Dear Kevin,
I realized too late that I missed the opportunity to use The First as a subtitle for my first letter to you after posting. But! Being that this is the first of a specific type of letter, I'm putting it here. So with that being said happy weekend to you sir and welcome to the first of many art dives! Today I'm giving you the dish on the piece I did that went into the art and poetry book sent to you because I have much to say and things to clarify. Sit back and get you a drink, this one's gonna be a doozy. For real, I’m talking 1.2k+ words. I told you I was long-winded. But fear not, I’ve added in pictures 😁 Now, let’s get on with it 👏🏾
First off, Hello from a moonlight book contributor 💁♀️ I was the person who submitted the Drink It painting. It's credited differently in the index because I joined with the Twitter account I use for group orders and such. Completely not the fault of the project runners, they were nothing but wonderful and communicative throughout the whole process. That was me ignoring the voice that said I shoulda told them about my art account that I actually use (or at least am trying to use more). Classic case of me not doing a simple task for it to lead to an easily avoidable problem or inconvenience. A very run of the mill occurrence and very on brand even for me 🙃 Anywho! Bit of a tangent but all that matters is that notablenobody_ 🚫🙅♀️<<<< invisibb_ ✅🙋♀️With that cleared, up let's get into it.
I wanted to give you a chance to see it in it's original digital form since the print may have left off or obscured the details in the dark parts (can't verify since I've never held the book in person) including the watermark 🥲
Not to go on a tangent again, but is the iPad version of Adobe illustrator just not intuitive or is it just the fact that I'm not drawing vector illustrations in it directly and am used to the desktop version? That and the photoshop app made me feel like I went thru trial and tribulation just tryna vectorize my logo and throw the whole thing in a large square 😭
Not to be dramatic, but this is literally the most complex thing I've ever done. I've been drawing pretty much all my life and professionally I am a graphic designer, but digital painting is still new-ish territory for me. Most of my drawings are usually just sketches and headshots, maybe a bit of shoulder if you're lucky. Going from that to doing 2 people, full body, and fully rendered? Not to mention me having to think about composition for once. Absolutely unheard of, but I did it for you. And y'know what? I'm glad I did. I'm often nervous to just try things that I feel are outside my abilities. This was a really good push to overcoming that since I had already signed on and had to go thru with it. And I learned a lot in the process, so thank you for that. It also means you are also part of my art journey 🎨✨️ I hope you enjoy the ride 😁
Okay time for details and dish. Two things to know about my art is that I'm currently in what I'm calling my purple period. One artist who I follow and occasionally watch on YouTube is ergojosh. He has an old video answering the question of why he drew in pink at the time and he said it was influenced from comic artists he followed who would use bright colors for preliminary sketches, it helped him stand out, was an easy way to add some color when he wasn't confident with it at the time among other things. So I kinda borrowed from that but just used tones of purple. I do like it more than just working in black and I'm also struggling with color, so purple it is! I used reds as a spot color for that vampy feel. Originally I was gonna hue shift everything else to black, but I liked how it looked so it stayed. I will start actually using color color soon. I've been practicing, it's just hard ㅠㅠ
Second thing is that more often than not I'm gonna spend 30% of my time in the planning stage. Like seriously, for something that initially was meant to be done in 3 months, the first month was just sketches and thumbnails. I had another idea that was just a headshot essentially, but I couldn't get the expression to come out how I wanted so I tanked it. (I say tanked, but I'm putting it in my back pocket for the future cause in hindsight it was probably better off existing outside the book yet still it intrigues me). I mentioned before that this is like the one full piece I've done where composition actually mattered. I spent so long scrawling the internet for sitting references (in senshi stock we trust 🙏🏾) and even longer staring at fancy chairs on pinterest. So. Many. Chairs.
On the subject of this being a milestone in my art journey, I've picked up ways to fine tune my process. Number one being not making multiple layers for the same bit of line art. Yes I am one of those who does make a million layers, but turning off one layer to see that line still there was so annoying. No wonder I hit the layer limit 😩 Other lessons learned were that leather is very interesting to draw. For a first timer I'd say those pants didn't come out half bad. And I'm glad because I put a lot more effort into the rock outfit than the suit. And no that's not JUST because I'm a self proclaimed emo and that look fits my aesthetic more, it just had more details to finesse and fine tune. The hardest part of the suit was the pattern for the vest and finding out what color and blend mode gave the best effect. Y'know what the hardest part of the rock outfit was? The fact that the specific Nirvana shirt you wore in the video appears to be the only one that exists. And not because the stylists altered it to be sleeveless and gave it a couple carefully placed holes. I mean that I could not find a single shirt with the Nirvana logotype and that specific picture of Kurt Cobain on it. And I scrolled and scrolled thru oodles of google search results. Like it just wasn't there. Had to do a mashup with a shirt that had the trio of it that was very clearly not official merch. Very clearly not inline with brand standards (had a different font entirely and off color) and also screamed country boy at the same time. So basically I had to trace over it to just get his solo silhouette from that and fake it well enough. And that bit was a doozy, but it came out looking dope so worth it.
Other fun bits was figuring out how to use the layer assist so I only had to draw half the chair, running into a wall because I couldn't convert the color profile to CMYK and having to just thru hoops to do it in photoshop. Next time I'll just know to start with that profile. Also, I found out what alpha lock does. Totally a working professional who uses photoshop everyday, but that never means there aren’t new things to learn 🧚♀️✨
Anyway that's all I have. I'll come back with other draws later. I promise those letters will be shorter... well at least not as long as this one. This project took a lot out of me, but I'm bouncing back. Can't wait to show you more. Hope you have a great week Kev. Love ya 💛🌙
- B ✧°•
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