Rocky Beach

My big project for the foreseeable future takes place in a very specific setting. It's a natural environment that I have spent a lot of my life in and it's incredibly important that I capture the nuance and variation of it. That being the case, I've taken hundreds of reference photos but, now that I am actually starting the project, I've realized how big of to-do capturing this setting correctly is! There is so much variation in types of stone, dirt, bark, grasses, and how light or moisture effects these particular things...oh god. My cartooning is quite simple and I like to contrast it with loose textures and large areas of black but, trying to capture reality, in specificity,  means I find myself caught up in detail and rendering each and every inch which is unsustainable on a long project like this. It's put me in a bit of a funk and has made starting this project more intimidating then expected. In pursuit of a solution and calming myself down, I did this drawing relatively quickly. Drawing quickly makes me draw looser and focus on broad but descriptive textures (much the way doing gestures in life drawing does). In order to make this project sustainable I need to find that sweet spot between representational and the abstract. I am happy with how this drawing turned out but the final project will be single color and I think having a full palette at my disposal is a bit of a crutch. I'll probably post more exploratory/studies in the coming month.

I've also been thinking of doing a post about how my inking process has changed over the past few months. The tl;dr on it is that I've really allowed myself to loosen up. I used to fuss over clean lines and I think it made some of my drawings feel a bit stiff and lifeless. In the New Year you'll see a change to how I've inked Blind Alley and I am interested to see how people will respond to it (if at all). It has made inking feel like more of a natural extension of drawing and for that I am grateful! I also think drawings done this way have a lot more energy than my previous finished work. Anyways - that's a tangent. Maybe expect a post on inking some distant day.