“FLOWER ST.”

I first came up with this idea at the end of June. In this piece, I challenged myself to start with an emotion and attempt to convey it through illustration. The illustration shows a girl kissing a boy, literally expressing the sense of elation that the boy feels. The flowers materialize from the girl’s dress, lifting the boy on the bike into the air.

I took about a month to do this drawing, on and off. I was almost afraid that I wouldn’t finish it before school started because I was so busy with work. I would come home every night after work and totally poop out. Occasionally, at like 10-11PM at night, I’d pull out this drawing and try to work on it for half an hour to an hour. The first week I worked on it everyday, but as the days progressed I started losing steam/interest in the project.

In the first week I worked on the composition of the drawing. More specifically, the way the boy’s body and bike emerge from the illustration with exaggerated perspective. I drew and redrew that over and over again on tracing paper just to get it look right. That was definitely the hardest part. I used another layer of tracing paper to test out how the flowers would look, then I transferred everything to water color paper and outlined the drawing in pen.

Starting color was also very intimidating because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I figured the safest route would be to just scan in the drawing and color it on the computer….but I had already drawn it on big water color paper so I figured I might as well watercolor it. I was afraid of the illustration looking generic, and tried to imagine ways I could color it to make it more exciting. I started off coloring lightly with basic colors, until I realized how boring it was. In fact, at this point, I was completely bored with the piece and didn’t care about it….which actually turned out to be a good thing. I started being more experimental with the piece, not caring too much if it was going in the right direction. I started getting messy with the colors….and found a new love for purple and brown *0*

When I finally got it on the comp and messed with it on Photoshop, I realized that the composition needed to be flipped. The whole time the two characters were on the right side of the drawing instead of the left. I realized for some reason that their faces disappeared into the detail….but when looking at the drawing flipped, the eye moves directly to the faces first, and then upward to the flowers. sooo….I flipped it even tho the original is not like that. if you look closely, my signature under the girl’s leg is backwards.

Over all, I’m just glad i’m finally done with this piece. I’m not the most proud of it subject wise…I can’t tell if I chose this subject for myself or to please others. I don’t think it turned out bad though, and I definitely learned a lot from doing it. I’m much more confident in watercolors!

my friend jon is starting a t-shirt company, and he asked me to do some designs. I’m super busy right now, but I cranked something out anyways. 

Lol I’ve always found playing with extraordinarily wild hair a great fallback when I’m not feeling particularly creative or just want to mess around. I’m not particularly proud of it, except for the sharpie use, but we’ll see what he thinks….

some ideas^ tho looking back on it, the last one is kind of shitty lol

another idea