My second super conceptual drawing,
Nairopeti is the physical embodiment of water. When I was conceiving
of her redraw I had a similar problem as I had with Sartep. The
original drawing on the left, which is at least 12 years old, is cute
and fun. But my thoughts about water when sitting down to draw the
new version were not.
My area of the country has received
record rainfall this year. Earlier in the year the news was talking
about nothing but the damage the flood waters had caused. Parks were
under water, businesses. The across-the-river-to-me city of Van Buren
had to close its riverside floodgates for the first time I can ever
remember.
There is a park I was walking at a lot
with my Dad around this time. One one side of it was bordered by a
wide river and on the other side a steep drop off into a small,
slowly moving tributary of that river. We went to check it out after
the flooding and on the big river side we saw a literal island float
by in the swollen waters- a huge grassy chunk of land just zipping
by. On the other side, the steep drop-off was gone and the small
tributary had swollen up eight feet high (at least) up onto the paths
of the park itself. It was wild.
As such, the ferocious power of water
was and is on my mind right now. Coincidentally, I also am writing
this one day after a more recent downpour smacked into Fort Smith
again leaving a lot of wind damage.
So like all my reflecting upon nature
again as an adult, I have learned that the forces of nature are not
just as pleasant as a gentle rain but also as powerful as a giant
wrecking ball.
Art tips: Water logged cardboard box! I
like that! Also, I like the color of the flooding sign against the
deep blue of the skirt. I also think my use of texture looks a little
less flat here then it did on my last experiment (Ageen).
Bonus!
I am including an example of the
original drawing. As I have discussed before, all of these drawings
start with pencil and paper and are then inked, scanned into my
computer, and edited with color being added digitally. Well this is
an example of a raw drawing, post scan but pre-editing.
So many changes! First off, the
original hand I drew was just awful. I drew it in pencil and then
went over it in ink (like I do on all of my drawings) and then I said
to myself “bitch, really?” That's why I added the lower hand. I
knew I could just cut the old hand out on the computer and replace it
with the better version. I also cut out and moved around the floating
debris elements on her skirt (and I fixed the flaps on the box, which
I forgot were needed to make a box look like a box until AFTER I had
already inked it).
Other than that I removed some of the
dribbles from around the mouth for being too large and bulky and I
just scrapped my drawing of the sign, though I had planned to do that
when I drew it. I just added the numbers drawn by hand to remind of
what that element was supposed to be.
So yeah, a lot of tweaking. Most of my
drawings don't need nearly this much tweaking. I think at this point
the pencil and ink part is like a first draft- I'm less concerned
with how I'm drawing things and more concerned with the ideas I'm
trying to express.
Please feel free to leave your feedback
in the comments! And any ideas on how to make the added textures look
less flat would be appreciated. ;)