It's Difficult to Describe What's on my Mind...
The Idea
We had to create a piece using some research and keeping some ties to our mini-series that displayed our "why". This piece was planned and planned for days and days, with a tone of sketches and thumbnails in my sketchbook.
I didn't even use those ideas because I came up with the idea for THIS piece—the piece I actually drew, in class the day we showed our thumbnails to the teacher to get some feedback before starting on creating our next piece.
A cropped/zoomed-in view of the main weight of the piece. The whole paper is eighteen by twenty-four inches (18''x24'') and is covered in all different types of pens and other mediums.
The pages in my sketchbook, full of thumbnails that were meant to be the plan for this particular assignment.
The idea may be similar, but all in all there really is no resemblance to the piece I ended up creating. That just goes to show how my mind likes to work.
Another thumbnail set that I had made in planning this piece, which obviously did not go as planned whatsoever.
"LET ME GO SKETCH WHAT I MEAN," I shouted as I ran to grab my sketchbook after having an epiphany during the conversation with my teacher about the thumbnails. This is the tiny thumbnail I scribbled out to show the teacher the idea I literally had just come up with. I had two versions of it, but I think I'm going to use the other one in a future piece, which is why I'm not going to show it here.
The Process
I vaguely sketched out where the end of the pen/ink work would be to give myself some limits to where I drew, and then I sketched out the figures to get a general idea of what would be outside the thought bubble. And then I just started drawing with my 01 Micron pen (and the 2 because I'm growing fond of the little chisel tip). I had no idea where or what the pen/ink work would end up being or looking like.
The pen/ink work is all 100% improvised, drawn without a sketch (save the arrows, since I had no intention of keeping those but ended up tracing them in pen) and created on the spot. It's not so much the lines that are my focus as the transitions. I know how to draw the sections and use the techniques, but the real fun is figuring out how one section will connect and/or flow into another section without seeming too choppy or out of place. A couple of transitions are just from comfort-zone techniques, but most of these transitions are new to my pen/ink work.
I started moving back and forth to focus on the area outside the thought bubble, starting to add vague color and things to highlight sections that are important. I started throwing on whiteout and scribbling random pen in the area outside the thought bubble, trying to imply a different feeling from the section depicting a thought process. I added the letters spelling ANSWER in the pen, making it a little game to try and find all the letters, since the answer is there somewhere in the organized mess...
And then I added color! The colors in the thought bubble are meant to be brighter than the colors outside of the thought bubble to try and portray the difference between realistic and the imagination.
A close-up of this section in some natural lighting.
Someone asked me why I always take a side-view picture of my pieces, and I told them it's because I like to make sure that there is proof that the paper is actually flat because you never know if someone will accuse you of using 3D paper. (I was joking, though. What even is 3D paper? Is that a thing? Where can I get some, if it exists?)