on this bed, but the area I wanted to get right the most was the contact shadow, where the body lies on top of the sheet. I think I did alright.
He doesn’t seem familiar, does he?
The idea for Judith was just a synthesis of two things I really wanted to do a take on. I don’t think It has to be more interesting than that.
One thing that’s worth mentioning, though: the Otomo Akira poster is the kind of composition that references itself. Once it was canonized in popular culture, the composition itself represented the original image. This is much like the Creation of Adam, where referencing the composition becomes almost parody. The Akira poster invokes a biblical significance, in that way. Judith and Holofernes happens to also be a biblical story, so there you have it…I zinged ya.
This will hopefully be one of many videos I create. I’m already working on the second “episode” having learned a lot technically from the first one. The project was inspired by some feedback given to me by my peers but with an interesting hook. Something calm, something peaceful.
