Friday, January 9, 2015

Hello Art My Old Friend..

Its been a while since I've done some art, its even been longer since I've actually enjoyed it. To catch you guys up its been over 3 years since I've posted on this website and I have to say I'm quite ashamed of that. There are a lot of things that have contributed to my departure from art as a whole, be it the senior year burn out, lack of inspiration or search for a competent style that satisfies me. Like many artists I'm probably my worst critic and I am rarely satisfied with work. My years in the Illustration department at UArts were full of frustration as I was adrift attempting to find the right "style" for my art work. I tried just about everything, acrylic, oil, color pencils until I finally settled with watercolor and ink. My senior thesis was Ok, I enjoyed and still admire my first piece from the collection "Nuclear Hand"


The others however left a bitter taste in my mouth as I scrambled to match the "magic" from that first attempt. There were other flashes of illustration going my way senior year but those were few and far in between. I graduated Uarts rather discouraged and still looking for "It" as I felt the ink and watercolor just didn't do enough. Fast forward several years and I'm still trying to figure things out.

Thinking about what I was trying to actually do I realized I needed to play to my strengths which is my drawing ability. The only issue is unless I can make ultra realistic pencil drawings akin to the work of Chris Van Allsburg they would only look like sketches or unfinished illustrations. I had to find a way to bring my drawing ability into the realm of a finalized full color illustration. Recently I had been working on illustrations for a Children's Book (I'll write about that soon) but ended up bottle necking myself into a style I felt was amateurish and unworthy of my portfolio. I chugged through the whole book in this style dreaming of that style that would magically come along and save my creative dark age.

After 6 months of emotionless illustration it somehow popped into my head. Let me youtube watercolor pencils. I dont know why I did it or why it popped into my head but I looked it up and was just floored at what I saw. As stupid as it sounds I always assumed watercolor pencils were simply pencils you used OVER watercolors.. not that the colors actually came from the pencil itself. The way I saw everyone using them in the videos nearly brought me to tears. Every line, every stroke I knew my days of agony, my days of frustration were over. No longer was I adrift, no longer am I lost in the art world looking for a home and as cheesy as it sounds it felt as though I had found some long lost piece of myself. I immediately ordered the pencils and have since been using them. I'll be posting some work on the children's book I am now redoing in the new style. I'll even post the same page in my previous style for comparison. I'll post about how the book came across me in another blog but for now I'm going to get back to work. Feels great to be back in the artistic world and I can't wait for whats ahead!

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