Music #8

The idea behind this work was to show that feeling of confidence that some songs seem to give you. I feel like when I listen to music, it makes me feel a lot, and depending on the song and my mood, it can make me feel really cool or really confident, like I'm in a movie or something. I wanted to show that confidence with a character. I wanted to show how I feel in a person with a personality. I wanted her to be kind of weird, but look like she completely owned it.

For this project, I decided to use colored pencil because I felt like I was able to control it really well in some of the smaller spaces, like her arms and legs, while still getting the shading and detail that I wanted. I also felt like I often listen to music when I am drawing, so it felt relevant to my theme of music. I was originally planning on using acrylic paint on top of the sky blue background that I had painted, but I didn't feel like I was going to be precise enough with the paint to get the details I wanted.

In working on this project, I actually started out with a different one and abandoned it partway through for this one. In the images below, there is a face sketch and a scratchboard drawing. I originally was going to do that, but the scratchboard kept messing me up with how I was shading in the highlights, so it wasn't working the way I wanted. I also felt like it didn't quite look how I wanted on the scratchboard anyway, so I abandoned the material altogether.

I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to draw, and struggling to find things to make that I thought were fun to create, and that I was happy with the final product. I was looking at some images online for inspiration, and the ones that I felt most drawn to were often really weird and random. I wanted to do something like that myself. I started with this squiggly figure that I often use in my doodles because I enjoy drawing them, so that was kind of my first step, and then I just thought about what might be kind of weird and random for her to be doing. At first, I was going to have her walk a frog, and I had a couple of different things she was doing with that other hand. First holding a coffee, then on her hip. But I settled on a purple umbrella because it seemed a bit strange, but also maybe it symbolized a shelter from sadness (rain) in that moment of confidence.