Sustained Investigation #2

Sporadically Sanguine

14" X 17" (300 DPI)

Digital

The story behind this drawing is that the woman is remaining optimistic even in the darkness. I depicted this by showing a street at night with rain. Three other people are walking in the street, but it is largely empty. The light on the side of the road is casting gold light on her umbrella and face. I wanted to make the patterns on the umbrella very dimensional and bright in the black and purple background, and I wanted to show her face lighting up. I chose to make this specific drawing because I thought it captures the negative and positive aspects of optimism. It can be blinding to be overly optimistic, but extreme optimism is better than not being able to see at all. Although, if you spend too much time in the blinding light, everything appears darker than it was before. This can be seen in the person at the bottom left who has walked past the street light. Additionally, I thought it would be fun to experiment with extreme lighting and rain -- which I think creates an interesting effect.

I made this using a Huion GT-191 KAMVAS Drawing Tablet and the art program Krita. I primarily used a textured brush, a smooth brush, and a low opacity blender. I used the textured brush to create the background and the rain. I used a combination of the textured and smooth brush to create the character. And, I used the low opacity blender to give the rain motion.

I started out by planning the drawing. I looked at reference photos for light at night and rain. Then, I created thumbnails of the drawing in my sketchbook. I wanted to use a triangle of important pieces of the drawing to make the composition more interesting (the corners are the umbrella, the rain in the bottom middle, and the other character), and I wanted to break up the space with the umbrella, the light, and the character. Originally, I was stuck because I was using really small brushes without accounting for what it would look like when I zoomed out. But, when I forced myself to use a bigger brush trying to express the essence of the details rather than the details themselves, I was able to create a much more put-together drawing. Later in the process, I went back into areas which I thought were especially important (the characters face, the umbrella, the character in the background) to add details. I used textured lines with varied color to create form with depth. I tried to use purple tones for shadows and blended it in with my other colors. Lastly, I adjusted the darks and the lights of my drawing to create contrast. I'm hoping to adjust the rain in the bottom of the drawing, make the background slightly blurry to add depth, fix the lighting/shadows on her face, and fix the light pole in the foreground.