Space

The ideas that led each piece was definitely fairly different. For Howling the Night Away, I had to make patterns that got progressively darker, within my preset constraints of the silhouette I had chosen. This led to a lot of creativity in the creation of the patterns, which took a lot of experimentation. Negative Hands was definitely much more straightforward—simply being drawings of the silhouette created by my hand in a special position. But for Hidden Jigsaw, I needed a lot more creativity again, which—by the currently unfinished artwork—was definitely a little more of a struggle. There was a lot of back-and-forth about whether I should draw something more representational versus abstract/pattern-y. Eventually I ended up with a compromise between the two.

To make these pieces, I used graphite pencils of varying grades, and mostly sketched at first to get a general shape. From there, I used either a darker grade pencil or a marker pen and outlined the shape(s), and filled in some areas with graphite pencil, and others with marker pen, depending on the darkness I wanted.

Overall, there was a lot of trial and error, with the exception being the Negative Hands piece. I needed to find what patterns work in each spot—and for Howling the Night Away, I needed to make sure each pattern was progressively darker.