Arrive Alive

DON'T BE A MONSTER

JAN. 26, 2019 — digital illustration

For this project, we were supposed to create an image that showed how drinking while driving (or distracted driving) was bad.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to somehow connect my piece to my concentration, but I wasn't sure how that was going to work out. I sketched out a few ideas, and eventually I settled on a view from the back of someone driving with a beer in their hand. In the rearview mirror, I wanted the person's reflection to look like a monster. After sketching out how I wanted it to look, I took a picture of it and used it as the basis for my drawing. I went over the lines in black, and then I colored everything in with flat colors. After that, as per usual, I spent a while shading and erasing the shadows to add highlights, and I zoomed in a lot to add some small details. For the road, I tried to make it look like the person driving was kinda doing a horrible job at it (so he's in the middle of the road), and I added highlights to the radio and such so that it was obvious that they were glowing. After adding a ring of highlight around the eyes, and wrote "DON'T BE A MONSTER" in the bottom corner, I was done.

I don't like the way that this came out. Even though I spent several hours on this project, I feel like it's still lacking, although I don't know in what regard. I do like the way that I managed to make the controls in the car look like they were lit up, and I like the glow in the monster's eyes (since it makes it more noticeable in the darkness of the car). I like the shading to an extent, but I also think that it might be too dark... I've been staring at the piece for like an hour, though, so I can't say for sure. However, I feel like there should be more texture throughout the piece, and perhaps I should have added some more details outside the car—although, I'm going to use the excuse that I've never driven a car, so I'm not really sure what it's like. Overall, I feel okay about this piece, even if I think that it could be better.